|
|
|
|
|
Search |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Contact Jim: jdipeso@rep.org (253) 740-2066 / 2008 Archive / 2007 Archive / 2006 Archive / 2005 Archive
The Lands That Time Remembers
April 8, 2008
By the essential nature of the mind set that frames the conservative world view, change is resisted. Studying the works of conservative scholars like Russell Kirk reveals a protective attitude towards our heritage from the past, a raising of shields against squandering it via unrestrained appetites for material gratification or superficial novelty.
The National Landscape Conservation System is a bulwark of conservatism. It is a 26 million-acre system of lands, trails, rivers, and marine waters, managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, that helps tell America's story. Like a collection of fine books, the Conservation System opens a door to learning about places and events that are outside modern experience but help us understand our nation's history and appreciate its profound natural beauty.
At Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, for example, visitors can see the remains of vanished American cultures. It's not a glass-encased diorama in an air conditioned museum. It's a challenging place where visitors who hike its lonely trails on a hot summer day will get a vivid sense of how those peoples lived long ago in an arid, demanding landscape.
More than 700 miles to the northwest as the crow flies, three mountain ranges converge at Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. Plants and animals from the high-and-dry Great Basin to the east and the rainy lowland forests to the west come together in a riot of creation's diversity that is rarely seen elsewhere.
These are the life-enriching "permanent things" that Kirk wrote about protecting. But the National Landscape Conservation System is not permanent. It is an administrative creation that could be taken apart at the stroke of a pen by a future administration. Legal permanence would be granted by HR 2016, the National Landscape Conservation System Act. The legislation, to be voted upon by the House on April 9, would give the system an "organic act" similar to laws that codify our systems of national parks and national wildlife refuges. It enjoys bipartisan support and the backing of the Bush administration.
Permanent legal status would greatly improve the odds that the great places within the National Landscape Conservation System will be left intact as a legacy to future generations.
As Kirk wrote in The Conservative Mind: "True conformity to the dictates of nature requires reverence for the past and solicitude for the future. 'Nature' is not simply the sensation of the passing moment; it is eternal, though we evanescent men experience only a fragment of it. We have no right to imperil the happiness of posterity by impudently tinkering with the heritage of humanity."
|
|
