Beware the watershed group

By William Jud

By creating the Big River Watershed Group last month, the people of St. Francois County who live in Big River's watershed have presented themselves as living proof of their claim that environmental lead in mining waste damages neural function and causes extreme stupidity.

The group adds another layer of sticky and expensive bureaucracy to life's problems. There will be little accomplished that actually benefits Big River watershed residents.

Nongovernmental organizations such as the watershed group are the natural habitat of utopist busybodies whose lifework is forcing their extreme positions on the rest of us. Environmental NGOs attract weirdoes, communists, socialists, anarchists, radicals, Luddites and extremists the way rotting meat attracts vermin. The anti-social types find a home base from which their NGO can employ predatory lawyers and corruptible legislators to carry out their agenda of national destruction.

Watershed group officials elected last month are no doubt decent and honorable people who want to make the environment a better place for all of us. Their terms in office will eventually expire. In their place, more radical and extremist people will take over the organization. Three or four elections down the line, the watershed group is likely to be ultraradical and dedicated to sucking up government grants for serving far-left special-interests rather than serving people living in the watershed.

President Richard Nixon's greatest mistake was not Watergate. It was his signing of the unconstitutional and now expired Endangered Species Act, which placed species recovery at higher priority than all other government functions, including national defense.

The Endangered Species Act will be used by the future watershed group to stop mining, industry, farming and even homeownership, and to separate people in Big River watershed from their land and water in the name of saving some obscure life form. A species becomes endangered by definition and only needs to be so designated to become official. If a suitable endangered plant or animal is not available in an area that greenie radicals want to snatch away from landowners, then an endangered plant or animal can be secretly imported and released or planted, as was allegedly done with the Meadowfoam plant in California in an attempt to stop a housing development.

Creation of the watershed group is a classic example of the nitroglycerin problem: the failure to look ahead to the likely future results of present action.

Nitroglycerin is easy to make. You could make a gallon of nitroglycerin on a tabletop in your basement. Congratulations. Your project succeeded.

Now what? You mean you did not think ahead? You do not have a plan to remove and safely dispose of the gallon of nitroglycerin that is in your basement? You just now realize that a gallon of nitroglycerin can explode and turn your house and your neighbors' homes into toothpicks?

The people of St. Francois County have allowed a nitroglycerin problem to develop in their midst. Now that they have a watershed group they will have to live with the consequences. Fifty years from now their grandchildren will ask, "Why did you let this happen when you could have stopped the problem before it began? Why did you let them take away our land and livelihood?"

They could tell their grandchildren that their extreme stupidity and failure to plan ahead may have been caused by lead in the environment.

William Jud resides in Fredericktown, Mo.