Narrowing the Wilderness Focus

Hi Hillary. What a wonderful site - I learned about it from Chris Botvinick who says hi.

I am a friend of Chris and Mark's and live in the NY area (NJ to be precise). I am a real estate developer, mostly housing in NJ and NYC but also in Colorado. Most of my early work was focused on affordable housing, but now I do a lot more market rate rental housing. I am a firm believer in all good responsible development efforts including transit oriented development patterns (most important I think), green building techniques, and diversity of uses and diversity of incomes within development.

I admire your efforts to get at "what is wilderness and why do we care?" I have nothing to add other to say that caring about wilderness is for many people simply an innate unexplainable passion that cannot be answered by "why" any more than why my 4-year old son's favorite colors are red, green and orange in that order.

However, another question, which you have not asked, is why are we losing wilderness and what if anything can we do about it? This "why?" is a very complicated one but there are reasons, some good and some bad, for why wilderness is disappearing. Certainly population growth is a major factor, largely due to people living longer and people with less opportunity in other regions of the world moving to this great land of ours. It gets really interesting when we start asking questions like - is the tradeoff of population growth due to longevity of human life and immigration patterns from less prosperous nations worth the loss of wilderness? This is not an easy question to answer.

There is also a prosperity argument, which is certainly less defensible as we may have actually been more prosperous in prior generations without Hi-def TV and cellphones, once you include free time, connection to loved ones, etc. in the definition of "prosperity" (Prosperity is certainly as hard to define as wilderness).

Recently I was working on a real estate development project in NJ adjacent to the Garden State Parkway that was halted by new protection environmental regs in NJ. The site had never been developed before, but was hardly wild given that the noise and perhaps vibration of the Parkway rumbling next door was so invasive. It would have made a nice development site for many who commute by car since it next to one of the two biggest highways in the state, and certainly would control VMT to the extent that someone was not driving 30 minutes to get to the Parkway. The site would also have housed 50 low income households, but not anymore. So was the right result acheived? I don't know but I do know that one could make a compelling argument on either side.

Anyway, I thought I would add my two cents and I would love to exchange thoughts further in the future.

Jon Vogel

Oh yea. Sorry for expanding rather than narrowing the wilderness focus. Can you control something that is "wild"?????