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National Geographic : 1982 Sep
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reserves, and U. S. Borax's plans to mine it have sparked a running fight with environ mentalists. The Alaska Native Claims Set tlement Act of 1971 in effect subtracts half a million acres of prime timberland. The exci sion of 20,000 of those acres on Admiralty Island has brought conservationists and ex ploiters together in opposition. Anything less than a lifetime is too little to catalog the diverse abundance of all our na tional forests-or to plumb their problems. Last year some 25,000 youths and senior cit izens found needed jobs working in the for ests. On the day the budgetary ax was raised against the Young Adult Conservation Corps, now extinct, I was in a YACC camp in Florida's Ocala National Forest, taking testimonials: "This program cares more about me than my parents did." Atop Colorado's 10,000-foot Grand Mesa, where winter piles snow to ten-foot depths, I celebrated spring in July as snow melt streams glinted across flower-bright meadows and plummeted to thirsty lands below-a story repeated in a thousand na tional forest watersheds that supply most of the West and much of the East. In New Hampshire's White Mountains I heard a ski-area manager defend his opera tion on national forest land: "The downhill skier is appreciating the same kinds of things that the backpacker thinks he alone is ap preciating. Yes, we do some reshaping of slopes, but you won't see runoff problems." In Puerto Rico's Caribbean National For est, ornithologists are counting on breeding by captive birds to save the endangered Puerto Rican parrot: "But we'll never re lease the captive breeders because they've picked up words and sounds from people, dogs, and cats that would pollute the pure vocabulary of the wild birds." (Incidentally, all parrots, I'm told, walk like John Wayne-a sort of pigeon-toed swagger.) In Los Padres National Forest I found controversy attending the start of a captive breeding effort to save the California con dor: "With only about 30 birds left, some people think it's wrong to remove any con dors from the wild, but the ones in the wild aren't breeding enough to save the species," a biologist told me. Since species come and go in nature, why work so hard to save one? Forestry and fish and wildlife researchers gave me three rea sons: In virtually all cases, the peril to the species has come from man; an act of Con gress mandates efforts to save species; and each death of a species is a loss of genetic potential of unknown value to all life. M AN HOLDS THE KEY to our forests' future, and pressure to accelerate har vests "is borrowing from our grand children," Dr. Arnold Bolle told me. "I see no calamity if we plan with intelligence. If we utilize new technology-which includes grinding up whole trees and using powerful glues to remold them to our needs-we'll have wood left over for export without ever having to touch marginal forests on the West's high slopes. "The planning must include all wood lands, public and private, and for leadership we look to government, the only body stable enough to plan for decades and centuries." My story about national forests ends where for me it began some 40 years ago among the steep wooded hills and spring-fed streams of the Ozarks. With Claude Fergu son I once more drove the Mark Twain's for ested miles to the North Fork to relive part of a float trip we'd taken in 1942. Though the river ran a bit high and fast from two days of rain, it was still clear enough to see six feet down to where a bass toyed with a baited hook-the dividend of decades of controlling the watershed. And as we drifted past snakes sunning on rocks and turtles on logs, some too relaxed or trusting to flee us, I felt a glow of being of a species kind enough and wise enough to fos ter nature's healing touch. May we learn to favor that touch in all our forests' many uses. Then we can truly lay claim to being made in our Creator's image. O Escaping the city but not its crowds, FourthofJuly merrymakersfrom Los Angeles swamp San GabrielCanyon in Angeles NationalForest.Rangers closed the canyon to newcomers by 11 a.m., a soberingreminderthat U. S. forests, which appearedboundless to earliergenerations,can be pushed past their limits. Our National Forests:Problems in Paradise 339
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