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Wilderness Designations Needed

by Allan Tweddle, REP West Virginia coordinator & REP Policy Director Jim DiPeso
published in the Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette on August 4, 2006

Mountains, woods, and rivers are the heart and soul of West Virginia. The land embodies our heritage and defines our great state's culture like nothing else.

The land can pay tangible dividends, too, if we plan ahead and create a nest egg of protected lands that people in state and from all over the East will want to visit for years to come.

Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito can help, by supporting citizens fighting to add the great unprotected treasures of the Monongahela National Forest to America's system of wilderness areas.

By joining with her constituents who have worked long hours to identify the places they want protected, Capito will carry on West Virginia's tradition of building wilderness proposals from the grass roots, led by local people who know the lands around their communities best.

Towns will benefit by having wilderness areas nearby. Outdoor recreation pays. People fishing, hunting, and watching wildlife spent more than half a billion dollars in West Virginia in 2001, according to the most recent edition of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's comprehensive national survey of wildlife-related recreation. Chances are good that the dollar figure will be even higher when the next edition of the survey is published in 2007.

As the populations of the East's cities expand, more people will visit West Virginia to enjoy the existing Dolly Sods, Laurel Fork, Cranberry, and Otter Creek wilderness areas. That's a good thing.

But let's not limit ourselves to four wilderness areas. Only one-half of 1 percent of West Virginia's territory enjoys wilderness status. Let's give the visitors more wild West Virginia places to explore so they spend more money in nearby West Virginia communities.

By designating special places such as Seneca Creek, Spice Run, the East Fork of Greenbier, and Big Draft as wilderness areas, we will give visitors -- think of them as West Virginia's customers -- more reasons to schedule their weekend getaways and two-week vacations in West Virginia instead of somewhere else.

West Virginia should be tops on the list of places where kids catch their first trout, hunt their first wild turkey and run their first river rapids.

The U.S. Forest Service, however, has released a draft management plan for the Mon that is not nearly as ambitious in its wilderness proposals as it should be. Ninety percent of the 13,000 letters and e-mails that citizens sent to the Forest Service asked the agency to recommend more wilderness than the draft proposes.

The Forest Service's recommendation would leave special places unprotected. Once given over to logging or other industrial uses, the lands will have lost the special features that make them interesting and enjoyable places for hiking, camping, rafting, hunting or fishing.

Fortunately, the Forest Service can only recommend wilderness designations. The final decision is up to Congress, which can accept, reject, or modify Forest Service recommendations as it sees fit.

This is where Congresswoman Capito comes in. She can help her constituents bypass the bureaucratic roadblock and win congressional passage of legislation making Seneca Creek and the Mon's other treasures the newest jewels in the National Wilderness Preservation System.

An ambitious wilderness bill is an investment in our state's future. Expanding the number of our state's wilderness areas will lay a foundation for clean economic development, creating jobs, businesses, and renewed vitality for West Virginia communities.

Economic growth is vital. But wilderness offers something more: it's a way to protect what makes West Virginia special -- the land, the communities, and the people shaped by the land. When we look outside our windows at the wild beauty around us, we know we're home. Wilderness is a way to keep our West Virginia home the way we like it.