Reporting from Los Angles (‘The West’ is “The West” to WaPo) Karl Vick in today’s WaPo is back on the Plum Creek / McLodges story addressed in column # 127 “Rocky Mountain Low” of 21 July 2008.
The sources Vick quoted in the earlier story — that EMR heard from after it was published — were not very impressed with Vick’s July coverage.
If Vick has this report about our home territory even partially right, EMR is not at all impressed with ANY of the players.
FEDS: The feds (US Forest Service) are trying to get a new “agreement” in place before 20 January (Inauguration of the new administration) to allow paving roads on public land to access potential Urban home sites on Plum Creek Timber Co’s land. What would you expect from an Agency which is being run by a former timber lobbyist?
MUNICIPAL AND STATE AGENCIES. The municipal and state governance practitioners (and the tut-tut-ers in Congress) are hoping the feds will keep Plum Creek from paving logging roads so they do not have to acknowledge their central role in fostering dysfunctional human settlement patterns.
PLUM CREEK: Plum Creek Timber cannot be so deluded as to think they can sell enough land for McLodges to make a difference in their bottom line.
Many owners of existing McLodges now realize they will NEVER be able to afford to spend another late summer / early fall in Montana. When the snow melts and current owners put their second, third and fourth ‘places’ on the market, the market will disappear.
If selling any significant part of their land for McLodge development is in Plum Creek’s business plan, they might as well file for bankruptcy right now.
ENVIROS: By failing to address the root problem – scattered Urban dwellings and dysfunctional human settlement patterns – Enviros have opened the door to ignorance compounding ignorance. See Larry Grosses’ note on Wal*Mart @ Wilderness Battlefield. Same problem here: The issue is Regional, Subregional settlement patterns – inside and outside the Clear Edges. Fussing over this or that transgression is a losing battle.
Further, ‘conservation advocates’ have never run the numbers. If they had, they would understand that the McLodges ploy is a smoke screen to get ‘conservation interests’ to buy the land and perpetuate the myth that these “Remote and Inhospitable” lands have Urban “development” value. Almost no one would want to develop most of the land. And the rest? If all the location-variable costs were fairly allocated almost no one could afford to “develop” or maintain a McLodge much less subdivisions of them.
EMR