THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, April 7, 1995 TAG: 9504060189
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Beth Barber
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
The ``Green Breakfast,'' it's called, this interesting, provoca-tive gathering the first Saturday of 'most every month over which Councilman Robert Dean presides. Among last Saturday's topics was the ``takings'' legislation now wending through Congress. Basically, it says that if government regulations deprive a landowner of considerable economic use of his property, government must pay him for the loss.
Proponents say that idea's time came when the founding fathers wrote the Bill of Rights, specifically the Fifth Amendment.
Opponents say that idea's time went when landowners began to threaten the very existence of animals and plants thought to be crucial to the ecosystem. The takings legislation in the Republican Congress, they say, intends to abolish federal wetlands regulation.
It makes the process too complicated. It lets anybody petition to rewrite old laws that don't meet the new criteria. It requires benefits too hard to quantify to out-weigh costs. It jeopardizes sound science by letting industry scientists on peer-review panels. It invites lawsuits by anybody injured by environmental regulations.
And all to please greedy business types who can buy the scientists who suit their bottom line and don't give a hoot about Joe Public, his kids or their lungs, much less their future.
That argument played right well with most of the Green gathering. But I began to wonder if this gathering is ``Green'' partly from bile. There are several eight-letter words for such a jaundiced view. Claptrap is one.
The ``takings'' legislation has its flaws, among them fighting existing red tape with even more red tape just to clog rather than remedy the excesses. But private-property rights, their protection from federales and fads and zealots, and cost-benefit analysis aren't whims of bird-haters and Newties. They're basic to what most of us consider the American way. Debating them is one thing. Deriding, dismissing, disdaining them is another.
It's also the kind of preaching that's unpersuasive outside the choir.
It unnecessarily and inaccurately demonizes businesses that not only have found solutions to environmental ills but are key to future solutions. It smears scientists solely by the size of and signature on their paychecks. Zeal for a cause has skewed science, too.
It divides the world, in short, into good guys, who exalt the claim to the environment of the red-cockaded woodpecker, and bad guys, who want other priorities like food, shelter, clothing and jobs for humankind in the policy-making mix.
As one lone voice at the Green Breakfast noted, the Great American Middle Class isn't just a financial grouping. It's also a mind-set that seeks middle grounds, that has real trouble with either/or's: Either clean air or cars. Either wetlands or houses. Either environmentalists or . . . what?
The very co-opting of that word by organized groups sets up their with-us-or-against-us, right-vs.-wrong attitude. They are as much a special interest as the National Association of Manufacturing or the American Petroleum Institute. And they broadcast just as many half-truths.
They bemoan lawsuits by any old body against environmental regs - but want Governor Allen to back off his opposition to letting any old body sue on behalf of environmental regs.
They ask, Can you put a price on a child's ability to breathe clean air? No. But can you decide that spending those next billions to make air that's 98% clean 1% cleaner won't make enough of a difference in a child's breathing to justify the expense? You can.
And while they insist that the benefits of environmental regulation are priceless, they also insist on quantifying the benefits - the ``givings'' - in any award of ``takings.'' Shall we bring that diminution of what governments owe when they ``take'' property rights home to the Agriculture Reserve Program? by CNB