Rescue Tellico - Conservation vs Preservation

J.C.

Volunteer
Moderator
Joined
Apr 18, 2005
Location
Greensboro, NC
From the SELC (Southern Environmental Law Center) website:

10. Saving special places. The heart of SELC’s mission is protecting one-of-a-kind sites of particular beauty or exceptional wildlife, historic, or natural value.

This is the SELC’s number 10 accomplishment in their list of top 10 things they have done over the years.

Merriam Webster says: protect – to cover or shield from exposure

“Education, Conservation, Recreation” – The SFWDA (Southern Four Wheel Drive Association) motto.

Merriam Webster says: conserve – to maintain constant during a process of evolutionary change

While the SELC, and associated groups like TU (Trout Unlimited), like to promote themselves as conservationist organizations, SELC’s own web site lists as one of their top 10 accomplishments, “protecting” the environment. What they mean by this is, to shield the environment from exposure to human use. Their philosophy of activism is actually geared more toward a preservationist point of view than a conservationist point of view.

In the case of the issue of the Upper Tellico OHV area outside of Murphy, NC, TU, with the support of SELC would be happy to preserve the area in such a manner that with no human exposure or intervention the native brook trout could continue their evolution. Maybe they would make it, maybe they won’t, but at any rate you won’t be able to blame humans for their destruction.

Conservationists, read SFWDA, on the other hand want to use our human abilities to manage brook trout habitat. We want to insure that through stream and water quality management, brook trout will be conserved, remain constant during this period of evolutionary change, for our descendants to enjoy.

The strange thing I see is that most TU members and SFWDA/BRC members agree on many of the trout issues. The difference is that under the SELCs direction, TU would have us close areas of public land to certain recreational use as a means of protecting trout habitat where as SFWDA/BRC, would work to properly manage the land so that all uses that have been designated as viable uses by the U.S. Forest Service are available to the public.

The job of the Rescue Tellico Coalition, through the individual 4wd user, is to make our legislators, the media and the general public aware of this distinction. That through following the U.S. Department Of Agriculture’s own agency mandate of managing public lands for public use, all users of our public Forests can work in cooperation to help conserve our lands for today’s and tomorrow’s use instead of closing them in discrimination to certain user groups.
 
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