Yes, John D., Vermont was mostly deforested. And, have you seen those pictures? [img]graemlins/1puke.gif[/img] The beautiful town of Woodstock, so pretty that Wall-Streeters go there and buy $1.5mil. wooden cute village mansions to get away from it all in, was a muddy sog-fest. It's hills were stump-beds. It took going to the brink of ruin to instill the notion of "Stewardship" in folks like Billings and Rockefeller that turned it around. Go
here for more info. Now, Vermont is 95% forseted and much happier for it.
The point is not "don't touch anything or develop." The point is can't we leave SOME places pristine. When I go hiking I like to actually get away from the sounds of cars and the sight of power lines. And being as I get a PAH/benzene headache from my 13-block walk to work every morning, it's really nice to have a "pure" environment to escape to every now and again.
And, with fragile environments, a few thousand drills and the cars and industry to support them will hurt the environment much more. But, again, its not about the notion that I know or even think there will be resulting harm.
It's about thinking "should we do this" before going ahead with the "can we do this." It's about PRECAUTION.
Oh, and any scientist will tell you that in any experiment you should have a "baseline" trial group that you do nothing to, so you can judge what changes you actually caused. This is ESPECIALLY true when the human industrial "experiment" is with the entire planet and there is no RESET button.
Assume the worst, and work to avoid it. This is a much better philosophy that assume everything will be fine. It's also more mature.
It will take 20 years, more or less, to prepare the ANWAR for drilling and get started. I vote we prepare it, so it's ready to go if we need it. Then, we DON'T USE IT until we must. This is an especially good tactic considering this is a finite resource and we don't really know when other resources will run out. We should plan AS IF America will be here and need this stuff in 10,000 years.
[ 03-01-2003, 04:53 PM: Message edited by: Timber Loftis ]