Bring back our state’s wilderness

Will we ever cut one of the east Arkansas levees bordering the Mississippi River and allow the adjacent land to flood and recreate a million-acre wilderness?

I believe we will. That flies in the face of conventional wisdom because we must have land to build houses and construct highways, each necessary parts of a civilized society. Without development or farming, our standard of living would suffer a dramatic decline.

But unconstrained development should remind us of how over 90 percent of our wetlands are gone, how the ancient forest that covered this land is but a tiny remnant, and how species after species have become extinct.

You might say that’s the price we pay for our standard of living. You can’t have a million-acre east Arkansas wilderness and still lead the nation in rice production, can you? But must we concede our great American wilderness is gone forever? Are we doomed by past mistakes to only read about our wilderness past? Can we ever recreate what a French fur trapper in 1650 might have experienced as he paddled up Champagnolle Creek?

If we can put a man on the moon and spend billions of dollars on everything from honeybee research to the restoration of Lawrence Welk’s birthplace, we should be able to create a series of wilderness areas within our state and across our nation.

Why should we? It all goes back to quality of life.

An American wilderness would consist of a large contiguous area with several major streams, no roads, no hiking trails, no three-wheelers, nor any motorized traffic. It would be the size of one of our counties; something around a million acres.

Through the natural restoration of wildlife and restocking where necessary, an ecosystem could be developed, which over the years would become more and more like our original American wilderness. We would restock wolves, cougar, black bear, elk, and any other species native to the area.

Hunting and fishing would be allowed, but no logging. We can afford to restrict uses, since we’re talking about a small percentage of land.

These wilderness areas would still be only a fraction of our available land. We could easily place them where they would least impact farming or residential development. The impressive yields per acre which our farmers have enjoyed over the past 50 years have flooded the market with products, and that surplus created the government land bank program to reduce crop yields.

What if the program were expanded to encourage land donations to form a wilderness? The creation of a wilderness program would remove this acreage from development and would constitute less than 2 percent of our land.

Where would these wilderness areas be located? It seems logical that an expansion of the Big Island area on the Mississippi River, the Felsenthal National Wildlife Refuge, and areas within the Ouachita and Ozark National Forests would be good starting points.

We should view these projects as ones to be developed over several generations; the creation and maintenance of even one large wilderness area is probably a 20-year project.

Are we destined to be like southern California, so crowded and over-developed that it’s not fit to live in? Have you noticed the recent exodus from California?

When I was a boy, it was nothing out of the ordinary to kick up a covey of 20-30 quail. Now, although quail are not extinct, they might as well be. Starting right after the Civil War, a concentrated effort was made to eliminate virtually every large predator. Our grandfathers and their fathers were amazingly successful, and by the 1950s wolves, cougars, and most of the bears were gone, and after they were gone our quail slowly disappeared.

The predators who ate the raccoons, possums, rats, and armadillos are gone, and those quail egg-eating animals have nearly eliminated the quail in our state. So if you want to bring back the quail and re-establish the balance of nature, bring back the red wolf, the cougar, and make the black bear common again.

When we see a polluted lake or a drained lifeless wetland, surely we understand a part of our quality of life has been taken away. One day we will realize how vital wilderness is.

When a national consensus emerges, our country will set its mind to creating new wilderness areas. It may be our grandchildren or their children, but one of them will symbolically turn the first shovel of dirt to cut an east Arkansas levee on the Mississippi and create wilderness.

I hope it’s one of my grandchildren.