Lolo Peak
No Common Ground: Boomers, Millennials, and the Public Process
By Kathleen Stachowski, Unfiltered 7-25-05
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I groused to my husband as we drove to the Forest Service public meeting in Missoula last week; from our home in a rural gulch west of Lolo, this adds up to considerable grousing. My complaints revolved around the format for the meeting, where we would sit around tables to “collaborate� with six to 10 fellow citizens who might or might not be like-minded when it came to revising forest management plans for the Lolo and Bitterroot National Forests. A proposed ski resort loomed large on all horizons.
I am not alone in detecting a trend within the federal government to side-step controversy and perhaps even accountability by eliminating the voices of individual citizens. Last year, when the Bureau of Land Management held a public scoping in Missoula to determine sentiment for gas and oil development along the Rocky Mountain Front, an audible wave of dissatisfaction drifted through the crowd when the announcement came that comments would not be taken in public. Those wishing to make statements were directed to a small room where they gave their comments to a recorder.
I write letters and send e-mails (in spades!) about the issues important to me, but there’s something so open and democratic about speaking out at public meetings. This is what we DO in America! Some folks are eloquent and confident, others are tongue-tied and nervous, but regardless of education or socio-economic status, we stand up, damn it, and say our piece! And at the end, a concrete record of public sentiment exists.
It wasn’t difficult to surmise that sentiment at this meeting came down largely for protecting Lolo Peak from ski resort development, in spite of the mind-numbing “report-out� process, wherein Forest Service moderators from each of roughly 30 tables recited summaries like, “Well, a majority at our table favored “backcountry� designation with the exception of three who wanted to change boundaries to include more 1.2 ‘recommended wilderness,’ but there was some concern from several about the 4.1 designation to the east, and two people were in favor of 6.1 ‘recreational’ but one of the two felt that a buffer zone should be created...�
Still grousing, I came away thinking, "This information means everything – and nothing! And it can be used to justify anything!" Yet I delude myself if I believe a concrete record of public sentiment is any more meaningful these days: Witness the Bush Administration’s repeal of the “roadless rule,� for which 95% of 2.5 million comments (according to the Montana Wilderness Association) favored protecting roadless areas from development.
The evening’s exercise offered more than just an opportunity to gripe about the Feds, however, as my husband and I found ourselves (along with one other graying baby-boomer) staring across a philosophical chasm at four twenty-somethings who, had we checked under the table, might have already had their ski boots on.
The younger folks were all about skiing. Period. Big Mountain’s too far, Snowbowl’s too crowded. While they offered a few feeble justifications for the appropriation of public land belonging to all Americans for the get-rich scheme of a handful of developers, and the annihilation of wilderness character on a mountain which, in fact, serves as the boundary for the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, their justifications were flimsy, indeed. They invoked the mantras of economic development and jobs without much to back it up.
A young woman offered that kids these days are obese, and a ski area on Lolo Peak would help them get more exercise. That comment was a conversation-stopper; we digested it silently, leaving unasked exactly how the parents, if typical struggling Montanans, were going to get their kids TO the mountain, let alone pay for lift tickets on a regular, weight-loss-inducing basis. (Of COURSE Junior’s packing it on! He’s in a state of torpor in front of the TV while mom and dad work numerous jobs between them to make ends meet!) One guy said he thought it would be a great legacy to leave a ski resort for his children to enjoy.
For our part, we boomers invoked the iconic status of this wild, undeveloped mountain so close, so accessible to so many; we talked about the spiritual value of untrammeled wilderness, about the integrity of the watershed, about the wild creatures who live there. We disputed claims that jobs associated with ski resorts offer a living wage, and maintained that economic development of this sort changes the character of communities forever, often driving out long-time residents who can no longer keep up with rising property taxes. We hoped to leave a legacy of the original American landscape, since so little remains.
But it was to no avail, and in the end, one young man summed it up: “I don’t care WHAT happens (with the forest management planning process),� he proclaimed; “I just want to ski there.�
“This is weird,� one of them observed. “The younger people want to develop the mountain, and the older people want to save it!� And suddenly, it really did strike all of us as an amusing and ironic inversion – the youth pragmatically supporting utility, the elders idealistically embracing preservation. Save the mountain? Without any malice whatsoever, the young guy next to me mused, “It’s just so….Sixties!�
Right on, I thought, the Sixties! The Voting Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act. The Wilderness Act. I decided to take it as a big, groovy compliment. After all, ski resorts are not healthy for mountains and other living things.
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Comments
Wonderful rendition of a modern dilemma. I am a forty one year old rock climber who lived through the near-violent controversy in the Bitterroot and elsewhere over "developing" climbing areas by bolting the rock, that is placing permanent protection bolts, and in some cases, chipping out holds to create new climbs. The climbers my age, and this was about ten to fifteen years ago, argued for the sacred nature of the cliffs, the pristine value of the places, the honor involved in leaving the rock as you found it, and the honor involved in bringing you level of skills up to the climb, rather than rreducing the climb to your level by artificial means. We talked about climbs that were too hard for us to climb with natural protection, that must be left for new generations, with skills learned and built and then surpassed from the old. It rang on deaf ears. The younger people wanted to climb, period, and they professed not to care about any of those values. They liked the battery-powered drills, they liked the safety of the bolts, they liked the competition of harder and harder routes that would be impossible without bolts. Our side mostly lost the debate, though public lands managers weighed in with some restrictions. I still look at all those bolts, all that impact on the rock and the bases of the cliffs, and think it is too much, that we could choose to be less destuctive, and have not done so.
One can be left with the dreaded feeling that your perceptions, the values that you hold most dear, are simply outdated and not shared by a majority of younger people. And you may be right, at least as far as policy goes. some of the places that have formed you and inspired you, where you have percieved, for a moment, the rightness and goodness of creation, and your place in it, may be reduced to someone's ski area, or their patio. This is the burden that we who love wild places and we who respect the right of wild creatures and plants to exist, must carry at this point in history.
But it is never wrong to show up and fight for what you know is right. The boredom and drudgery of democracy, the endless prattling, is the price, and perseverance is the weapon of choice (we are lucky that we live in a place where the fight is conducted with words and reams of paper rather than ak-47s and rockets). In the end, I guess, you ask yourself, "did I make a stand for the right of future generations to ski quietly though a stand of snowcovered fir, following the tracks of a wolverine, hearing the wind wail against the peak above me, or did I capitulate and let the whole place be turned into a circus entirely dominated by man's endeavor, with the fumes and the noise and the clearcuts and the myriad absences of wildlife and silence that those endeavors require, and did I do that knowing full well that the same thing-the conversion of wild places to industrial sites devoted to the gratification of one single species at the cost of all the rest--was going on in every last corner of the planet." And then you ask, "was I right to spend so much time and energy goin to those meetings and writing those emails?"
Suffice it to say that i admire what you are doing, and hope you will keep doing it.
Does the world benefit more, right now, on public lands, from another ski area or other industrial conversion, or from a place that is untrammelled and intact, and remains so? Are they not both commodities of a sort, and which is the more rare? Those young people you talked with may not
ever go to the backside of Lolo Peak to ski, but then again, they might. It is like Ezra Pound said about poetry, people might not read it, or miss it, but they are dying a little bit everyday for the lack of what can be found there.
Hal