Development in the 100 Mile

[TJ aka Teej]

Plum Creek announces its plans for the largest subdivision in Maine’s history – approximately 1,000 house lots, two resorts and other enterprises -- on an array of high quality lakes and ponds. All of the sited in the Moosehead Lake area and around the 100 Mile Wilderness. A detailed story by Phyllis Austin, including a map showing the land owned by Plum Creek bordering the Appalachian Trail is at www.meepi.org (For reference, the red line of the AT crosses Rte 201 at Caratunk.)

From the Phyllis Austin story:
"Of the 415,000 acres included in the plan, about half the Maine land it owns, Plum Creek would develop 14,000 acres, leaving 95 percent of that tract in commercial timberland management. Six thousand acres would go to about 1,000 camp lots – half on the shoreline of various waters with existing development and half on back lots (with one exception, all of the lakes already have some development). Another 6,000 acres would go to resort development. One thousand acres in Greenville would be allocated to a business park and another 1,000 acres to low-income housing. To balance the development, Plum Creek is willing to place in permanent conservation a 500-foot buffer around the shoreline of 50 undeveloped ponds.
Plum Creek is also proposing other conservation initiatives, although they are outside the lake concept plan. The company has offered to create permanent easements for 43 miles of new hiking and cross-country ski trails and 75 miles of existing snowmobile trails. It is willing to sell to the state 37,000 acres bordering the Appalachian Trail’s Hundred Mile Wilderness. Included in that deal would be No. 5 Bog near Attean Pond and land around Second and Third Roach ponds – tracts the Bureau of Parks and Lands has been wanting for some time."

[JoeHiker]

That link should be

http://www.meepi.org/

[The Solemates]

Maine of all places. Makes me sick to the stomach.

[Footslogger]

...and to think, the slogan on a Maine auto license plate is:

Maine ...the way life should be (or something to that effect)

'Slogger
AT 2003

[Lint]

Maybe folks could stop all their rutting until we figure out this whole food/air/water deal. People keep popping out babies, and they grow up to demand subdivisions. Love your mother, don't become one!

[dperry]

Maybe folks could stop all their rutting until we figure out this whole food/air/water deal. People keep popping out babies, and they grow up to demand subdivisions. Love your mother, don't become one!

Well, with respect to the baby part, the reasonable estimates for the U. S. (from the Census Bureau) and the world (from the UN) is that that problem should end by about 2050.

For good or for ill, it's not clear that that will end the second part. We're not building homes in Maine to house homeless people. We're building them because people like taking vacations in the woods.

[Mountain Dew]

For a moment I thought we were going to talk about how the amc is developing wilderness in Maine. oh well.....

[steve hiker]

If this trend continues, America will go the way of Europe which lost its wilderness about 1,000 years ago.

[The Solemates]

Well, with respect to the baby part, the reasonable estimates for the U. S. (from the Census Bureau) and the world (from the UN) is that that problem should end by about 2050.

Hows that?

[dperry]

Hows that?

In other words, the estimates are that the populations of both the US and world should begin to decrease around then.

[minnesotasmith]

Worldwide total population will likely go down in a major way long before 2050 due to the onset of Peak Oil and the Olduvai Cliff, even if no Islamocrazy releases smallpox or the like. U.S. population would have pretty much stopped increasing in the 1970s if immigration (legal and not) into the U.S. was not out of control. Lint, it's not native-born Americans of many generations causing the population increase in the U.S.; it's Third World new arrivals (and their offspring) within the last 30 years that are causing it. California (for example) would actually have had a significant population decrease duringthe last 10 years if national immigration had remained at the level established between 1930 - 1965, instead of exploding upwards as it is doing currently. So, if you want development around the AT to be minimized, one way is to do your part to get immigration lowered back to what it was pre-1965.

