The West 2000 Page 16

Muir is a hero to us, too. Aldo Leopold could have written for RANGE magazine. Contemporary environmentalists, even if their views are as radical as those of David Foreman and Reed Noss, are part of our interest. But every trend deserves to be examined for its truth.

These things we think are true.

• The honest production of food, fiber, and raw materials in the West is no less necessary today than ever.
• If the numbers of farms and the viability of farming continues to decline in the United States, the least result will be a serious increase in the cost of food for all of us.
• If the decline in legitimate livestock grazing continues at a rate of 20 percent each decade, the result will be not only higher costs for protein, but lower quality and even questionable supplies.
• If timber production, reduced by 70 percent in the last decade, remains at such levels, consumer costs for an incredible variety of products will rise, while the forests will be in ever greater danger of catastrophic wildfires.
• If the production of fuel and minerals in the United States is even more limited than it is today, this consuming nation will still acquire the necessary raw materials from imports, thus not only compromising national security, but contributing to environmental destruction in other countries.
• If the national heritage contained in our public lands is set aside as a preservation of a mythical past, our future as a nation and as free people will be in dire doubt, and the balance of nature throughout the planet will be threatened.

• If the trend of federal regulation and control continues, production of food, fiber and raw materials in the United States will be directed into the holdings of larger and more powerful corporate enterprises that will have influence over supply, demand and prices.

In calculating all of it in the last two decades, it is not the management of natural resources, but the attempt to manage and control human behavior and aspiration that is at the heart of the issue in the West.

We believe, as people in the West have always believed, that we have a right to participate in shaping our own destiny. That is nothing more than what is promised to us all as free people.