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[at-l] List Down?



      I seem to not be receiving the List suddenly. I was interested in 
responding to a post about me by Jim Owen in the archives, but somehow the List 
isn't coming through. This isn't the first time this has happened.



     Jim wrote:
   

    " You're also wrong about RnR.  He has a vision of a 10 or 20 mile wide 
swath of "wilderness" running from Springer to Katahdin - although he once said 
he'd settle for 2 miles on either side of the Trail. " 



        ***    For brevity's sake - The 10-20 mile swath is something that 
corresponds to natural systems, not economic. Someday, probably after the great 
environmental collapse, people will pause long enough to consider the value of 
natural systems before they scoff them off as being a source of ED problems 
and little else. 

      There are lengthy paragraphs that could be written, but suffice to say, 
Jim Owen, and even those people who were the subjects of the acquisitions, 
all enjoy the natural surroundings and 'viewsheds' those land assumptions 
contain. I think it is a sign of the incompleteness of his arguments that he fails 
to connect the enjoyment he gets from a GSMNP view while on the Trail and the 
means by which it came about. 

     Lastly, it was MacKaye who wanted national forests in areas like New 
Jersey where the Trail went through suburban streets with ranch houses when I 
hiked. He shot for that scale at the start because he was smart enough to realize 
what is happening now. So, the argument doesn't fairly originate at ED, it 
originates at what the Project was meant to be and how it was initially going to 
be brought into being. 

         I'm sorry, but hypothetically, if I had to choose between Jim's 
concept and its outcome and total ED of a wide and viable corridor I would 
painfully chose the latter. Why? Because after the injury and insult was done, 
posterity would inherent a small corridor of original Appalachian hardwood forest. I 
don't see Jim offering any other plan. Frankly I'd like to see nature win one 
for a change. If Jim were equally angry about the giant rip-off for waste 
acreages on Saddleback I would sense he was sincere. His lack of mention of such 
exposes his myopic land rights-based AT perspective. No matter how unfair ED 
moves were on certain individuals, this is worse as far as the AT. In all of 
Jim's arguments you'll notice he never mentions any description of the AT's 
conservation cause as an attached item to the Trail's purpose. That is because his 
partial concepts can only 'work' without it...



     " RnR's vision for the Trail is a disaster - not only for the AT - but 
for every other trail in this country. "  


              ***    Short version:   Continued sprawl is a disaster period. 
This isn't changing, and eventually those landowners will feel the pinch and 
subdivide. We have many examples next to the AT today. Those cases are just as 
bad, if not worse, than the individual ED cases you provided. Why? Because 
they are also a sort of "ED" of their own. The domain they claim, and show no 
mercy over, is that of continued development and growth and consumption of open 
space. When they come and build dense condos next to the Trail (Lakes Road, NY 
- Pennsylvania) they are showing the same kind of willful negligence towards 
the AT and its purpose as those agents are showing towards those ED subjects. 
The fact that Jim omits and entire relevant side of this "AT formula" only 
highlights the failing of his argument. To value Jim's opinion correctly, consider 
that he considers this kind of Trail support talk a similar type of 
imposition on this List...

      What some in the older generation fail to realize is that we are 
currently at the point of choosing between one 'disaster' or the other. If those 
landowners decide to develop over those other LDH trails, it is important that 
the process be caught on video and shown to the world. America develops over its 
LDH trails...




       " Who ever told you it should be "easy"?  They lied.  Life isn't easy 
- hiking the Trail isn't easy - why should anything else be easy? "


      ***   Trying to involve the Trail community in this kind of productive 
dialogue isn't easy either.

                   Jim is right. There is no excuse for people to be taken 
advantage of in the name of the Trail. I think the best way to solve this is to 
figure how greater AT support can be won and better funding elicited from our 
government. Public support is critical. But I don't see how that support will 
be gained if a Trail insider focuses exclusively on incidental wrongs without 
accenting the greater plan in its entire perspective. It wouldn't be 
"rational"...





   
 
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