Your wilderness could be zoned industrial.

Wilderness designation is reserved for the rarest of landscapes. The Cabinet Mountains Wilderness was among the first ten areas designated, which makes it not just rare, but remarkably so. If you’ve ever been there, you understand.

This secluded temperate range is dotted with 85 deep crystal lakes. Its high country of jagged rock cirques gives way to temperate rain forest valleys thickly forested with larch, spruce, fir, cedar and hemlock. The wilderness is home to deer, elk, wolverines, lynx, mountain goats and black bears. It is a stronghold for grizzlies in the lower 48 and harbors the snow that feeds the streams that spawn bull trout.

Just downstream is one of the world’s most beautiful and cherished lakes—Lake Pend Oreille. The lake is not only a natural wonder, but also the engine that drives the region’s resort and recreation economy.

In the midst of this pristine and awe-inspiring landscape, a corporation plans to introduce deafening machines including primary and secondary rock crushing, rumbling explosives, toxic chemicals from the blasting and a perpetual polluted discharge. Revett callously plans to subject a place in which you cannot fire up a chainsaw or ride a bike to the blunt onslaught of industry.

What’s at stake, then, isn’t a bear, trout, lake or stream. What’s at stake is the very essence of wilderness, the very reason places like the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness are protected to begin with. What’s at stake is a price we should all be unwilling to pay.