My Ponderings While Camping

My Ponderings While Camping

I believe that I am in the perfect setting for writing this paper, I am sitting here with my laptop, overlooking a beautiful reservoir, surrounded with autumn colors, and enjoying a donut. This paper has given me a little grief because of my love for the outdoors and because of my dislike for the Forest Service and the Fish and Game agencies. On the other hand I was excited about this paper because I was given the liberty to freely express how I feel about the way things are being managed and also share a few ideas about how I think things could be better managed. All the articles I read drew really sharp lines, black and white so to speak. As nice as it would be, there is never a situation that has only black and white sides to it. There is always a gray middle, always an exception to the rule and to the ideas being presented. I feel that the articles read, did not allow for that exception to the rule. For example Deep Ecology discussed how we as people have the same moral rights to live as a tree. In fact the situation that was proposed was that a hiker, injured in a protected forest, would not be rescued with ATV’s or with a rescue helicopter, which would probably never touch the ecosystem of the “delicate earth,” because it would ruin the protected area to an extent to which it would never recover. The idea that the disturbance of micro organisms on the forest ground has more worth than a person is absurd. I would like to see one try to explain this man’s death to his widowed wife and his 4 children that are under 10 years old. It probably will not go over to well.

The idea of making forests inaccessible for people all together is absurd. What will that benefit any of us? The idea of a bio-centric society is just a dream, it would be as difficult to achieve as it would a total utopian society. I believe however in regulating the use and misuse of the environment. Just as it always is a few people who are obviously below the intellectual standards of today’s society, screw up things for everyone else. For example lets take the dumb, drunk, and irresponsible person that jumps on his four wheeler and tears up a whole mountainside in a drunken fit. So when the forest service makes their usual routes they, along with many other activists, throw a fit and the area is then graced with the ever so familiar skinny brown posts, stating “no motorized vehicles beyond this point.” So when the next man, who has many social responsibilities, packs his travel trailer and takes his young family to the mountains to teach them about nature and how to respect it, he is greeted with a closed area and has to find another place to camp. The worst part comes later that night when his 8 years old daughter asks why they did not camp next to the stream. What is this man to tell his daughter?

I am a very religious man and believe that God created all things. Because of this belief, I also believe that the mistreatment of God’s creations is morally wrong. I grew up packing out my garbage, extra food and even melon rinds when I left to return to “the city.” At first I did not understand why I had to take my apple core with me, besides it would just bio-degrade anyway, right? I was right, it would become part of the earth again, but that was not the point my father was trying to teach me. He was trying to show me the importance of leaving things better than I had found them. He said a pile of apple cores and banana peals do not help the next person enjoy the beauty that surrounds us in the outdoors. I did not understand this fully until one day we pulled up in our usual campsite at Strawberry reservoir, which is now closed, and as I was running around in excitement I almost fell in a large hole. I was only about 13 at the time so the hole seemed huge to me. It was right in the middle of camp, what was its purpose? I wondered. Upon closer examination and help from my father, I realized that the last person that camped there, like the drunken four wheeler, caused a perfectly good area to begin to look like the city dump. Instead of taking all his trash with him, he decided to dig a large pit and burn it. So of course this left a scar on the landscape, not to mention the charred tin cans it left behind. This my father told me was unacceptable. It was because of this and because of a jeep that could not stay out of the river that this favored campsite was closed, permanently. What is my point to all of this? I agree with the fish and game and its affiliates that this area was harmed