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Show pressed to find 25 square miles of land free from man and his civilization. Conservation today is a battle between men who love the earth, and the men who supposedly are making the best long range decisions for all of us-the government. Conservationists fight to keep certain pieces of ground in their present condition-untouched. One of these untouched places, is the Escalante Canyon complex in southeastern Utah. Escalante is the last remnant of what was the incredible Glen Canyon, and now is under several hundred feet of mud and water. To avoid the possibility that Escalante will meet a similar fate, Utah conservationists organized and testified at every government hearing affecting the area. An account of one of these hearings, held by the Bureau of Land Management, gives one a feel for the seriousness of our ecological dilemma, and the direction of the conservation movement. The classification hearings for the Waterpocket Fold-Escalante Drainage System were held Friday, October 30, in the State Office Building Auditorium. Though slated to begin at 9:30 a.m., it took the four men from the Bureau of Land Management an extra hour to decide on positioning the maps and to make the tape recorder work. The four, all balding, elderly, bespectacled, and wearing green suits, gather- ed around the recalcitrant tape recorder. Roderick Neilson, BLM chief in Utah, fiddled with the controls, and one of his assistants tapped on the mike and said, "Testing, testing, testing, can you hear me?" A high pitched feedback squeal shattered the drowsy auditorium. Neilson fiddled with the controls some more; the problem seemed cured. The matter of the maps was more difficult. Using six clips and four tacks, three men held a three feet square map to a piece of wood, while Neilson tacked it up. Shortly after ten o'clock Neilson opened the meeting. He summarized the hearing's purpose, recounted the duplicate hearing which occurred in Escalante Wednesday, and began to explain the maps and overlays. Had one been unfamiliar with the area, he would have gathered from the mineral maps that the Escalante area could supply all America's mineral and oil needs for the next hundred years... coal tar sands, oil shale, uranium, etc., a treasure chest of power. Neilson neglected to mention that no feasible processes exist to remove the substances from their compounds, that no one has ever found the uranium, that the coal requires strip-mining. Neilson then explained the BLM's proposed classification of the area as a natural area. This would prohibit oil development, but allow mineral prospecting and mining and grazing, as 28 |