[at-l] Maine land prices

[kahley@ptd.net (kahley)]

I really tried to let this slide but..


At 01:01 PM 6/16/02 -0400, RoksnRoots@aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 6/15/2002 2:10:31 PM Eastern Daylight Time,

The issue should not be that individual taxpayers all pay for things
of which they, personally do not approve.  The issue is, since we are
a democratic republic, the tax money should go to the things of which
the majority approves and in the amounts the majority approves.

If people in the minority (us) want to see more money spent to keep
wild lands undeveloped then it is up to us to raise the money to do it...
like Weary is.

If the majority of the people are not willing to pay for a thing, any thing,
then, in a democratic form of government, it should not be paid for with
public money.  This is pretty basic stuff whether we like the results
or not.


>       Your self-funded conservation is simply unrealistic. There just isn't
>enough good will interest in doing so. The monies you cite will never come
>from that source enough to satisfy the real need to protect natural zones.
>The whole idea of the Appalachian Trail Project is that our system consumes
>undeveloped land in order to perpetuate itself. It does so at rates that
>will, by mathematical certainty, destroy what small amount of original
>American forest and ecosystem remains. To reduce this to a sterile market
>dynamic shows to me, an insensitivity and lack of humanity that misrepresents
>the actual relationship of man to the planet. You see, you have to have a
>healthy planet in order to support even the most sophisticated, advanced and
>progressive economic model. Your paper theory makes it sound like an option
>to be traded according to supply and demand. I myself look at it in more
>moral terms as a directly interconnected bond or responsibility we hold both
>to nature and ourselves. Human nature will always push too far and take just
>one more piece, because it's just too tempting not to. Theories will adjust
>to accommodate this as it progresses. MacKaye knew this and tried to set a
>special place aside that would be forever protected from this destructive
>failure in mankind.
>       Just as much as I don't benefit from disgustingly bloated golden
>parachute packages for executives who increase profits by putting loyal
>workers out of work, there are some who will never hike the AT. If you looked
>at the score on that deal you would see that conservation's cut was minuscule
>compared to the huge lobbied monies going to interests whose end result can
>be directly tied into sprawl and expansionism as a preferred practice. If you
>have any conscience, projects like the AT are almost entitled to automatic
>grace in response to this system. That is why, having to argue for the right
>to exist on our fragile little strip is unconscionable when you have much
>worse examples going on in far away board rooms and government meetings. To
>me the AT has a right to exist as a matter of justice and the last chance for
>man to redeem himself in face of the number he has done on this planet.
>Government intervention is a necessity because it compensates for the lack of
>large scale social projects that could never be adequately organized by
>individuals and their scattered interests. The idea is to provide the best of
>all possibilities. Your interminable questioning of propriety serves as a
>good example of why that can't be left to reactionary theorists who in the
>end care more about the sensation of popular politics than the AT. Your views
>are derived from too incomplete a scope of total influence and therefore do
>not validly represent a full addressing of the complex dynamic involved in
>land conservation and social contract. It reduces life on earth to letters in
>law books which are never as subtle and complex as the natural influence from
>which they are ultimately derived...
>     Man will never be as smart as nature. In this abstract sense, nature is
>god...
>
>
>
>
> >
> > Nature has no such right. It has no rights, period.
> >
>
>
>       *** Nature is your master and dictates everything you do. It tolerates
>you and takes insults yet still provides. We are at the brink of a generation
>that is about to learn a serious lesson on what such fool beliefs can do when
>allowed to dictate policy. Kingdoms have been brought down by less. And only
>a fool would so arrogantly dismiss that meek and insignificant natural order
>which in the end will make the final judgment on us all. I think you have it
>backwards and it isn't the AT that needs to learn to fit into man's designs
>but vice versa. It would be the ultimate irony for even the most proud and
>proclaimed economy to be brought down by bugs in the grass. We live only
>because of nature. For you to say it has no rights, is for you to crush and
>smash your own theory at the root. For you to deny this right as policy is to
>build up an inevitable dam break of nature's rights returning to assert
>themselves -usually in cruel fashion. No society is exempt from this, not
>even an economically sophisticated one. If those who believed what you say
>here, Texas, ever implemented this rogue policy through government they would
>be dooming us all.
>
>
>     Breen bought that land knowing it would come down to a question about 
> the
>AT. He wasn't an innocent lamb. He didn't give a damn about the AT. When it
>came time for this private individual to deal with the future of the AT
>Project, he chose to lock out appraisers and ask a ridiculous sum through a
>phony ski-area speculation he could never support. Having enormously profited
>from threatening to destroy the AT, he now turns and threatens to use his
>bounty to build a massive development in an adjacent rural area the AT
>benefits from. Hence, Breen uses the AT as leverage to extract an overpayment
>that he then uses to fund a development project that will enable him to
>attract skiers to winter homes that will give him the customer base to
>enlarge the ski area and finish off the AT completely. How, in God's name,
>Texas, does your feeble theory overcome the obvious evil involved in this
>scandal? What you seem to forget is that the AT was there long before Breen.
>Only ridiculously skewed angles like yours could possibly put a good face on
>that deal. The result speaks for itself. To put the blame on those who
>struggle to save the AT is to miss the entire meaning of the AT Project
>itself. What happened on Saddleback is a perfect example of the entrenched,
>faulty socioeconomic dynamic from which the AT gains its right to exist by
>moral order...
>
>
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