[screwysquirrel]

Worldwide total population will likely go down in a major way long before 2050 due to the onset of Peak Oil and the Olduvai Cliff, even if no Islamocrazy releases smallpox or the like. U.S. population would have pretty much stopped increasing in the 1970s if immigration (legal and not) into the U.S. was not out of control. Lint, it's not native-born Americans of many generations causing the population increase in the U.S.; it's Third World new arrivals (and their offspring) within the last 30 years that are causing it. California (for example) would actually have had a significant population decrease duringthe last 10 years if national immigration had remained at the level established between 1930 - 1965, instead of exploding upwards as it is doing currently. So, if you want development around the AT to be minimized, one way is to do your part to get immigration lowered back to what it was pre-1965.

You're preaching to the deaf and blind here. Surprised you haven't be called a racist so yet.

[minnesotasmith]

But that's already happened here more than once. The board ultraliberals have panic attacks whenever someone has a new idea they haven't given that person permission to have, or knows a piece of information they aren't familiar with, so it's not a rare thing to see them try (and fail) to substitute ad hom attacks for an adequate rhetorical defense of a logically weak position (such as simultaneously being pro-immigration and wanting development/sprawl constrained). I'm just about used to it.

[Blue Jay]

You racists ignore an important fact. Anyone with any talent at all, in any way, in the entire world, will do anything to come here. That is why we are a great country. America is becoming like Kuwait, no one wants to work (including most of us on this forum). Our economy would collapse without foreign talent. Even your god, Rand knew that. If your going to be a Randy at least read her books.

[minnesotasmith]

Blue, for every bonafide Ph.D.-level genius that comes here (and I welcome those) from the Third World, there are scores or hundreds of unremarkable at most adequately-skilled people (displacing native-born Americans from jobs by living wage-busting, illegality, gov't-compelled affirmative action and benefits, and massive universal favoritism towards their own), and hundreds or thousands of lesser types who are often unemployable, being brought here under the justification of family "reunification". If the borders were closed, most post-1965 immigrants expelled, and welfare/AFDC/SSDI/food stamps/affirmative action shut down, you'd see plenty of Americans employed again, filling the "jobs that Americans don't want" (can't currently feed a family on, more usually), and at decent wages.

Non-Asian Third World illegals and legals alike are economically most notable in terms of how they clog the emergency rooms, criminal courts, and public elementary school school classrooms (where they often learn little, while impeding normal learning rates by native Americans).

Rather than go on at length about this, I'll let the following two pieces speak for me here:
==============================================
I LOVE AMERICA

I come for visit, get treated REGAL
so I stay, who care I ILLEGAL?!
I cross border, poor and broke,
take bus, see employment FOLK.
Nice man treat me good in there,
say I need to see WELFARE.
Welfare say "You come no more..."
Welfare send cash right to DOOR!
Welfare checks, they make you WEALTHY,
Medi-Cal - it keep you HEALTHY!
By and by I got plenty money,
thanks to you - AMERICAN DUMMY!!
Write to friends in motherland,
tell them come as fast as they can.
They come in rags, and CHEBBY trucks -
I buy big house with welfare BUCKS!
They come, we live together...
More welfare cash, it gets better!
Fourteen families now move in,
but neighbors patience growing thin.
Finally WHITE GUY moves away!
I buy his house and then I say...
Find MORE aliens for house to RENT,
and in the yard I put a TENT!
Send for family, they just TRASH -
But they also draw welfare CASH!
Everything is MUCHO good,
soon we own the whole NEIGHBORHOOD!
We have hobby - its called breeding,
welfare pay for baby FEEDING!
Kids need dentist?
Wife need pills?
We get FREE!
We have no BILLS!
America is crazy.
They pay all YEAR!
They keep welfare running HERE.
We think America damn good place,
TOO damn good for the WHITE MAN RACE.
If they no like us, they can go
Got lots of room in MEXICO!
=============================================
From www.fredoneverything.net

http://www.fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm

Article #250

Demographics And Witlessness

The Flow Across The Rhine-Danube Line

The Nature of Mexican Immigration


September 10, 2004

"When I write that I like Mexico, that it enjoys much that we have lost, that Latin societies are more livable if less prosperous than ours, dismissive letters arrive. They amount to the same letter: “If Mexico is so great, how come they all want to come to the United States?” The writers invariably believe that they have made a telling point.

Mexico is not so great, of course. It has plenty of problems. But why do Mexicans swim the river? Money. Period. If asked, an immigrant will usually say that he seeks “una vida mejor,” a better life. He means “Money.”

