LETTERS: VOTE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL CONSCIENCE

To the editor:

While Mike Haydn was the Republican governor of Kansas, he served as chairman of the Republican Governors Association. Haydn now serves as chair of the board of directors of the League of Conservation Voters, a bipartisan organization that works to educate citizens about the environmental sensitivity of members of Congress.

The LCV evaluates our representatives and senators on the basis of a series of key votes conducted in each chamber and measures their environmental sensitivity in terms of the percentage of pro-environment and pro-health positions that they adopted on these key issues during the course of the congressional two-year term.

The LCV has recently released its evaluations for the 105th Congress, just ended in Washington. It is educational to see how our representatives have fared in this evaluation:Among members of the House of Representatives, the average score is 47 percent. For the Midwest, this figure dips to 40 percent. Then for Missouri's delegation, the average score slips depressingly to 37 percent. Finally, in Missouri's 8th Congressional District, Congresswoman Emerson scored a shabby 3 percent.

In the Senate, meanwhile, the national average is 45 percent. The mid-western score is slightly higher at 49 percent. The Missouri delegation of Senators Bond and Ashcroft, however, managed an appalling 4 percent. In this average, Ashcroft scored zero and Bond managed only 7 percent.

This assessment reveals that we in Southeast Missouri can boast a suite of federal representatives who bring up the rear when it comes to environmental sensitivity. Clearly, for these representatives, environmental issues are a low or nonexistent priority. I am not convinced that the attitudes that these folks take to Washington accurately reflect the attitudes of their constituency.

Is it not time that we voters in Southeast Missouri sent a message to those who would represent us that environmental issues are important here, and that our representatives ignore such issues at their peril? The best way to send such a message is to vote overwhelmingly against the records of our current representatives.

ALAN JOURNET

Cape Girardeau