Q: We have had record avalanche fatalities this year from skiers who go outside ski-area boundaries, something permitted by the U.S. Forest Service, on whose land this occurs. The problem is that rescue teams risk their lives to help these skiers. Should the service close these areas, temporarily or permanently, to protect the rescue teams? — Pete Feistmann, Vail
A: Some areas are closed when conditions make them particularly dangerous, according to Craig Magwire, the Forest Service’s acting winter-sports program manager, but infrequently as possible. “Our policy is to give Americans the broadest access to what is, after all, their land,” he says. Instead, the Forest Service seeks “to educate people about what conditions they’ll find and how they should prepare.” This is an ethically sound approach.
Even under optimum conditions, skiers will get themselves into whatever sort of jam skiers get into, and rescue work is by its nature dangerous. That’s one reason it is voluntary.
Skiers must be mindful of their abilities and the prevailing conditions and not act in ways that are likely to end in a rescue. It is ethically dubious to subject other people to grave — and predictable — risks. Rescue squads must make similar judgments, Magwire says: “The first priority is not to unduly endanger their own members.”
Q: I am a gardener who purchased a Wollemi pine tree (considered “critically endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature) from the National Geographic Society. I’m told it is illegal to propagate and sell this tree because the NGS has exclusive rights to it in the United States, but would I be unethical to do so? — Nelson Ryland, Brooklyn, N.Y.
A: You may yearn to be wicked, a pine- tree bootlegger, but you’re merely a bit misinformed: Neither law nor ethics forbids your selling this tree’s seeds (cuttings? eggs? — whatever it does for reproductive fun).
The Wollemi pine, an ancient species, was believed extinct until its rediscovery in 1994 in Wollemi National Park, Australia, by David Noble, a parks officer. Efforts were taken to re-establish the species, and in the U.S., that led to the National Geographic Society selling the tree through its catalog. Liz Nickless, a spokeswoman for the society, says that “there are no exclusive agreements for the distribution of the Wollemi pine.” There is a U.S. trademark, she adds, “so anyone wanting to use the name will need permission.”
The perils of climate change make the planting of trees particularly desirable — but there might be even greater good in your Brooklyn tree farming if Wollemi fanciers bought the authorized rather than the bootleg version so as to support those in the best position to further an admirable enterprise, re-establishing an endangered species.
Contact Randy Cohen via Universal Press Syndicate, 4520 Main St., Kansas City, MO 64111, or ethicist@nytimes.com.
