Cont,

My brother recently did seven days on a raft trip down the Franklin crapping into a bag that came out with him. He is one of the limited number in our society with the money and appropriate fitness who have got to enjoyed this wilderness. I for one do not begrudge him that. If it meant that to allow my family similar access a road had to be put through the area I am happier it be left as it is.

By necessity we exclude many species from our communities, I no longer have a problem with being excluded from some of the very few areas that are off limits to humans however I will concede it took a fair journey to get there, one I should not expect everyone to have made.

Perhaps in the end it is enough to recognise that people see the value of things in different ways. For a couple of hundred years loggers in this country saw forests for the timber they could extract from them. Even through those times there were those who viewed parts of our forests as having significant ecological value as evidenced by a fairly effective national parks movement. As forests have diminished and plantations have grown (in Victoria we have 4.9% old growth forest coverage to 22.1% plantations) more of the community are now seeing these forests (often by virtue of their growing scarcity) as holding greater ecological rather than commodity value. Ultimately we might just need to let democracy take its course.