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I favor maintaining restrictions. There are very few opportunities that offer themselves up to us for study in the way Spirit Lake has offered itself, and we need to err on the side of caution and not cause disturbance to the natural recovery cycle that has been occurring since 1980.

It is important to realize that if we only define the public interest as a narrow set of traditional outdoor extractive activities, then the logical conclusion would be that something is being taken away by maintaining restrictions. We must widen our viewpoint to include as a significant public interest the scientific knowledge gained from undisturbed areas. I would offer that the constituency for the latter is a much more broad-based than the former.

posted 4 years, 1 month ago
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