First Doug said: > > Should we all stop encouraging new growth, boycott symposiums, stop > > teaching? Any thoughts, or is this not a valid question in the kayaking > > community, yet? [snip] Jackie then said: > I guess this, like anything else, is relative. Those that started > paddling decades ago feel a greater impact than those that started > paddling say 10 years ago that see a greater impact than those that > started paddling a year ago that see a greater impact than those that > started a couple of months ago that think the waters are vast open > spaces without a whole lot of people but will feel differently this > time next year. Which is where we all were at one time or another. > > Does this make sense? Is it important? Probably not... :-) I think it is important, and it makes a lot of sense. Doug has raised an existential question -- often the most important sort. Five years ago my 80-year-old father gave me a panoramic photo of the north shore of La Jolla, CA, circa ... 1918! It looks like some remote parts of the Baja coast: sere grassland with the odd oak or two, a straggle of telephone poles along a lazy dirt track, and ... way off in the distance ... a couple haciendas. The haciendas are the ancestors of wall-to-wall condos, apartments, and resorteffluvium -- which now contaminate the La Jolla scene. Who changed that scene? We did. Just as we are changing the paddle scene in Doug's back yard, and Jackie's, too. I was not immaculately deposited here in a little town-by-the-bay, on the River, near the coast, at the NW tip of Oregon, in a state which had billboards on the OR/CA border some 20 years ago asking Californians to "visit, but please do not stay ..." I came here to work, raise a child, and to love this land the way haciendans in La Jolla did in 1918. And I can not avoid leaving some marks. When I intertidally flush in a private cove on the coast of Vancouver Island, my waste suffers the same fate Doug's does. He and I are brothers-in-biological similarity. So is everyone else reading this. Doug is trolling. He caught some of us. Got any **real** answers to your questions, Doug? The problem is there are too many of us. As Ted Turner said of his late conversion to the philosophy of Planned Parenthood: "Yeah, I've got five kids. I would not start five kids today, but what can I do with the five I already have? Shoot 'em?" (He actually said this -- in my paraphrase, anyway.) Anybody who has practical, realistic ways to promote protective enjoyment of precious paddle spots should speak up. Heaven knows resource managers like Anna Gajda of Gwaii Haanas struggle every day with this. We owe them our ideas and support. Not simplistic answers or jingoistic phraseology. What are the answers? Limits? Restricted publicity? Concentrating paddlers in one area (viz. Brokens) to avert crowding in another (viz. the Deers)? Guidebook authors with sensitive scruples? Fewer "dramatic" rescues widely bandied about the paddling community? Hook's out Doug ... chomp away. -- Dave Kruger Astoria, OR *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Thu Sep 23 1999 - 19:14:13 PDT
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