Dave Foreman Speaks

One of the articles in Is Militarism Fading? (IC#20)
Winter 1989, Page 10
Copyright (c)1989, 1997 by Context Institute | To order this issue ...

Dave Foreman is the founder of Earth First!, a radical environmental group. Write them at PO Box 2358, Lewiston, ME 04241. The following quote is excerpted from an article in Harrowsmith (The Creamery, Charlotte, VT 05445), Sep-Oct 1988, p. 50.

"The man who started the Forest Service was Gifford Pinchot. Gifford Pinchot said, 'There are only two things in the world: people and resources.' That's where it all began. People and resources. Not a living community out there, not a diverse old-growth forest tied together at the roots by mycorrhizal fungi, not animals living in the treetop canopy, not the forest creating its own climate, not everything acting in graceful interpenetration - but people and resources.

"The United States Forest Service has been guided by that philosophy from the very beginning. The Forest Service plans to build 100,000 miles of roads in currently roadless areas. They want management. They don't want old-growth forests that are more complex, more beautiful, more tied together than we can even imagine. They want forests that are like cornfields. That are easy to understand and easy to manage and easy to access. And it's us, as creatures of this planet, as people who believe we form part of a live community, who are going to have to fight for that diversity, and that wildness. If we don't do it, nobody's going to do it."

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