Leaving aside your occasional nomadic herdsman, few folks who make their living from the land -- and who will thus suffer for years the economic consequences of any lasting environmental damage -- "despoil" the earth for no reason. The notion that private resident landowners would willingly turn their portion of the planet into scarred rubble -- thus bankrupting their own posterity -- is counterintuitive, to say the least.
In fact, while absentee decision-making by huge corporations granted artificial government monopolies or (worst of all) arbitrary schemes hatched by the distant government bureaucrats themselves, can indeed lead to ecological disaster (see: the Soviet Union), it is often he private owner, living on the land, who turns out to be the (start ital)best(end ital) environmental steward. Just ask anyone who's ever watched wild game watering safely at a trough or spring maintained by a private rancher.
You know, the kind who the environmentalists tell us is "subsidized" -- because he pays the government "too little" every month to use land to which the government holds no title.
Yet it increasingly appears nothing will please the typical urban environmentalists but an outrigh ban on human beings setting foot on vast tracts of the earth's surface, which the eco-extremist characterize (sight unseen) as "sacred wilderness."
Mind you, folks have every right to believe such stuff. They're also free to buy and fence off as much "wilderness" as they can personally afford. It is only government which is banned from enforcing such doctrines by law, under that clause of the First Amendment which prohibits any government "establishment of religion," a new (or perhaps very old) religion being precisely what green extremism more and more resembles.
Enter now our old friends at the Sierra Club, who in January filed a lawsuit against the Tourism Authority of the state of Hawaii, seeking to halt that agency's plan to issue a $114 million marketing contract. The Sierra Club argues that under federal law no expenditures intended to attract additional tourists and "alien species" should be allowed, until a detailed analysis of the likely "environmental impact" of such plans is conducted.
("Alien species"? And here Nevaans thought Area 51 was the only attraction likely to draw tourists of that ilk.)
Needless to say, merely conducting such studies would consume a good part of Hawaii's $114 million. Whereupon, the conclusion of any such study is almost guaranteed to provide ripe ground for further litigation -- for who would contend that tourists in Hawaii don't "contribute to environmental degradation" by subsidizing fleets of tour boats and helicopters, breaking small branches along the hiking trails, frightening the amorous dolphins, and so on?
What such studies rarely address is the question of what would happen to the pristine vistas and blue waters now preserved as "tourist attractions" should the tourists and their credit cards stop coming, and the populace find it necessary to turn to other sources of income -- fish packing plants, perhaps, or oil refineries, or guano mines, or subsistence pig farming. Ever seen what a herd of free-roaming pigs can do to a couple acres of rainforest? Shall we discuss the "ecological diversity" of land cleared for your typical corporate pineapple plantation?
At any rate, other states have been quick to realize the kind of expense and trouble they could face should this Hawaiian suit set a national precedent. A broad application of this law could curtail public access to such public lands as Lake Mead, the Red Rock Canyon, and Death Valley, explains Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt, who also serves as chair of Nevada's Tourism Commission.
Thus, in company with the Western States Tourism Policy Council, the Nevada Commission in Tourism sought to file an amicus brief, joining this legal action on the side of the state of Hawaii.
But unfortunately, the justices of Hawaii's state Supreme Court last week disallowed those amicus briefs, leaving other tourism-dependent states with no direct say in the case.
That's a shame. No one favors environmental devastation. But the irony here is that tourism is one of the (start ital)least(end ital) ecologically destructive ways the inhabitants of the earth's most beautiful regions can make a living.
If the Sierra Club and others in the growing environmental "industry" wish to run educational programs, discouraging littering and the senseless destruction of nesting birds, well and good. But if they now seek to stretch federal environmental laws far beyond their intended purpose, actively seeking to destroy the jobs of those who make their living from tourism, then Nevadans and lots of other Americans who still live on o near the land should be seeing red ... not green.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at $24.95 postpaid by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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