Scouting History

If you're going to point a finger point a finger at everybody that has and still is doing it. I live in a major metropolitan location here in America and right now, right here, on your watch, this city and many others are landfilling estuary. Captain conservation, make a list of all the bad actors. 

If that's the rationalization then I would say that in this as in so many things we have come to stand for nothing. We are -- or at least were -- an outdoors related conservation minded organization. 

I did not and do not support Summit for many reasons but you can't compare the two. US Scouting at least attempted some environmental remediation of an existing damaged site where the damage started more than 100 years ago and largely concluded decades ago. Also, while the environmental damage was extreme locally, it was not a site of global importance for threated and endangered species. The South Korean site was a very high profile, very controversial, and very current example of extreme environmental destruction on a global scale and is everything the conservation minded scouting community should stand against. SBR is about 15 square miles; Saemangeum is about 160 square miles of intentional devastation. The scouting community allowed itself to be used by political interests attempting to legitimize what it had done. It's why those South Korean political interests poured so much money into showcasing the site and were so infuriated and incredulous when it fell apart. What I hope this does, however, is bring about a reconsideration of how, where, and why WSJ events are held in the future. From the US side, I think we need to be more judicious about whether we send contingents to WSJ. From the international side, as the report outlines, the world scouting community needs to take more interest and ownership in the safety and I would say suitability as far as alignment with our conservation credo when selecting sites.   

If we're going to go down this road of complaint I feel the need to point out that every major city in the world is built at the intersection of water and those cities all contain significant acreage of landfilled estuary and wetlands that were turned into developable land. 

Simply a fabulous video about a major donation to the Museum. https://www.facebook.com/nationalscoutingmuseumbsa  I likely will not have the pleasure of seeing it now, as travel is difficult, but I was fortunate to see part of this at least at the 2010 Jamboree.