Change land management

Paul Lindholt provided a comprehensive article (Feb. 7) explaining the abuse of our public lands. Cattle ranching, like all industries, must change or find itself foundering. The taxpayers should not be bailing them out, as we did the auto industry.

My brother, George Simchuk, was a mining engineer for over 50 years managing some of the largest mines around the world. When he took over a gold mine he would reconstruct the roads to save the streams, install health clinics and schools and provide decent housing. He retired, disillusioned with the corporate view of removing minerals at whatever cost.

He saw fracking as the ultimate destruction for a temporary product and a pipeline over our country’s largest aquifer as a disaster waiting to happen. He spent the last years of his life volunteer flying over 3,000 hours in Central America for environmental groups and governments to document corporate practices, and how indigenous people did not understand what selling their hard wood to corporations was doing to their environment and, ultimately, to the world.

We need food, we need minerals, but we must innovate and change our ways so as not to add to the destruction of our environment and ourselves.

Janice Simchuk

Spokane