Wandering

Having spent the last month amongst the leafs and twigs of several mountain ranges, I read with interest the musings of Victor Davis Hanson on his trekking around Florence Lake in the High Sierras. Many of you will recall that the ole Rumbear was up at Florence Lake several years ago with the young cub. Apparently it has become more of an isolated destination now reserved for, well I'll let VDH describe it....

The few types I met in the High Sierra this summer were mostly the elite from the California coast, many of them Sierra Club members and other self-appointed and well-intended custodians of the wild. But from talking with many of them, I gathered their idea of a national treasure was a rather remote untouched preserve, visited by educated and affluent magnificos such as themselves, who visited no more than once or twice a year, but championed its sanctuary status daily from a distance. Anwar is the ultimate expression of that attitude, in which it is far better apparently that a Russia despoil the Siberian wilderness to put its petrol on the world market than for us to reduce our need by, if only in part symbolically, developing our own oil carefully and sensibly.

The point of all this is that we have a created a sort of natural religion for those who treat our wildernesses as churches rather than classrooms that can impart a much needed wisdom to an increasingly clueless generation.

Nature is something that should be used and enjoyed by all, not just the self appointed busy bodies who claim to protect it by keeping YOU out.