Well, for us as a community the impacts of that sprawl and growth that
are most easy to relate to are air quality and water quality. Air and
water are where we lose first, and that's where the costs are going to
be highest—to try to buy clean air and clean water is going to be the
most expensive endeavor that we've ever encountered. So those are the
two big things. My work with the Forest Coalition also looks at the
importance of wildness and wilderness as defining who we are as a
species. We are defined by those parts of the earth that we haven't
changed. We're defined by wildness, whether it's through our religion or
our economies or just our basic spiritual identity. That's always been
the defining element, and we feel that if we lose wild areas, we lose
ourselves. It also is related to the importance of our being able to
leave something alone. Are we
Page 29 simply a cancer? Are
we a species, are we an organism that behaves as a cancer on another
organism without regard to balance and economy, or are we one that can
step back and say, Okay I have evolved high enough where I can simply
leave this alone? I can step back from this and say, It's okay to leave
this alone and let it be what nature has created. That's something we
haven't been able to do yet. Some people would argue that that's our
tragic flaw as a species. Looking at the Southern Appalachian Region,
the pieces of that wildness across the landscape manifest themselves
across our public lands, which is primarily the national forest lands
and the natural park lands like the Great Smokies. The plant and animal
species that exist in the southern Appalachian region represent the
greatest biodiversity in all of North America. We have a jewel, a
natural jewel in the Southern Appalachian Region without rival. That
should have the highest value to us as a species and a civilization,
just inherently, just because it's there. Beyond that, however, when you
look at all those plants and animals and begin to understand them and
how they've evolved from glaciation and all the ancient processes that
were going on, you begin to understand that they evolved because they
had certain opportunities. A lot of those opportunities were related to
scale of place. As we chop up this place, this Southern Appalachian
Mountain Region, those opportunities disappear for those species,
whether they're plants or animals. Just to give you the clearest
example: I-26 is dividing bear habitat. Black bears are extremely
dependent on migratory opportunities for breeding, expanding their gene
pool and eating. They need lots of space to find food. You lay down a
gigantic cut in a mountain, and it's a barrier for bear migration. So
their populations and their lifestyle are drastically altered, and that
was one of the big issues in the environmental impact statement for
I-26. The solutions—I don't
Page 30 know if you've seen
them on the plans—are these tunnels, hundreds of feet long. It's like
trying to get a beetle to crawl through a four foot long soda straw.
That's what you're asking bears to do. They're not even in the right
place. There was no consideration for location. They just happened to be
where they also needed them for water, as water culverts. So you have
this, these tunnels, two of them as I understand it, hundreds of feet
long, eight feet square, and you're asking a bear to use that for
migratory purposes. What the bears are going to do, they're going to
cross the highway at the top.