The Wilderness Rape: Preface

Statement

Someone once said that a good book needs no preface. The statesman failed to acknowledge that a preface is quite often an after-word. Writing is an art form. A writer is an artist. What he portrays is sometimes done in a fervor and there is not always time beforehand to fully consider the objective. Therefore, an after-word becomes a prerequisite.

Justice is swift for the writer. He never determines the literary value of his product. That decision is left, so viscerally, to the audience. It is this allocation of value that should preside over his every chain of thought. Still, no matter how conscientious a pen-wielder might be in catering to his audience, the writer should speak his mind, and not everyone is going to like what he has to say.

Like a sly priest, a writer can remove himself from radicalism, dogmas, and bigoted assumptions. Yet, there is no infallible writer, in this fact rest assured. And this word of caution to the literary critics: No one is pretending that the actual composition of this manifesto was a fervid or grueling task. I jotted it down while I was out taking orders for the original printing. This little book was not intended to be a dramatic, Pulitzer Prize winning, literary masterpiece. It was intended to be exactly what it is. An honest, straightforward communication that will entertain readers and stimulate thought. Over 60,000 sold copies of a homespun, backyard production defy the critics to blast away at the content or character of the story. You can have the most sophisticated, Ph.D.'ed, documented, bibliographied, indexed book in the world — and the audience may refuse it even an audition.

The Wilderness Rape has had its audition. People from the grassroots of the Western United States have born its completion; and if the Wilderness issue had been properly resolved, this manifesto might not have had an audience.

The Wilderness Act, when combined with the Endangered Species Act, the Wetlands Act, and a host of other radical federal land management policies, has become an economy-killing nightmare that has poisoned the dreams of too many thousands of families to count. People who are naive about the natural environment and the current ‘save the planet' philosophy need to see the Wilderness Act for what it truly is, hence the need for more and more declarations of protest.

The success of this story was determined by people who bought orders on a prepaid basis, many of whom did not receive their books as promptly as they should have (putting it mildly). I offer my apologies for the incredible delays, along with a brief explanation.

The book suffered atrocious setbacks. The first fifteen thousand were published and delivered on time. The next ten thousand were contracted to a printer that took bankruptcy and defaulted on the deal. New orders had to be taken to offset the loss, and rebuilding the program took manifold more effort than the fledgling publisher had ever imagined.

Two benefactors helped sponsor the next twenty thousand copies, but there were still outstanding orders left unfilled. In order to go national with a title, a publisher should be capable of running fifty thousand copies or more. Hoping to achieve this, we incorporated and began searching for investors. This has proven to be an arduous and time-consuming task.

I trust that in the end, perseverance will pay, as it normally does, when an idea is on solid ground. That avowal provided, one may also be sure that without the support, patience, and fortitude of the people whose lives and heritage depend on proper management of public lands, this message would never have flourished. To the people that paid and waited patiently, I need to express my warmest, deepest thanks. Success is assured. The extent of our impact is the only determination that floats on the wing. We can come together on the Wilderness dilemma — not in the form of any more ‘compromise', but rather, in a sensible agreement.

In reality we are again faced with an allocation of value. The federal government has determined that existing Designated Wilderness Areas have more value as such than they would if managed under multiple-use proviso. An interesting determination — as simple — and at once as complex — as any other allocation of value.

It is simple stuff. Vital stuff. Like a pristine stand of North Idaho cedar at the five thousand foot level, and a grey forest of bug-killed lodgepole at the four thousand foot level. When lightning strikes the grey forest in the dead of August and the grey forest goes up in smoke, you can kiss the resources that could have been harvested and the pristine forest good-bye. Simple stuff like that.

It is as simple as a band of backpackers who lament and wail about the abuses of public lands by ignorant visitors; and so called ‘environmental' groups who spend millions lobbying in favor of the lock up of public lands by the federal government, when if they had spent a fraction of their time and money organizing cleanup clubs and reclamation programs, the problems would have been solved before they began. Simple stuff like that. The kind of stuff that equates to really caring.

The fear is that the cybernetic world will gobble up the remnants of the natural world, and obviously, the fear is justified. But the solution that the ‘environmental' groups propose is the carte blanche takeover of public lands by federal authoritarians and the transfer of private lands into the hands of the federal bureaucracies.The solutions that these ‘environmental' groups have proposed, and are proposing, is failure. Failure to communicate, failure to agree, failure to respect the lives and liberties of the inhabitants of the Western States, and failure to separate the fallacies from the realities.

It is not the trademark of a highly evolved society that they should be at each other's throats in a desperate struggle for existential needs, and it is not a feather in the cap of the oncoming generation that they become expert at control through coercion and propaganda. If this simple story does not give you other areas of thought to roam — areas outside of the Wilderness issue — then it will not have been for lack of intent.

The Wilderness Rape was originally published in 1985, quite sometime before the Rush Limbaugh crowd became a national phenomenon. Several books, Trashing the Planet, Ecology Wars, and Trashing the Economy, among them, came out while The Wilderness Rape was strolling along as a grassroots package that needed revision, editing, and proper backing. Since the original publication, scores of coalitions have been organized to work toward slaying the elusive environmental dragons and it seems to have become more popular to throw dirt at the so-called ‘environmentalists'.

There should be a way to join the fracas with a minimum of mud slinging, but I'm not ashamed to be throwing dirt where the dirt is due. The ‘silent majority' seems to be reluctant to join either one camp or the other. Obviously mainstream America is hoping for an intelligent compromise, but that's not going to happen in the foreseeable future. There are too many war zones in the way of intelligent solutions. The intent of the revised/amended edition of Wilderness Rape is to shed some practical light on these and many other dilemmas.

This book has been around the Intermountain West with limited availability and in relative obscurity, but is still waltzing along and may continue to waltz for many more years. Hopefully, the band will strike up a two-step that will dance us into the national markets. The passage titled A Slight Sojourn should cast a little light on some of the ominous moral and financial battles an individual may expect to encounter when going up against the publishing industry's big guns. I do my best to make counter measures against the barrage of environmental propaganda that has saturated the media markets, and hope you enjoy the story.

One more note on the side might be warranted. Various buyers questioned the wisdom of using a nude woman as a carriage for the narratives, and voiced mild objection to the use of sexual symbolism on the back cover. The female protagonist symbolizes Mother Nature. She is there to entice readers who might be bored with facts, figures, statistics and political opinions. Though more sophisticated minds might reject such trickery, in this case, Mother Nature may be given credit for Her share of the success. The Western States have made a lot of progress since the original publication. Perhaps Mother Nature had something to do with that as well.

So, as I close this preface, which is really an afterthought, I want to tip my hat to you, the reader, and offer my appreciation for your patronage. May life grant you courage, wisdom, goodness and plenty. May we all live, love, and prosper in a free society.

Source