
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, June 22, 1995                   TAG: 9507180100
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A13   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARTHA EZZARD
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

AN APPALACHIAN HIKE

EARLIER THIS month, my 25-year-old son and I stood at Rockfish Gap and looked over a vista Thomas Jefferson called the finest he'd ever seen. We'd just come from hiking through a stand of old-growth forest - white oak, hemlock, white pine - that predates our U.S. Constitution by at least 100 years.

The Appalachian Trail, as it winds its way from the James River to 4,000-foot wilderness peaks, then down again to where the Blue Ridge Parkway and resort developments have squeezed it to snakelike proportions, is a perfect example of the clashing interests in today's debate over the preservation of public lands. Golf courses and ski areas are popping up, but by the year 2040, the Forest Service forecasts use of the trail will also increase, by a whopping 366 percent.

My son took a college course at Yale on the environmental history of the United States, and he's studied more than I about how we got where we are in today's conflict. I listened to his perspective on environmental values as we hiked together.

From the time of Teddy Roosevelt, he notes, a split developed between the ``utilitarians,'' who thought public lands should be managed from a scientific and economic standpoint, and the ``romanticists,'' who counted a pristine environment essential to man's search for the sublime.

Gifford Pinchot, a 19th-century utilitarian, wrote that public lands should be preserved to give the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people for the longest period of time. John's ``take'' on today's GOP environmental revisionists, who are closer to the utilitarians than not, is that they've truncated the philosophy. They've ditched the part about preservation for ``the longest period of time.''

My son applauds decisions affecting the land that have improved our lifestyles, given us jobs, raised up great cities and brought us modern transportation. Who, says John, would declare that we are worse off because of our most polluting innovation, the automobile, for example? Yet, in the final analysis, he'd side with the romanticists, those like Henry David Thoreau who decided man couldn't play God.

As we descended from the wonder of wildflowers and songbirds on central Virginia's Priest Mountain and Three Ridges to stretches of the trail plagued by ordinary kudzu and the sound of trucks, I asked John why he'd come down on the romanticists' side since he articulates the pragmatic so well. He told me to read an essay from Aldo Leopold's ``A Sand County Almanac,'' called ``Thinking Like a Mountain.'' Leopold, known as father of the Wilderness Society, wrote of hunting wolves, then watching the deer population (controlled naturally by the wolves) defoliate the mountain ``as if someone had given God new pruning shears.'' Leopold says a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in three years, but a range ruined by deer takes decades. Only the mountain appreciates the cry of the wolf.

This summer, a furious debate will emerge in the U.S. Senate over revision of our environmental laws which, indeed, need some revision. But it seems to me the pruning-shear approach, taken by House Republicans, is just wrong. Maybe John and I should send Speaker Newt Gingrich and Sen. Bob Dole a copy of ``Thinking Like a Mountain'' to add to the GOP's ``required reading'' list.

Martha Ezzard is an editorial writer for The Atlanta Journal.

Cox News Service

by CNB