- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
I have lived in the Northern Oregon coast range my entire 57 years. For many of those years the logging roads were open to exploration. Only in recent decades have these roads been gated. Far too many of them are now, blocking access to thousands of previously open semi wilderness experiences. Please do not advocate gating and locking away any more of these areas in order to appease those who seem to believe that every single human experience should be safe and foolproof. That's a goal than no amount of misguided control is going to assure anyway.
The more we limit access to wild experience to people; the more we strive to control our entire experience and make it safe, the more we're insulating and removing people from the experience of real nature. If enough people don't experience nature and wild beauty then it becomes easier to write off these areas as "unused" and abandon them to commercial interests. Only by the force of a large pool of people who have experienced and value wild areas and experiences can we save some small semblence of this world from those who constantly seek to exploit it for short term gain.
I'm sorry that the Kim's horrible string of incredibly bad decisions led to James' death. I would be far sorrier and it would be infinitely more tragic if his death led to fewer people having the chance to experience the wild areas of our country on their own terms and with their own skills.
