Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2011 16:14:03 -0400
From: John R Dykers
Subject: Growth and the Environment
Val Proffitt wrote a nice piece about balance for people (‘growth”) and the environment that supports us that appeared in the Chatlist today, 25 Aug 11.
Everybody’s gotta be somewhere, and the only long term protection for the environment is pregnancy prevention. Meanwhile, we all want to enjoy the comforts and amenities of civilization and the most urgent of these is clean air and water and adequate sewage and food and clothing and educaton and medical care and entertainment, be it sports or music or art or literature.
It is tricky how to afford these, and it is deceptive when we try to have someone else pay our share. When a family who may have been in Chatham County for 4,5,6 generations and scratched a living out of mixed woods and thin rocky soil and finds themselves with the opportunity to sell to a developer and enjoy a little money for the first time in their history, it is a bit disengenuous for a newcomer (like myself, only here since 1964) to deride their sale as destroying the environment that the newcomer moved here to enjoy.
At the same time, it is also hypocritical for us all to enjoy the 4 lane highways and the nice restaurants and nearby universities and amenities and complain about the traffic on the one hand and the lack of jobs and business on the other. We at least have to try to be smart about whether what we do is improving our quality of life as well as our livlihoods. It will require EVERYBODY’S cooperative input to navigate these tricky rapids as best we can together. And surely we are capable of doing that without polluting our air and creeks and wells and raping our soil and forests.
John Dykers