NATIONAL MONUMENTS

May 18, 2000 Ravalli Republic, Letter to Editor by LaVern (Bud) Richard: NATIONAL MONUMENTS.

Environmentalism Los Alamos, 260+ homes burn to the ground. As one news agency put it, "The Wild Card is Wild Fire" Not so! The wild card is spelled out in Al Gore’s book, EARTH IN THE BALANCE" "...it is the most serious threat that we have ever faced, and we must act boldly. decisively, comprehensively, and quickly, even before we know every last detail about the crisis..." This approach has resulted in a buildup of a backlog of fuel throughout the Rocky Mountains; renewable resources must be harvested or disease or fire or both will be the result and when conditions are right - and when it happens in the wrong place - humans can lose their property and sometimes their lives.
Columbine high tragedy. While this experience wrenches the heart. Apparently not enough to cause society to concentrate on the problem rather than the implement, i.e. Million Mom March and also Governor George Bush has proposed a program in Texas where he will make free trigger locks available to all the citizens of that state and says he will initiate the same program for the whole country, if elected president. Implement control is not the answer and will never stop violence. We had better get the ten commandments back into our society. "...Do unto others as you would have them do unto you..." The Golden Rule seems like a reasonable place to start. It won’t happen overnight - and it will not be perfect - but it sure beats the dilemma we are experiencing now.
Roadless-wilderness preservation. We have the means of building and maintaining roads in our national forests for the purpose of management, resource extraction, disease control, recreation, sightseeing, etc. Some people in our society presently subscribe to the idea that the environment must be protected from people rather than protected for people. This kind of thinking has resulted in the loss of whole industries here in the west, subsequently a loss of tax base producing a shortfall in tax revenue for our schools and other public purposes, the loss of high paying jobs that will sustain a family -- forcing both parents to spend more time as bread winners and less time as parents, and all of this while further eroding the industrial base of this great nation -- all in the name of environmentalism. Scary isn’t it?
Pantheism. In short, we had better stop worshiping the creation and
get back to