SAM COOK Putting a price tag on our wilderness

How committed are we to keeping our remaining wilderness as wilderness?
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DULUTH, Minn. -- When I was in Alaska's Brooks Range a few weeks ago, I kept having this fantasy. President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are in the next tent. No Secret Service. No entourage. Just Bush and Cheney in a two-person tent plopped out on the tundra.
I wanted them to experience the silence and the vastness of those wet valleys. I wanted them to wonder, as I did, if they might stumble onto a grizzly as they ventured out alone away from camp. I wanted them to watch a band of caribou splashing across the tussocks, fording a rain-swollen river or dancing over the scree of a glaciated peak. I wanted them to walk for hours into the hills and look back at their speck of a campsite, just to gain perspective on the planet.
Sense of humility
I thought surely they, too, would feel the same sense of humility I felt in those millions of vacant acres. I thought they, too, would come away believing there was virtue in preserving wilderness, that as a people and a nation we should hold onto these last vestiges of truly wild country.
I returned to Duluth and had hardly knocked the dry silt from my boots when I saw that the Bush administration was pushing again for oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is just next door -- in an Alaskan sense -- to where I had been.
I fully expect that, perhaps by the time these words are pressed to paper, Congress will have yielded to the administration on this issue. Or that such vote will come any day. Sweet enticements such as an $800 million loan for a coal gasification plant at Hoyt Lakes give senators such as Minnesota's Norm Coleman all the reason they need to allow drilling in a distant wilderness.
Not against jobs
Don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against reviving jobs on the Iron Range. But I don't like using those jobs as political chips to leverage a few key votes in the Senate. Bring on the loan for the plant, but leave the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge out of the package.
I fully acknowledge that I am part of this nation's energy equation. My two cars gobble gasoline. My home consumes gas and electricity. When I take off to live simply in the Brooks Range, I'm burning a lot of fuel to get there.
But the amount of oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, according to the government's best estimates, is not going to reduce our dependence on foreign oil in a significant way. The way to reduce that dependence is to use less, a notion that isn't popular in Washington these days.
Can't see it working out
Much as I want to believe in my Bush-Cheney Brooks Range fantasy, I can't see it working out. I'm afraid they would look out over that amazing play of land and think, with all that country, what's the big deal about a drilling pad over in one corner of it?
This is wilderness on a scale almost unimaginable to most of us in the Lower 48, a remnant of what this land was like before our European ancestors arrived on the continent. If we're willing to drill the last, vast unspoiled land in this country, we might as well sell Lake Superior's water, put the caribou in a petting zoo and auction off the northern lights.
USam Cook writes about the outdoors for the Duluth News Tribune, Duluth, Minn.