LETTERS: A CONSERVATIVE STANCE

To the editor:

I have recently moved back to Cape Girardeau after living elsewhere for some 15 years. I must say that I am rather amazed and disturbed by the attitude toward the natural environment which seems prevalent in this community. I would like to comment briefly on the issue of property rights.

First, I would encourage everyone to realize that most of us now live in a kind of artificial world which is completely disengaged from nature. We buy our food at grocery stores. We have no idea where most of it actually comes from. We live in homes where the temperature is controlled. We seldom, if ever, fact nature head on. Where previous generations had a direct, immediate link to the land, we have lost an conscious connection between our actions and their impact on the larger natural world. I'm suggestion that we always keep this important fact in mind.

When we speak of "owning the land," we are probably fooling ourselves in a very dangerous way. If we think that we can own the land, like a pair of shoes with which we can do anything we want and which we can wear out and discard at our will, then we have lost all contact with reality. The idea that the land owns us is probably closer to reality. All the food and goods which we consume, every single bit of it, comes, somehow, from the land. Even though we have now forgotten this, we are still intimately and organically dependent on the land.

Every day, an individual landowner says, "I need a way to get ahead in life. I can see no problem if I drain my 40 acres of marshland and build a shopping mall. In the large scheme of things, my little 40 acres is nothing." Of course, he is correct. Taken as an isolated case, any given 40 acres is insignificant. So we build another shopping mall or cultivate another 40 acres using highly toxic chemicals or make a cool $80,000 on the lumber. What's the problem? Cheap food continues to appear at the supermarket. The water still magically appears at the tap. The gasoline is still $1.15 a gallon. The kids are off to school as usual. The problem, of course, is the cumulative effect of millions of individual landowners all utilizing this same sort of thinking over an extended period of time.

The potential danger should be obvious to any reflective person. How long can this sort of attitude and behavior continue before our daily lives are directly impacted in some adverse way? Will it be in our lifetime or our children's, or our grandchildren's? Any thinking person can see that the earth is not inexhaustible and that nature will eventually regulate us. It is certain that our current exploitation of the land will stop. The only question involves which generation will make the necessary change and under what circumstances. We should realize that as landowners we have a heavy responsibility which we must no ignore. This responsibility must cut deeper than the immediate impulse for profit or blind progress.

This brings me around to the rather interesting word "conservative," which is closely related to the word "conservation." As landowners, if we are to take a truly conservative stand, we will tend to err toward preserving what is left of the natural world to the fullest extent possible. After all, it is this natural world and this natural world along which has proven adequate for supporting human life over the long term. A conservative stance would listen carefully to scientific reports concerning the effects of our actions and our lifestyles on the natural world. A conservative attitude would tend to side with the vast majority of unbiased scientists who suggest that we must change much of our current behavior, rather than believe those few reports which simply confirm or support our immediate agenda. This would be the true meaning of the word conservative. Ironically, when viewed in the larger frame of history, what is currently labeled as "conservative" may prove to be the most liberal and destructive of all possible attitudes.

I encourage all of you who seem to be so emotionally embroiled in such issues as property owners' rights and government regulations to carefully consider what I have written. At its heart, this is not a political issue. It is a moral issue of the highest order. We simply must rise to a higher level of understanding about our place in history. The emphasis on property rights must give way to a sense of responsibility to the land, to the community and to future generations. Likewise, the notion of land ownership must give way to an attitude of conservative land stewardship. When this change in attitude finally occurs, the political issues will simply fall away as irrelevant.

Finally, I would say that we ignore the fact that the land owns us at our peril. Are you ready to claim that this is an exaggeration? Are you really ready to bet your grandchildren's lives on it?

ROBERT J. POLACK JR.

Cape Girardeau