Where Is Land Use Planning? - Hal Darst, Eugene

[Sent to Senators Ben Westlund, Kate Brown, Vicki Walker, Rick Metsger, Frank Morse, Jeff Kruse, and Bestsy Johnson:]

I am writing out of sense of complete outrage and dismay at the possible development of the Metolius. I am a native Oregonian who has experienced tremendous amounts of backcountry throughout the Cascades, Wallowa's, Kalmiopsis and most of Oregon. Further I have led numerous 20 plus day backpacking trips in Yosemite, Death Valley, the Appalachian Trail of both Maine and New Hampshire, as well as trips in Vermont, Alaska and Utah. Of the many places I have been blessed to experience, no place, - NO place, is more dear and cherished to me than the Metolius and Three Sisters Wilderness. I could try to bolster my argument with descriptions or comparisons, but let me be forthcoming and say I honestly don't know why - it is simply something one feels in the heart. If one has any ability to feel a connection with the land, (and this ability has nearly gone extinct in our species I believe), there is just something profoundly special about that area.

It has been excruciating to watch this endless paving of Oregon, from abundant ecological wilderness to greed-stained wasteland, over my 54 years. The hopes many of us had in the McCall era with the passage of Senate Bill 100 and the onset of Land Use Planning, has been bulldozed over. What happened to the strength of character in individual legislators who could STAND UP to shortsighted, monied interests trying to sacrifice public benefit for private gain?!!! Back then legislators worked to create whole systems such as the Bottle Bill, the Willamette Greenway and Land Use Planning. Nationally efforts were made to enact the Wild and Scenic Rivers bill, the Clean Water and Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Protection Act. Some courageous efforts, albeit flawed and imperfect legislation, were put forward by truly heroic and memorable legislators. Bipartisan efforts with people like Gov's McCall, Straub, Sen Hallock, Sen MacPherson, who used genuine passion and power of belief in the rightness of the cause, to persuad their peers to enact STATEWIDE, systematic legislation to comprehensively address the onslaught of developers and mindless consumerism.

And now legislators and citizens are reduced to fighting over this incessant incremental erosion by 100 acre parcels in a thousand different places, and civic government today even gets bulldozed over by these single penny-ante developers. I place a call for the return of some courageous legislators with the strength to hold the line set forth by those who brought forth the vision of an unspoiled state, saved from the fate of New Jersey and California. Those who once called this state the "Pacific Wonderland".

Truly, if these beautiful ridges and slopes of the Metolious die under the pavement and plastic, there will be a part of me that dies as well. I plead for some legislators and legislation that will stop this cancerous assault on our wildlands. Protect the Metolius, and lets get development back into the cities, where it belongs!!!!

Most sincerely yours,

Hal C. Darst
Eugene, OR