Environmentalists Unpaving The Way For The Future

Who are those damned environmentalists, anyway?

Are they the long-hairs who chain themselves to logging trucks, or the little girls who catch spiders in the house and release them outside?

Suckers and carp can live in polluted waters. Cutthroat trout cannot.

Anglers who don’t want to make that choice are environmentalists.

Farmers say environmentalists are creating a nightmare of regulations.

Environmentalists say regulations wouldn’t be necessary if every farmer was environmentally sensitive to the application of pesticides, the draining of wetlands and the burning of fields.

The farmers are right. So are the environmentalists, whoever they are.

The environmentalist’s sin is to suggest alternatives to trashing trout streams with cattle or building corrals on sage grouse mating grounds.

A reader recently called and left a message telling me to quit saying the sky is falling.

Why?

Even an ostrich eventually has to pull its head out of the sand to eat.

Environmentalists don’t make life easy. But they make great ancestors.

Who’s legacy do you admire most:

Those who raped the Silver Valley, ran with the riches and left their children with one of the nation’s most polluted drainages?

Or those who worked to preserve the Little Spokane River as a natural area?

Life without environmentalists would be more profitable for industries. Building pickups would be easier without all those confounding pollution control devices. Making lead shot for shotgun shells would be cheaper than studying alternatives.

Without environmentalists, developers could have a heyday gobbling up wildlife habitat and laying more pavement to rush stormwater into streams.

How bad could it get? The 100-year floods are occurring roughly every five years in overdeveloped Puget Sound drainages.

Salmon and steelhead runs are nearly gone.

Are you sure the sky isn’t falling, sir?

Spike a tree with nails and you become a far-left-wing eco-terrorist. Demand clean air for your baby to breath and you’re an environmentalist.

It’s not such a bad word, environmentalist. Sort of middle-of-the-road, actually.

Environmentalists have been getting the rap for closing some forest roads to protect endangered grizzly bears.

Educated hunters know that road closures are their best hedges against habitat destruction. Studies in Idaho, Montana and Washington have proved that the proliferation of roads in our national forests is the bane not only to grizzlies, but also to bull elk.

Closing some forest roads to reduce easy access by motor vehicles is one way to reduce poaching and hunting pressure and restore trophy bulls.

The other option is to close the hunting seasons.

I know a sportsman who has shunned any interest or activism in environmental issues, even though he loves to hunt and fish. But when a developer proposed straightening a portion of his favorite trout stream, by golly, he was poring through those nasty environmental regulations with a magnifying glass.

Some environmentalists work to battle global threats to the environment. Curbing the explosion in human populations is at the top of their list.

Others don’t realize they’re environmentalists until bulldozers show up in their backyard.

Edwin Davis, the area’s often published anti-natural resources propagandist, gave us a sneak preview into the far-right-wing’s environmental terrorism tactics for the November elections. In a recent letter to the editor, Davis dubbed a local candidate an “eco-twinkie” for taking a stand for growth management.

The plot, ala Limbaugh, is to shrug off the merits of a politician’s platform and simply apply a nasty label, such as “environmentalist.”

But at some point the public has to cut the baloney and ask the most pressing question:

If you’re not an environmentalist, what are you?

Only a fool wouldn’t know the answer.

You can contact Rich Landers by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5508.

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