Effective Does Not Mean Perfect
This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents.
Consider for a moment the idea of paved roads to Arches National Monument. Edward Abbey, the renowned environmentalist and park ranger at Arches, hated those roads.
No more cars in national parks. Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs – anything – but keep the automobiles and motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out.
No more new roads in national parks. After banning private automobiles the second step should be easy. Where paved roads are already in existence they will be reserved for the bicycles and essential in-park services, such as shuttle buses, the trucking of camping gear and concessioners’ supplies.
A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourist can in a hundred miles. Better to idle through one park in two weeks than try to race through a dozen in the same amount of time.
It's a beautiful vision, isn't it? That our time in a national park should be spent slowly, without the aid of a car. That wilderness shouldn't be made as easy as possible to breeze past.
Of course it's a vision that completely leaves out a variety of people, including the disabled, the less robust elderly, smaller children, and the busy. Is it better for a few hundred people to visit Arches every day naturally, or for a few thousand to visit it using cars?
How far down the scale do you want to take it? Abbey describes his ideal way of seeing things, a vision that even if we were to enforce, only a handful would accomplish daily.
walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll begin to see something, maybe. Probably not.
Should everyone get to see Arches, in as packaged a manner as possible, or should it be kept as a difficult to access wilderness for those who have the ability? It’s not a binary - every improvement to access increases the number of people by some percent. And this doesn’t even consider the argument that wilderness should exist for itself, not for us to access. There's no expert who has the right answer to this, no single solution. This is the nature of many governance questions.
It’s worth remembering this when we talk about effective governance. Effective does not mean perfect. It means that when we decide to make something accessible (or inaccessible), we do a good job of our decision.
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