(FROM AN EVERGREEN STATE GRADUATE), A LETTER TO MY FELLOW ENVIRONMENTALISTS: STOP SUPPORTING EXTREMIST POSITIONS OR LOSE

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*** ORBUSMAX GUEST OP/ED *** (FROM AN EVERGREEN STATE GRADUATE), A LETTER TO MY FELLOW ENVIRONMENTALISTS: STOP SUPPORTING EXTREMIST POSITIONS OR LOSE - By Dan Brown November 9, 2003 To all who love the Earth: Unless you, like the geoduck mascot of my Alma Mater, live buried under three feet of sand, you are aware that there is a growing support for efforts to drastically modify Federal laws pertaining to environmental protection. A backlash against what many perceive as socialist policies that threaten the fundamental American right to own, use, and protect property grows daily, fuelled by the not necessarily unforeseeable negative impacts of increasingly extreme judicial interpretations of law in actions brought by persons whose extremism blinds them to real world practicalities and good science, preventing them from seeing the bigger picture. As is the case anytime that extremism dominates a movement, it becomes its own worst enemy and greatest source of its undoing. Abandon those that fight for every damned minnow and bug or watch the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts be gutted. It is instructive to consider the events that have led to this pretty pass. My entire life has been a study in the human effects of the long struggle to balance the needs of technological man and the natural world. Growing up in a timber-dependent community, I remember the bad old days. I remember the bay in my little town utterly ruined by an obsolete pulp mill. I remember that bay fit for nothing other than a log pond filled with millions of feet of logs waiting to be milled. I remember the shellfish and fishing industries devastated by the water quality. And I remember that it was the "Arch Conservative" Richard Nixon who signed most of today's environmental legislation with overwhelming support from all sides. But later, after the first great improvements, the darker side began to emerge. I remember the increasingly nit-picking scrutiny that made it harder and harder to make a living, helping to stagnate wages and opportunities for a whole regional sub-economy. I remember watching timber workers become one more "endangered species." I was fortunate; the compromises that accompanied the Northern Spotted Owl listing provided Federal and State funding for retraining I was able to take advantage of. I obtained an Environmental Science degree from The Evergreen State College, and today I am a chemist for the only company in the Pacific Northwest that actually recycles the whole gamut of petroleum products, solvents, and antifreeze. Some environmentalists talk about the environment; some of us actually get our hands dirty on its behalf. I've lived both sides of this issue. There are a few clearcuts with my name on them; a bit of paved paradise here and there. I've been turned into economic road-kill by environmental protection, and then scraped up by the State. I am one of the many people that know firsthand that socialism is designed to break your legs in order to become the provider of crutches. And to the La-La land wing of the environmental movement, I posit the following: The master science is economics. Not a natural science, not environmental science, but economics. Any person or group that ignores this will ultimately fail. Man is a natural part of the environment, one more animal that must eat and provide for its other needs. People need "habitat" too: Land to farm; resources to harvest and mine. Places to build homes. Modern technological man isn't going give up his safe, comfortable lifestyle to chase a fantasy goal of environmental perfection. And the goal is in fact a fantasy. Much of modern environmental extremism is based more on religion and political philosophy than science. Increasingly, good science is shut out of the debate, and with it the objectivity it brings to the issue. Anything can be made into a religion, and most things can be used as tools to grab power. Much of modern environmental "science" is based on the Eden-Myth that before technological man somehow nature maintained a "perfect" state of balance. What poppycock! Nature is a chaotic affair where extinction, disaster and constant change are the rule and life is constantly engaged in a complex competition of adaptation wherein it hones itself for survival. Species come and go; life survives. That survival doesn't depend on the survival of every living thing. We represent the only survivor of at least seven species from our genus; the geological record is replete with similar cases. The environment can only be understood in these long-range terms. Efforts to stop the changes, even if they are partly or mostly man-caused, are at best fraught with uncertainty and at worst doomed to expensive futility. Man is here to stay, and as many species have benefited from this reality as have been destroyed. So to practical application of current events. As was underscored by the recent conflagrations in California, constant pressure from "line drawn in the sand" groups have forced our government into a malfeasance of inaction over the issue of forest stewardship. If I allow my property to deteriorate to the point my neighbor is affected, my neighbor has a right of redress. Through inaction all across the West, the Federal and several State governments have become very poor neighbors. In California, inaction has certainly