Para'dacks

Phil Terrie brought up another good, yet unanswerable question in his talk on Friday in regards to exchanging wilderness areas. When he was talking about trading one area of the Forest Preserve for another area somewhere else, he brought to mind the idea that this exchange is based on an evaluation of the land's worth. Someone has to figure out how much and what land should be traded in order to justify the exchange of preserved lands. My question is how do they make that evaluation? Is it by subjective beauty? Accessibility? Acreage? Proximity to existing manmade structures? Usefulness (to humans) in terms of resources? I'm not sure how (or who) decides these things, but I think that the fact that someone is assigning differential values of worth to the land is indicative of perhaps another anthropocentric aspect of our relationship with the park: we continuously take on the role of the land's "proxy," making decisions for this thing that can't communicate what is best for itself. This observation takes on other iterations in that it occurs in the conflict of locals versus outsider control, but at least in that example the "insiders" can still make themselves heard. I think to some extent people are playing God by determining the fate of Forest Preserve land, but it's also pretty obvious that there's no other way to do it--as long as humans are involved with this land, then they will have to make decisions for and about it. What's interesting is the way that this intersects with ideologies like that of environmental stewardship and the belief that people should be stewards to their land and do their best by it. Unfortunately, people often have different opinions on what is best for the land (or the people who use it, ie. the Phil Brown Mud Pond case) and it's not always easy (read as: it's never easy) to determine what is best. We can talk all day long about what wilderness is and how best to protect and use it (like the conservation design approach that Terrie brought up), but ultimately, someone/something somewhere is always going to be getting the short end of the stick. Whether its the ATV-ers, the local inhabitants nervous about a failing economy, or the land itself, not everyone can be happy with ultimate land use decisions (and now I'm anthropomorphizing!). I guess that's just the paradox of coexistence, but its one that seems particularly salient within the blue line.