At 02:25 PM 5/19/04 +0000 said:Mike,
Quoted message said:I sincerely do appreciate your comments but I will not enter publicly into this
debate with you because of your entrenched and caustic stance on the matter.
The moderator will prevent it, anyway.
Quoted message said:I appreciate your concern for establishing parkland without human presence --
indeed the underlying justification for that forms part of my point which I hope
that you would consider: that humans on bikes and humans in boots have different
but overall similar levels of impacts on parkland.
That's relative. There is certainly no (good) science supporting that view.
Quoted message said:If the impact rises to an unacceptable level, it is not due to the technology
in this case (indeed horses present a much larger impact).
It's exactly the technology that is the problem (what else is a bicycle, except
technology?). It allows one to do a lot more harm, over a much larger distance.
How many people can walk 50 miles in a day, or hike at over 20 MPH?
Quoted message said:The problem of bicycles is something that can be addressed with planning and
attitudinal shifts; as you know, bikes are already banned on all trails in most
US parkland -- federal wilderness, nat'l parks, and many if not most state
parks.
Quoted message said:I am already familiar with your work and have read some of your papers. I just
wish you could apply more of your passion to the larger threats to biodiversity
presented by extractive industry, sprawl, rural poverty (esp in Mexico -- this
is the NorAm forum after all), and climate change.
What makes you think I'm NOT? You have no idea what organizations I support. But
there are plenty of people doing that. There are too FEW people addressing the
harm that mountain biking does.
Quoted message said:I would fundamentally disagree with your point that "within parks, mountain
biking is by far the greatest threat." While that may be arguable in a small
city park in Berzerkely (sprawl is probably a greater threat), it is not true of
the many paper parks throughout the world. Please refer to the USAID funded
Parks in Peril program for Latin America for some background on this. Also refer
to the work that GEF is doing to reverse biodiversity drawdowns. There are long
lists of immensely greater priority threats to biodiversity. Remember that parks
themselves should not be conservation targets, the ecosystem functions and
biodiversity are the target; parks are the conservation tool.
Of course, and not the only one. Mountain biking is a rapidly expanding threat
inside & outside parks. That is undeniable.
Quoted message said:Lastly, almost all mountain bikers I know are very keen hikers; many are
environmentalists, and nearly all do not want to see natural areas developed.
I don't doubt that, and have never questioned MOTIVES. What I question is their
EFFECT, which is highly negative, in so many different ways. Motives are
completely irrelevant -- to the wildlife!
Quoted message said:If US society and the international community of concerned individuals are
going to have a chance to ever 'achieve' sustainability, then this moronic
infighting has to stop.
As soon as you all stop riding off-road, it will stop. Your intransigence is
proof of how shallow your "environmentalism" is.
Quoted message said:I've devoted my career to sustainability, mostly in an int'l context, and I'd
like you to know how I came to that decision: through mountain biking.
That doesn't prove that it wouldn't have happened some other way, e.g. through
hiking.
Quoted message said:When I was a college student back in the evil 80s, it was how I first came in
significant contact with the natural environment.
That's not a productive "contact". You may have moved on to conservation, but
most mountain bikers' focus is on more mountain biking and ever more access.
Anyone who sees you mountain biking, especially young kids, will get the message
that the rough treatment of nature is okay. It's NOT.
Quoted message said:To be sure, many others have also developed personal relationships with the
natural world through recreation. Indeed, this kind of ethic and how it develops
is exactly what Muir and Leopold wrote so eloquently about.
We have learned a lot since then. Leopold did it through hunting. We can't
afford that any more. Muir did it by encouraging everyone to go to the
wilderness. That was when the population was far less & it was much harder to
get there. Nowadays, it is so easy for people to get into wildlife habitat that
it is driving the wildlife away. That is obsolete, like campfires & drinking
water from the wilds. There's no way you can rationally justify mountain biking
or any other extreme sport involving use of natural areas (wildlife habitat).
Quoted message said:Best,
Steve
----Original Message Follows----
From: Mike Vandeman <[email hidden]>
To: [email hidden], North American Mountain Forum
<[email hidden]>
CC: "Steve Danyo" <[email hidden]>
Subject: RE: Mountain Biking
Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 23:02:53 -0700
At 06:10 PM 5/18/04 -0400, Steve Danyo wrote:
Dear Colleen (and all),
A quick comment on environmental ethics.
The comparison between waste and trail cycling is tenuous.
Everyone does indeed produce waste; not everyone has a
desire to ride trails, and certainly not everyone has the
ability to ride trails, especially those that are
difficult or remote. If you really want to define your
environmental ethic by measuring every action against
everyone's doing it at the same rate, then that
necessarily implies:
no flying (carbon intensity), no driving internal
combustion vehicles (carbon intensity), no eating meat
(landuse), no peri-urban homesteads (landuse), no
drinking water (not enough clean water now for everyone in
the hydrologic cycle), no nothing!
Suggest visiting www.myfootprint.org, which is an
interactive tool to measure how many Earths we would need
if everyone indeed lived like you. Try it out. It's fun.
The lesson I get from it is that if everyone in the world
lived like your friendly neighborhood NorAm-based
composting vegetarian hippie (nothing wrong with that, btw),
we still wouldn't have enough globes for us all, assuming
current technologies and practices: even the least
consumptive NorAm resident is vastly more consumptive than
our neighbors in low-income countries. That's the real
issue; all this mess about trail impacts of bicycles is a
first-world luxury far removed from more pressing concerns.
Within parks, mountain biking is by far the greatest threat. If it were a minor
threat, we wouldn't be talking about it. Multiply the damage they do times the
number of mountain bikers in the world, and you will see that it is a MAJOR
problem, and growing fast.
Remember, MTB trails don't have to be on pristine land or
wilderness, and they almost never ever are in the US.
So what? Is "pristine" land the only land worth protecting? Once it's not
pristine, do we write it off as a total loss? Or do we try to restore it to
viable habitat? The latter, of course.
Best, Steve
P.S. Colleen -- After your 35 years in the mtns with 12 of
those spent in the field, what is there to really complain
about if you've been startled six times? Six! During my
cycling commute to work each day at the Global Envt Facility
here in DC I'm startled 6 times!
In the case of horses, it has at times meant the difference between life and
death. A startled horse may bolt off the trail, the ride with it. Some have been
injured so badly that they had to be killed.
===
I am working on creating wildlife habitat that is off-limits to
humans ("pure habitat"😉. Want to help? (I spent the previous 8
years fighting auto dependence and road construction.)
http://home.pacbell.net/mjvande
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===
I am working on creating wildlife habitat that is off-limits to
humans ("pure habitat"😉. Want to help? (I spent the previous 8
years fighting auto dependence and road construction.)