Agriculture Secretary Anthony Vilsack visited the NorthState to let farmers and ranchers know he is determined to restore their interests. He might want to let Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in on the secret. Salazar has cancelled the lease on an eighty-year-old oyster farm in the north bay area because he claims the farm negatively impacts harbor seals – who are apparently more deserving of honor than human families trying to make a living. The irony here, by the way, is that no fewer than four studies indicated the farm has no impact on the seals whatever. Salazar was simply catering to politically correct environmentalists of the type who prevailed on President Obama to cancel the Keystone Pipeline after builders satisfied every environmental concern anyone could think of. There – and here – the politically correct fix was in.
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
