LETTERS: NATURAL RESOURCES ARE TO BE USED

To the editor:

Thanks to the idiocy of the environmental industry during the past 30 years, immense areas in which exploration and new mining of minerals may occur are now called wilderness, critical habitat, old growth, biosphere reserve, wetland or park and are closed to productive use. The Sierra Club and its environmental-industry fellow travelers would like to designate everywhere as a crown jewel of one sort or another, including Doe Run mining company's proposed lead-prospecting area in Southeast Missouri, saving the entire planet from the use, enjoyment and nourishment of humanity.

There is no virgin forest in the mineral-prospecting area. It is all second- and third-growth timber. Today's abundance of flora and fauna is the result of man's modification of the land from the original green desert -- a closed-canopy forest so lacking in animal life that early Missouri surveyors had to pack in food because hunting could not provide sustenance -- to modern openings in the forest resulting from logging, mining, farming and ranching, which provide mixed habitat and food for both wildlife and people.

Let's drop the emotional babble and make our choices. Children are messy and destructive. Should we do away with children and choose to let the human race die off? Timber harvesting leaves stumps. Should we stop building homes and printing newspapers so trees can grow old, rot and choke out wildlife? Mining disturbs its surroundings. Shall we end production and use of lead and absorb our daily dose of X-rays from every television set and computer monitor we watch? Trees can be replanted. Mined land can be reclaimed. How many people can list 10 uses for lead and now what they must do without if lead production is halted?

It has proven immensely profitable to the environmental industry to scold people from earlier times who let their industrial trash lie about. Times are different now, and so are our ways of doing business. Will people 100 years from now look back on our actions today and scold, "If only they had not allowed environmentalists and world-government fanatics to destroy our livelihood, our social structure and our representative government in the name of saving the earth, we would not be in this wretched condition today."

Let's not give our distant grandchildren reason to scold us. The earth is here for us to use, to manage and to care for, not to lock away or worship. Responsible mining is part of it.

WILLIAM F. JUD

Fredericktown