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  Re: Tropical forest dreams and nightmares
From: StellrJ at aol.com on 2001.05.18 at 14:41:17(6515)
In a message dated Wed, 16 May 2001 11:14:54 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Betsy Feuerstein writes:

<< I know of NO country that has large tracts of untouched jungles, rainforests, forests, in general.

Do not be fooled by those world globes that show vegetation as it would naturally be, not as it presently is. Remember, those globes show eastern North America as deciduous forest, when, in fact, we know it is mainly a unique form of grassland we call "lawn." But, does your above comment mean that even the great boreal forests of Canada's Northwest Territories -- which are simply left out of even the most comprehensive highway atlases I have seen -- are also fragmented? If so, then there is no hope in the long run.

<

Inaccessibility is the last, best hope for nature. Even "ecotourism" brings development to the very areas it strives to preserve. In the new millennium, only the inacessible will survive unspoiled.

<< Change...... that is all there is, change. Either we adjust or we do not and we suffer. I choose to not suffer and just know gratitude for the past days and hold a hope that my grandkids will someday know the joys of walking in the forest, temporate or tropical, and know the joy of that peace and that wonder.

Grandkids will not -- not in the sense that we still can. There may be preserves here and there, but these will be akin to museums -- collections of relics to remind us of a bygone past. No doubt they will be micromanaged to preserve what remants remain in them. Wilderness? Forget it! Such a world would undoubtedly be livable, in the sense that human needs could be met; but to a personality like mine, it would not be worth living in.

On the other hand, I do maintain a fantasy that, many generations from now, after some catastrophe on a global scale has greatly reduced the human population, and the survivors coalesced into small areas, then nature will reclaim its lost lands. Extinct species will never return, of course, but new types of ecosystems will rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes, and species hanging on the verge of extinciton will rebound in the absence of human pressures.

Jason Hernandez

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