Last night I watched an excellent PBS documentary about the Gold Rush, in which tens of thousands of greedy dreamers from around the world converged on Northern California in search of easy money, which wasn’t to be found in the gold fields, generally, but was to be found in the dreary business of selling picks and shovels (and fire insurance — San Francisco burned to the ground every few months before it occurred to the folks to hire a fire department).

One of the prominent features of the Gold Rush was massive habitat and species destruction to turn a buck. Rivers were rerouted, whole valleys turned to muddy hell holes, thousands of acres of forest were clear cut, all the grizzlies were killed, most of the native Americans were killed. In return a few people got stinking, filthy rich and everybody else continued their lives of quiet desperation, although in admittedly sunnier climes (at least in the summer) than from whence they came.

Animals that weren’t killed off completely recovered when they could. The forests came back, as they always do — if given half a chance.

Those fortunate enough to live within the bounds of the most excellent United States of America have a pretty simple choice: do we want our Congress and state houses full of people who want to Gold Rush the landscape for easy money, or do we want it full of people who’ll give nature half a chance to do what it does best if people would just leave it the hell alone?

I can see why people would want to drive motorized toys at high speeds down dusty mountain roads. Loads o’ fun (really). OK, if a guy owns a mountain and wants to build some trails, maintain them on his own dime and rent passage to ATV’ers to cover his costs, I say let him. It’s difficult to take possession of a mountain so such scenarios are bound to be rare.

But if the same guy wants to stroke his congressperson and wheedle a sweetheart deal where he takes all the profits and taxpayers absorb all the risk so a few guys can tear down dusty mountain roads that belong to the United States’ taxpayers, I say let him try — it’s a free country — but other people have to stand up and have their say, too. I doubt many people want their forests ruined so a few guys can play in them with noisy machines that go too fast to enjoy the nature anyway.

The motorbikes-in-the-national-parks issue is small beans, though, compared to some of the injuries being inflicted on wild lands. Whole mountains are being “topped” for coal; massive natural gas exploration is happening across the Mountain West. Most of the time this is work that will be done somewhere, to somebody’s back yard. We can’t expect to keep our computers and cars and not incur environmental costs. But we can make sure our so-called leaders choose the clean ways vs. the easy ways. If we pay attention, and make our so-called leaders pay attention to us.