My Page: Hillary Rosner

The Wilderness Blog

This week’s historic agreement to protect British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest—the world’s largest remaining swath of coastal temperate rainforest, an area twice the size of Yellowstone—marks the culmination of 10 years of haggling, negotiating, and compromising among divergent agendas. It also marks what might be the future of wilderness preservation. The plan, which places four and a half million acres off limits to logging and regulates logging practices on the remaining 10 million acres, is backed by environmentalists, industry, native people, and the provincial government. [more]

The Wilderness Blog

Everywhere you turn these days, there seem to be headlines about wolves. “Idaho to Take Over Managing Wolves in January,� read an AP story in yesterday’s Idaho Statesman. “Wolfless Nevada,� declared another AP piece, in the Casper Star-Tribune. (That fascinating story was about the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rejecting a petition to delist wolves in Nevada, despite the fact that the species was completely wiped out in Nevada several decades ago.) Across the West, states are grappling with the question of how to manage wolves: whether or not they should be listed, what should happen when they interfere with ranching, how many is too many, who should be allowed to decide.

Given that wolves are crossing state borders — from Idaho to Oregon, for one — the wolf will soon be making an appearance around the Northwest, at least in federal court.

In the ten years since wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone, the animals have become a symbol of hope for wildlife lovers, a soul-stirring sign that the wild has not been entirely eradicated from the West. But for some ranchers and others who will never love the howling canines, the wolf is still a creature to loathe, a pest no better than a rat that should be left to survive only in the smallest possible pack numbers.
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The Wilderness Blog

Everywhere you turn these days, there seem to be headlines about wolves. “Idaho to Take Over Managing Wolves in January,� read an AP story in yesterday’s Idaho Statesman. “Wolfless Nevada,� declared another AP piece, in the Casper Star-Tribune. (That fascinating story was about the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rejecting a petition to delist wolves in Nevada, despite the fact that the species was completely wiped out in Nevada several decades ago.) Across the West, states are grappling with the question of how to manage wolves: whether or not they should be listed, what should happen when they interfere with ranching, how many is too many, who should be allowed to decide.

If the headlines are any indication, it seems like the anti-wolf faction may be winning – though their victories are hidden behind a veil of dispassionate policymaking. For all the wolf’s success at making a comeback, the talk still seems to be about just how many it’s okay to off.
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The Wilderness Blog

I just returned from two weeks in New York City, where “wild� refers to the crazy all-night party you went to last night. There are pockets of wildness in the city, like the High Line: the remnant sections of elevated rail tracks in downtown Manhattan that were abandoned decades ago and now teem with their own grassland ecosystem (and which are in the process, after a long campaign to save them, of being turned into a greenway). But otherwise New York City is a highly unnatural place, one that I can now—after three years of living elsewhere—see in a way I never could before. I love the city, and would consider moving back if I had $10 million in the bank to buy a few floors with a garden in a West Village brownstone. But it’s sort of sad there, nature-wise: lone trees planted in little fenced-off dirt islands amid the concrete, dogs quietly coveting them as they dutifully pee on lamp posts instead. [more]

The Wilderness Blog

Wilderness was over the news this week, from the debate over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to a plan to open as much as 20 million acres of public lands to mineral leasing. The U.S. House of Representatives decided this week to remove the ANWR provision—which would have opened the refuge to oil drilling—from the controversial budget bill, now stalled until at least next week. But another provision still in the bill would overturn a ban on buying up mining claims--meaning that mineral companies might soon be able to buy public land, including in national parks, at wholesale prices if they think it could contain mineral deposits.
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The Wilderness Blog

I've been meaning for a while now to call attention to an interesting op-ed piece that ran in the Christian Science Monitor earlier this month. It was written by Erik Schultz, a "paraplegic wilderness advocate" and director of the ABS Foundation, which supports both wildlands conservation and mobility for the disabled—as well as the intersection of those two issues, wilderness access for the disabled. Schultz, who lost the use of his legs in a backcountry skiing accident, wrote about the bill that would designate a wilderness area in Idaho's Boulder-White Clouds mountains; the bill contains a provision to construct two primitive-access trails to accommodate wheelchairs.

As Schulz points out, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), passed in 1990, contains a section explicitly exempting wheelchairs from the prohibition on "mechanical transport" in the Wilderness Act of 1964. The ADA provision sparked a mini-controversy when the bill was passed, particularly among mountain bikers. [more]

The Wilderness Blog

The power of religion to shape environmental views and policy is getting a lot of ink of late, particularly the growing divide between the pro-environment Creation Care movement and the anti-environment forces of the Christian right (increasingly under attack from within their own community) holding fast to the archaic view that God made Earth for humans to plunder.

At the World Wilderness Congress, which wrapped up Thursday in Anchorage, John C. Nagle, a law professor at Notre Dame University, put an interesting spin on the popular subject of wilderness’s spiritual values. Nagle pored over transcripts of the early ‘60s testimony leading up to the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, and he was struck by how often those who testified mentioned spirituality. Housewives, ranchers, oil executives, members of Congress—they all, Nagle said, hit the same themes. They described wilderness as a place of encountering God, a place of spiritual renewal, a place of solitude and escape. They described wilderness as land the way God created it. While the spiritual language didn’t make it into the text of the law, it was clearly a powerful tool for gaining support—something that’s particularly interesting today when the most evangelical American Christians tend also to be those most opposed to wilderness preservation. [more]

The Wilderness Blog

The 8th World Wilderness Congress in Anchorage is a wilderness wonk’s fantasy, a weeklong whirlwind of PowerPoint presentations, data dumps, and impassioned pleas for conservation. After attending just two days of it (and even with a kayaking interlude in the Chugach mountains), my head is throbbing, my mind overloaded, and I think the only thing that will help me unwind is a long vacation in the wilderness.

In the meantime, though, there’s some pretty amazing stuff going on around the world on the wilderness conservation front. As Peter Seligmann, CEO and chairman of the board of Conservation International, said yesterday morning, we have come to a period of “unprecedented opportunity and unprecedented urgency� for conservation. The time is now, Seligmann implored the crowd of hundreds from around the world, "to elevate conservation to its rightful place among global leaders and make wilderness a core global value." [more]

The Wilderness Blog

The day after the House Resources Committee voted 26 to 12 in favor of legislation that would seriously weaken the Endangered Species Act, Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt spoke in Boulder about the need for a radically new form of federal and local land use planning. Babbitt's new book Cities in the Wilderness: A New Vision of Land Use in America, assesses the "ongoing destruction of the national landscape" and calls for a national land use plan that puts the environment first. Amazingly enough, Babbitt seemed optimistic that such a thing is possible—though, he emphasized, "Not in this session of Congress, not under this President." [more]

The Wilderness Blog

Thirty Alaskan small business owners received federal loans for companies affected by the 9/11 attacks, according to Anchorage Daily News. It may seem strange that a bush plane operator in North Pole, Alaska, could qualify for 9/11 aid. But with people across the country suddenly terrified and bracing for economic blows, the appeal of trip to the wilderness on a tiny plane apparently shrank, and his business needed help. It’s just one example of the interconnectedness endemic this teeming cultural ecosystem that is the United States.

This is slightly off the wilderness topic, but bear with me, because it’s very much about environmental policies in general. Things don’t happen in a vacuum. [more]