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Jim: jdipeso@rep.org
(253) 740-2066 / 2009
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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."
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