Two
of the studies Salazar rejected came from the National Academy of Sciences before
he decreed the oyster farm – and the jobs it generates – had to go. The same set-up occurred in our own region a
couple of years ago when Pacific Gas and Electric – with the complicity the
Federal Emergency Management Agency – rejected consecutive impact studies
showing the Kilarc reservoir had no impact on salmon populations and actually
promotes ecological diversity. PG &
E and FEMA said – predictably – the reservoir and the dams supporting it have
to go because – you guessed it – they damage the salmon. Locals have fought the big brothers to a
standstill so far but the issue is still being contested by PG & E. When politically correct environmental
decisions are issued they are often matters of faith, not science. They are also matters of political advantage
and – perhaps – greased palms.
The
environmental movement did not begin this way.
As recently as the 1960s Lake Erie was considered biologically dead and
the Cuyahoga River in Ohio once infamously caught fire because of the
industrial pollutants in their waters. I
personally witnessed the suds of pollution in the Housatonic River of
Massachusetts and the Penobscot River of Maine when I traveled to the region in
1972. It was absolutely necessary and
proper to address these issues aggressively, and the nation committed itself to
do just that in the last third of the twentieth century. But, like everything else, the pendulum swung
back – and back – until the unbalanced and rampant corruption of power had its
day on the other side. The environmental
movement today is a jack-booted thug dedicated to stifling enterprise and
progress – and it often features a secretive agenda that is the sole source of
logic in otherwise incomprehensible decisions like the two I mention above.
These
aberrations range from the pathetically comic to the downright diabolical. In San Diego’s La Jolla Cove the Children’s
Pool was built in 1909 through a gift from Ellen Browning Scripps. When harbor seals invaded the spot some
eighty years later the city banned humans from using it in an explosion of twisted
reasoning that was eventually overturned in court. Much more sinister is the cap and trade scam
in which companies are pressured by government to purchase ethereal “carbon
emission credits” which are nothing more than government permission to emit more
pollution than the law otherwise allows.
The scam is that government and companies purchasing these credits pretend
pollution quotas are somehow addressed, but the only things changing hands are
the dollars buying the credits. In
California the government even skims these funds and calls them loans.
It gets cruelly
evil when we think of the Keystone Pipeline, a project rejected by President
Obama at a cost of between twenty and one hundred thousand jobs. Now we can buy Canadian oil and have it shipped
on tankers that can spill instead of through a pipeline that cannot.
The
application of real science is the goal, but to get there requires a radical change
of perspective. First we need to recall
that we are not accountable to the planet, but to its Owner. It’s a variant of Jesus’ “Render to Ceasar
what is his and to God what is His.”
Second we need to re-discover that – while fouling our own nest does no
one good – developing it for our prosperity is the meaning of the Biblical
mandate to “be fruitful and multiply.”
We are obligated
to care for our world. But inhibiting
the abundant life for which God came in human flesh pollutes the very being of
the earth more than carbon emissions can pollute its atmosphere. Finally we
need to resurrect reality that our world exists to facilitate our abundant
life. Changing that perspective is
called repentance by Christians.
James A. Wilson is the author of Living
As Ambassadors of Relationships and The
Holy Spirit and the End Times – available at local bookstores or by
e-mailing him at
praynorthstate@charter.net
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