Decrees of Illogicality and Absurdity
The largest Island directly west of Juneau, Alaska, and across Young Bay and Fritz Cove, is Funter Bay State Marine Park. The Park is the northernmost section of Admiralty Island. The island is 90 miles long and 35 miles wide at its widest point and is America’s 7th largest Island.
In the mid-70s I was charged with purchasing and dispatching mining equipment and supplies to Juneau for furtherance by helicopter to a small acreage on that Island. A camp would be set up on the island for advancing an exploration drift looking for rich deposits of silver. A “drift” is a mining term for a horizontal underground tunnel or passageway. Since the ratification of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1969, exploration could not be conducted on the surface of the island. Furthermore, the helicopter could not fly within one mile of a known eagle’s nest.
The first thing to be flown in was a crawler tractor or bulldozer for campsite clearing. The exploration contractor was provided a minimum amount of land to house the mining crew, their equipment, and facilities as well as any waste rock that would be excavated from the exploration tunnel.
Leading up to this time was the environmental revolution initiated by the1960s hippie culture. A mass social movement, it also self-assumed a cure for many environmental causes. The movement was also exhorted by the 1962 book called “Silent Spring” by marine biologist Rachel Carson. She contended that the chemical compound DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) used in fertilizers was killing birds and thinning birds’ eggs.
DDT eradicated all malaria that was prevalent in almost every state of the union from 1947 through 1951. As a result of the book, DDT was banned without much further evidence or testimony and now malaria annually kills millions worldwide, most of them children. As the late medical doctor, author, director, and filmmaker, Dr. Michael Crichton said during a 2003 speech to the San Francisco Club, “Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth-century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn”.
And that remains a very sad and distressing sentiment to this very day. Yet, the hippy environmental evolution eventually became mainstream and led to the original Earth Day in 1970, as well as many legislative actions around the world. The movement’s tentacles have spread far and wide and over the years have dispersed and expanded into more nonsensical and radical issues.
With the logical and rational issues resolved, environmentalists and environmentalism cannot just stop so they continue marching forward - the issues becoming more fanatical and extreme.
A year after NEPA had been introduced the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was ratified by committee hearings in the House and Senate. It had been proposed and then subsequently signed into law by President Richard Nixon. During these days, the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was adopted, later becoming the Environmental Impact Assessment. The EPA currently has about 15,000 employees assessing environmental action or purported inaction. As recently dealt with by the Supreme Court, the EPA was soundly castigated for creating its own environmental laws and then endeavoring to enforce them.
Today as the linked article “How environmentalists stalled progress over half century” points out, with the addition of anthropogenic climate change into the environmental assessment, and often being the primary one, nothing gets done without an absolute overabundance of red tape, bureaucratic paperwork, and a deluge of public hearings. As the article states, “Without reasonable permitting system which no longer exists, infrastructure projects crucial to U.S. energy security cannot be constructed under a timeframe that reflects the urgency for which they are needed”.
Remember when carbon dioxide, an invisible, trace atmospheric gas and an essential element for life, is considered a pollutant, how, with anti-CO2 policies being put into place, can any environmental assessment be expedited in time to make a difference? These overly arduous and demanding environmental mandates, ones that seem to get worse and worse each year, unnecessarily obstruct and impede a nation’s economic and structural needs.
Everyone understands the need for environmental protection and oversight, but in many cases now illogicality and absurdity rule the nation - and many other nations around the globe.
. . . China continues to smile.