Mexicans and gringos have distinctly different views of the United States. An American explaining the attractiveness of his country will usually say, “I have a big house in the suburbs, three cars, a home theater, and 300 channels on the cable. I can drink the water, and in the mall I can buy anything, absolutely anything.” He may talk of freedom and democracy, often having only the vaguest idea of whether he actually has them or what conditions might be in other countries.

A Mexican is more likely to say, “They are such a cold people. They don’t know their neighbors. They don’t know their children. They have no fiestas. Rules and being on time are more important to them than other people. They have no religion.” (To a robust Catholic, bland agnostic Protestantism isn’t detectibly a religion.) Democracy means little to an illegal with a second-grade education; in any event, Mexico is probably as democratic as the United States. He knows the government left him alone in Mexico, which is his definition of freedom. And mine.

But money counts when you don't have any. It counts a lot. And so they come whether they like the country or not. Very often they do not. This is going to matter.

Now, do the “all Mexicans” of my mail want to emigrate, to attach themselves to the northern nanny’s promiscuous dugs? No. Few do. Who then are the emigrants?

For starters, they are not doctors, chemists, and airline pilots. Successful Mexicans do not want to go to the United States. Mexicans who are merely comfortable do not want to go to the United States. They like Mexico. This is very difficult to explain to most Americans, who know beyond doubt that Mexico has lesser malls. But it is a fact.

The Mexicans who go north are the losers, the failures, the barely if at all literate, those with little to offer. They go because the Mexican economy is wretched, because the jobs that left the United States for Mexico are now leaving Mexico for China. Money. The United States can run a first-world economy. Mexico cannot. Why is debatable. The fact isn't.

While Mexicans are good people, their dregs often are not. On average the immigrants are uncultivated, uneducated, and of low intelligence. One may not mention the matter of intelligence, but it is well known among people who pay attention to such things, and has implications for the future. America is getting those Mexicans least worth getting, the least assimilable, and getting them in circumstances that do not encourage assimilation. Unlikely to prosper, they show signs of becoming another unsalvageable underclass.

Being Latins, they are not comfortable in an impersonal, technological northern European culture that values performance, competition, efficiency and punctuality. It isn’t their way. Often they plan to make money and return to Mexico; many then develop ties and remain. Yet even then they stay among their own. Their numbers as they swarm across the border are such that they can do it. If they don’t want to assimilate, don’t have to assimilate, and don’t have the wherewithal to assimilate—don’t expect assimilation.

Further, Latin Americans resent the United States for its great wealth and for their own poverty, which they tend to blame on exploitation by American corporations. Whether this characterization is correct (it isn't) doesn’t matter. The resentment does.

Mexicans know that much of the American southwest was once part of Mexico, taken from them by force of arms. Americans, having been the victors and in any case being historically illiterate, know little of this. Mexicans do. Few know the dates or the politics, yet they have a sense of grievance, a sense that these states are really theirs. They are getting them back. They know it. They view the reconquista with the relish with which they watch a Mexican soccer team beat the US.

Their envy, their sense of inferiority and of failure, breeds hostility in the southwestern barrios. This is far less true of Mexicans in Mexico. In a couple of years in the interior, I have found people to be friendly and courteous. The only exceptions, apart from my experiences during a couple of unwise forays into seriously low bars, have involved males who clearly had spent time in the US.

Comparisons are made between Mexican immigrants and, say, Italians, a Latin people who melded well into American society. A word of caution here: Assimilation is proportional to contact. When a minority population is sufficiently large, and sufficiently concentrated, the consequence is not assimilation, but the establishment of a sort of country within a country. There are for example countless huge black regions of the cities where one can go for days without seeing a white face. Whites barely know that these places exist. The inmates are not assimilating. The same appears to be happening with the Mexicans.

Perhaps as important, past immigrants have cut their ties with their native countries, and have arrived with the conscious desire of becoming Americans. Mexicans, very often, do not want to be Americans, and the mother country is right across the border. The phrase “trans-border de facto semi-sovereignty” is not Milton. It merits thought.

