Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 17, 1995 TAG: 9503180039
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A17 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LIZA FIELD
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The torture of animals and the amount of home sledgehammered to rubble left me stunned. Were we at war? What would prompt someone to randomly wreck people's homes? And the animals who lived there - was it possible to smash them along with the furniture, and feel nothing? It seemed the ultimate enactment of what Albert Schweitzer, decades ago, called irreverence for life.
The scene came after a week of woe for the environment.
On Tuesday, Virginia's Air Pollution Control Board voted to relax the state's air-quality regulations - part of the Allen administration's ongoing campaign to slacken any pollution restraints that hamper industry. The decision will immediately bring an unwanted medical-waste incinerator to Bland County, which has no zoning ordinances with which to fight it. Similar effects of this deregulation will no doubt accumulate, particularly in this rural, unzoned part of the state.
On the national level, Rep. Charles Taylor, R-N.C., slipped a rider amendment onto the House Appropriations Recision Act. This rider, called the ``emergency'' timber-salvage program, would open nearly all public lands to clear-cutting, and force the Forest Service to clear-cut 6 billion board feet over the next two years.
Taylor, at much prompting from the timber industry, declares that aging or fallen trees (which exist in any natural forest) pose a ``danger'' to the ``health'' of that forest, and should be removed (along with the forest) by clear-cutting.
Such an action will cost taxpayers $1 billion, double the logging in our National Forests, and override the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Protection Act, among other environmental laws. Under these ``emergency'' measures, the logging would be unstoppable, exempt from citizen lawsuits and appeals.
Beyond the death of our last natural forests, what disturbs me about this and other casualties of environmental ``deregulation'' is the recklessness with which we're kicking away these basic rules for living on the earth.
In a bust-loose, fake-frontier spirit of grabbing what we like, we are indeed asserting our American ``rights'' - the right of industry to plunder nature, the rights of landowners to drain fertilizer into the river, the right of a waste incinerator to endanger the air of a rural county.
But revering - even respecting - life has little to do with our ``rights.''
Sir Edmund Hillary told the National Press Club some years ago that we could not wait for government to protect our waters, wildlife and trees. What we call a democracy, he said, has become a nation ruled by money, not right reason. The way to make instant money is by plundering nature.
I recognize his point in these recent buckings of environmental restraint. Much of the Contract With America presumes our right to make a killing (an appropriate term) off of life we did not make and never owned. It necessarily claims our right to smash things.
And, indeed, it is our right to smash them; human beings have been endowed with free will. The teens who spent a few hours demolishing what they had not created, destroying life which they did not know how to make, were in fact exercising their right to choose. No human law can curtail that right. In fact, if it were human law only that kept us from smashing houses and putting animals in the microwave, we would have ended ourselves and the world long ago.
Rather, like it or not, most human beings are tuned in to a higher law. That unspoken law makes us feel, profoundly, that life is sacred. Since we did not create the ancient forest, the sky, another person - to destroy these mysteries is to deny the existence of anything greater than ourselves. To destroy them is to prefer death to life.
Human law, through the millennia, has striven to describe this higher, innate law. The attempts have been awkward and piecemeal, yet in making them we have declared something about who we are and what we value.
Only 130 years ago did we see fit, after incredible struggle, to restrict a person's ``right'' to own another human being; and we set out this law even though it meant inconvenience to industry and loss of property ``rights.''
The sanctity of life and liberty, even then, was hardly a new concept. The ancients knew that life must not be swapped for money; it's a precept that appears in many old fables, myths and religions of the world. Take King Midas, whose avarice drove him to pray that whatever he touched be turned into gold. The gods smiled and - ka-thunk - into gold went all the low, ordinary, living things the king had scorned: plants, dirt, water, animals and finally his own dear daughter. The king died, in great wealth, of a broken heart.
Hillary saw that a government that revered money more than life would be unlikely to respect forests, creeks and whippoorwills. Life does not become gold without ceasing to be life. And in dismantling our bare environmental codes, we are declaring to the world what we value more than life.
We all have rights. As free agents, we can smoke in elevators, wreck some new houses, whack down a continent's forests. No number of regulations can stop us from doing as we please. But those regulations do say something about who we are as a nation, and portend what we will become.
As our congressmen pass Taylor's clear-cutting rider on to the Senate, and as we bemoan the latest eruption of teen violence, perhaps we should consider the homes and lives whose fate we are now deciding, and question who the real vandals are. Note: The Taylor Salvage Rider tags the House Appropriations Recision Act, and is up for vote this week in the Rules Committee and on the floor of the House. For information on a congressman's position, citizens may call 202-225-3121.
Liza Field lives in Wytheville.
by CNB