New Definitions

Policy making is nearly impossible. Class on Wednesday was both exciting and endlessly frustrating in that, although we all had great ideas regarding our amendment to the SLMP, they were often broken down by numerous loopholes. By the end of class, we hadn't even begun to come up with the actual wording for the amendment, or methods for convincing others to vote for said amendment, because we were so stuck on finding foolproof solutions to the discovered loopholes. I think I've decided that foolproof just isn't an option. If we could come up with so many loopholes in such a short amount of time, it seems likely that someone can almost always come up with a way to skirt around the regulations, or modify them, if they simply think for long enough.

I hadn't even thought about this before, really. When we originally came up with our amendment for private land easements in lieu of the public ones that currently cut into wilderness land, we thought that we could just continue to call this easement land "Primitive Use Land." Then, in our class-wide conversation, a classmate asked what the specific regulations were for this new classification of land. It was then that I realized how precise and specific policymakers need to be in order to be most effective in mitigating the possibility of ambiguity. We couldn't simply translate the public "Primitive Use Land" regulations onto private lands; we needed to create an entirely new land classification specific to privately owned land. And although this was another frustrating realization, it was also a good one because it made clear the fact that this pre-existing land classification was specific enough to what it regulates that it could not be any more far-reaching. A new definition of private primitive use land was necessary.