People Can’t Survive If Land is Dead

Excepted from the Lexington Herald-Leader, May 3, 2004

… Nearly 40 years ago, our state government began an effort to regulate strip mining. While that effort has continued and has imposed certain requirements of reclamation, strip mining has become steadily more destructive of the land and the land’s future. We are now permitting the destruction of entire mountains and entire watersheds.

No war, so far, has done such extensive or such permanent damage. If we know that coal is an exhaustible resource, whereas the forests over it are, with proper use, inexhaustible, and that strip mining destroys the forest virtually forever, how can we permit this destruction? If we honor at all that fragile creature the topsoil, so long in the making, so miraculously made, so indispensable to all life, how can we destroy it?

If we believe, as so many of us profess to do, that the whole Earth is God’s property and is full of his glory, how can we do harm to any part of it?...If we love our country, as so many of us profess to do, how can we so desecrate it?

Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and in the name of God?

… There are such things as economic weapons of massive destruction. … But we have powerful political opponents who insist that an Earth-destroying economy is justified by profit. And so we compromise by agreeing to permit the destruction only of parts of the Earth, or to permit the Earth to be destroyed a little at a time – like the famous pig that was too valuable to eat all at once.

The logic of this sort of compromising is clear, and it is clearly fatal. If you become economically dependent on destroying parts of the Earth, then eventually you must destroy it all.