materially contributed to immense loss by thousands of citizens. And what was saved? Nothing! Nothing is more devastating than wildfire! Of course nature mends, but the suggestions of some that fire is OK because it is somehow "natural" is idiotic! "Mother Nature" doesn't always know best. The "natural" accumulation of fuels in a forest benefits nothing. It promotes overpopulation of insects, blocks the access and retards the food production for larger mammals, and then, when it inevitably burns, it utterly destroys the organic fractions of soils that end up washed into streams. What the fire doesn't kill outright dies as the pH of the groundwater, rivers, and lakes are pushed out of the environmental range and the watercourses fill with mud and burned debris. Oh, and all those houses? They were made of countless fabricated materials that when burned create and release a litany of the worst chemicals man or nature ever created. And all for what? Economics still rules. Most of those homes will be rebuilt, and that far sooner than the land will renew itself. So count a few more trees killed in the deal. And how about those wacky landgrabs? For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the policy of the Federal government was to promote growth. Throughout the West, Federally inspired dams, canals, and similar constructions have encouraged people to make their homes and stake their fortunes on the resources that these projects provided. Today, in instance after instance, these investments are destroyed with the stroke of a pen to pursue the dubious goal of protecting one obscure or insignificant "species" or another. Often these "species" are species that are so similar to so many others that their individual survival means nothing. Look at the situation in the Klamath Basin. In a region replete with set-asides, the extreme interpretations of the ESA have left hundreds of people in economic limbo. Gutting the resource base of the region will not protect the fish; the people won't just vanish, and even if they did, their long-term impact would remain. And so would the demand for the agricultural products that they produce. A message to the NIMBY environmentalist: Inevitably, shifts in production will occur that will simply put more pressure on the environment in other locations. And with equal inevitability, some of that production will be shifted to foreign Nations where land protections are less and restrictions on the use of really dangerous agricultural chemicals still uncommon and/or unenforced. So the American market will be importing more produced to a standard we no longer tolerate at home. And to do so, "we" will use just that much more fuel. When you eat food grown halfway around the world, you eat with Osama…. Are you just worried about your own backyard, or are you a real environmentalist? Then there's the drill for oil over my dead body environmentalist… Driving the SUV… Conservation is my middle name; my car gets 40 miles per gallon; I personally consider using more fuel than necessary unethical. But the real world is full of people who disagree, and they create a huge demand, much of which is currently supplied by imports from Nations whose policies are again far from ideal. Our needs are a principle driver of a foreign policy that has cost us trillions of dollars in military and related expenses over the years, embroiled us in wars, and earned us enough hatred in some quarters that today our security in our own Nation is threatened, in many senses a first. Paying the freight on that fuel represents a hidden "gas tax" some calculate to be almost a doubling of the pump price. And there is no way to quantify the larger human cost. For what? Not for any valid scientific reason. We have the technology, for example, drill in ANWAR without leaving so much as a misplaced footprint. We have the technology, for example, to extract coal gas in the intermountain States to provide natural gas, the cleanest of fuels. Oh, and that coal gas? To the "nature is perfect" environmentalist: That gas inevitably escapes into the atmosphere as volcanism, tectonic shifts, and erosion gives it avenues. That gas is mostly methane, which is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. There will be less global warming created by its combustion than its escape, and combustion recycles it into the carbon cycle instead of bleeding off into space and with it the carbon of life. So what do you prefer? Our economy runs on energy. We can either buy it from despots who hate us - and who aren't nearly as "green" as we are - while being held hostage to foreign entanglements we either cannot control or must spend hugely to affect. Or we can employ the best technology man has developed to extract in the most environmentally sensitive fashion possible our own resources. So consider it well, you lawsuit wielding fools. The fact is, the environmental "war" has long since been won. All that remains are symbolic "gains" that whose costs are so disproportional to their benefits and accomplish nothing and that materially stifles creativity and efficiency America needs to continue responsible stewardship. Public outrage over extreme practices rapidly approaches a flood that may well destroy laws and precedents that served us well for years. The only hope for their survival is restraint of the wielders.

----------------------------------------------------------- Dan Brown is a Materials Management Chemist, a graduate of the Evergreen State College, and of the University of Adversity.