Worse for America, much worse, is that far too many of them perform terribly in school. Dropout rates are very high, auguring ill for the future. Mexicans are not an academic people (as, increasingly, neither are Americans). In the barrios, their Spanish is barbarous. So is their English. Crime is high. The press will not talk much about crime, but the police know.

And—here I am on statistically shaky ground, as there are no statistics—the young too often seem to be assimilating to the black underclass rather than to the central white current. Mexican machismo and the ghetto strut of the black underclass have much in common. Rap is popular among low-class Mexican males. It is the music of defiant losers, of macho swagger and rejection of white America.

Black and Mexican won’t unite. They don’t like each other. Anger will come when the growing and better organized Mexicans take the southwestern cities from the blacks. One country, three nations, little compatibility, and no love lost."
=================================================

[The Old Fhart]

Though many of [immigrants] are, doubtless, persons of small means, who have been hoarding and saving for years, and living in rags and squalor, in order to amass sufficient money to carry themselves and families across the Atlantic, and to beg their way to the [United States], where they may "squat" or purchase cheap lands, the great bulk appear to be people of the most destitute class, who go to join their friends and relatives, previously established in America.

That is a quote from 1850 regarding the Irish immigration. As you can see, the xenophobes haven’t changed. America is a great country, not because of those "people" we exclude, but rather because of those we embrace.

MS and SS should crawl back under their rocks and let the rest of the posters talk about the 100 mile "wilderness."

[orangebug]

I see that using the Ignore feature has saved me from unnecessary distress.

[minnesotasmith]

SS's posts and mine are completely on-topic here. We are discussing development near the AT, after all. Development/sprawl are closely associated with population growth, and pop growth in the U.S. is now primarily a factor of uncontrolled immigration (legal and not). That means that the topic of development cannot be competently discussed in general without reference to the immigration issue.

As far as the characteristics of the immigrants coming to America now, they have changed dramatically from those of a century and more years ago. This is due to 1) the welfare state (that did not exist at all prior to the wretched FDR administration, and reached its approximate final trough under LBJ in the 1960s), 2) almost completely switching over to drawing peoples from the Third World culture types rather than the First World, and 3) the "race over merit" system we are increasingly adapting in this country, which often disadvantages deserving native-borns over undeserving new arrivals.

Finally, you might be interested to know that the Irish immigrants arriving here after the potato blight of the 1840s were in fact as a group a cut below the English/Scottish/German/Dutch predecessors that founded the nation, going by their documented behavior. They were more pointlessly violent, less inclined to learn skills, less likely to hold down jobs longterm, more likely to drink to excess, poorer at maintaining marriages, more likely to produce bastards, ended up in the almshouses more, etc. Because they spoke (more or less) the same language as the founding peoples, were the same race (and otherwise not genetically much different), there was little welfare-state reinforcement of their bad behaviors, generally bore this country no ill will (unlike Mexicans and Muslims...), and were not forever reinforced by a continuing massive inundation of similar types, they at length did assimilate. Sadly, none of these conditions hold true today, so assimilation of Hispanic new arrivals is overall considerably slower, when it happens at all.

My source on the last paragraph is "The Unheavenly City Revisited", by Ed Banfield.

[The Old Fhart]

minnesotasmith-“SS's posts and mine are completely on-topic here.”

You must think you’re posting on some Aryan web site because nothing you’ve said has any relevance with development along the A.T. in the 100 mile “wilderness.” And you display your stupidity by wasting most of your last post trying to justify the 1840 quote I used to show just how asinine you racist xenophobes are! You are one sick puppy!

You’ve tried this crap here before and it didn’t work. I’m sure the outcome this time will be the same, but then you’re probably too dim to realize that.

[minnesotasmith]

You will be in a logically equivalent situation as someone who regrets illegitimate births, but will not allow discussion about sexual behaviors. That is, you will never come to understand anything, nor improve anything. I am sorry that you appear unable to grasp new information if it is politically incorrect (not to mention your disagreeable and counterproductive inclination for substituting insults in place of refutation by logic of positions with which you disagree); however, not everyone on this forum is so handicapped, fortunately for the future of the Trail.