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<br />002353 <br /> <br />Colorado today is rich in moderate areas of wild, <br />open space suspended in its history between a past we <br />found and a future we desire. There is much more <br />wilderness here than in my native New England, where it <br />exists only in tight, cramped lots, reservations and <br />preserves. Much less than in Alaska where wilderness <br />will be set aside...in intact ecosystems and grand <br />sweeps of openness large enough to honor the grizzly and <br />his ways. Colorado is a midpoint between these two <br />poles. <br /> <br />In the end, this state's final decision on its <br />wilderness. will, like Pike's encounter with his <br />peak, be as symbolic as it is real. It will be a <br />decision not just about land preservation, but about the <br />basic design of our civilization: the balance point it <br />has chosen between the wild and the developed. As such, <br />Colorado will become the nation's exemplary mix of the <br />open and the regulated, of contrast and sameness, of <br />choice and coercion. And ultimately, Colorado will <br />serve as evidence of the degree to which we, as a <br />people, choose to honor our deepest roots.2 <br /> <br />It is that concern for the future, of the state as well as for <br />the need to preserve some ecological remnants of Colorado's past <br />that prompts the conservation community to offer its 1989 <br />Wilderness proposal, <br /> <br />2Colorado, 1978, <br /> <br />3 <br />