This August, I decided to visit our natural majestic heritage. While Europeans claim that the United States is without culture in comparison to their 1,000-year-old structures, I happily respond with pride and point to some of our million-year-old natural monuments that can be seen to the west of Denver. I am talking about the places that have defined us as a nation from Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon. Generations of Americans have made their livelihood and survival dependent on our natural surroundings.
Sadly the latest generation can only look upon a shadow of our heritage as our virgin forests have vanished. Today, fragments of original forests remain in our natural parks. However, now even these are endangered as our public lands are opened up to clear cutting, mining and drilling. At the present time, of the 16 million acres of public lands in Colorado, only 600,000 acres are protected from these activities.
With this reality, I decided to spend two weeks last summer traveling to the places in the United States, where our natural beauty has inspired millions: Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Grand Tetons, and Zion National Park. They are places where natural form and pattern tower over human creations. These places cannot be quantified when measuring their value to our society.
However, some people with less imagination and vision have found value in our landscape by mining, drilling, and ravaging it for shortsighted use. Instead of the promotion of renewable energy, eco-tourism, and sustainable agriculture to spare these precious places, these individuals would drill just outside Arches National Park, whose namesake feature adorns Utah’s license plates. Their activity would cause future accurate representations of Arches to have to include oil and natural gas wells. The present state of affairs can be simply summed up as the thoughtlessness of greed and self-interest, which is now deciding the fate of these precious locations.
These attitudes and policies have been accelerated under the Bush Administration in conjunction with its reactionary allies in Congress who have pursued destructive environmental directives, which advance the few at the expense of the many. The Administration with hubris and ignorance has put its faith in laissez-faire economics as the solution to our woes when an unrestrained free market of excesses contains the worst of human nature. Combined with innovation, human nature has unleashed a Pandora’s Box of problems.
While we have made progress with regulating the excesses of the free market, the nuclear age has left us today with 52,000 tons of nuclear waste, while the use of Perchloroethlylene (PERC) in dry cleaning that causes kidney and liver damage has begun to appear in our water sources, which demonstrates the results of complacency in researching and regulating dangerous substances.
Unless we take action now, and continue to do so, business as usual will create phantom menaces of looming environmental problems, which even the strongest skeptic will not be able to cloak.
Reckless technological innovation will not only destroy our Natural Heritage that inspires awe in us; our natural heritage sustains the ecosystems we all depend on. By destroying our special places not only are we stealing from the future, we are destroying what makes America special.
