LETTERS: WETLANDS RAISE OTHER ISSUES TOO

To the editor:

I write in reply to the recent letter by Dr. Kathleen Conway and the comments she made about wetlands preservation as it pertains to the property for the new vocational and high schools in our city. She is a faculty member at our local university and is, therefore, accustomed in the teaching of her students to asking questions. I'd like to ask her the following questions:

1. There exists in our society a body of self-proclaimed elite individuals who regard themselves as experts on all the current supposed crises of our small planet. These include global warming, human overpopulation, environmental pollution and the rights of animals. These experts act as if they possess near-omniscience regarding animal life, which qualifies them to assign priorities as to which species should and which should not flourish upon the earth. It may be that they assign a greater priority to snail darters or to spotted owls than to humans, but such assigned destinies, they imply, are in the best interests of society at large and, therefore, should become the duty of the rest of us to accept and to implement. Does Dr. Conway consider herself such an expert?

2. Dr. Conway chides us collectively for the deforestation of "millions of acres of bottomland ... between Scott City and the Arkansas border." Is she aware that the Little River Drainage District to which she refers comprises about 540,000 acres, not millions?

3. Was she an eyewitness to the massive Little River Drainage Project in the early 1900s whereby swamps of Southeast Missouri's Bootheel were drained and cleared, thus furnishing the nation with some of the richest farmland and, in the process, also vastly reducing the risk of mosquito-borne encephalitis and of malaria which had been previously endemic to the area?

4. Would she consider it a social good that during the Great Depression an individual with a meager fourth-grade education could manage to buy a portion of that Bootheel land and subsequently utilize it to provide a living for his own family and for numerous other families whom he would employ down through the years to help him farm it? (Hint: Had she known my grandfather, she could answer yes.)

5. Is she aware that there is not actually any law which defines or regulates a so-called wetland, that government authority over wetlands derives from Section 404 of the 1972 Clean Water Act which, as written, allowed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers only to regulate "discharge of dredged or fill material into the navigable waters of the United states"?

6. Would she consider the gully on the school property navigable waters?

7. Is she aware that since the passage of the Clean Water Act of 1972 the corps (and later also the Environmental Protection Agency) has gradually expanded its jurisdiction, first via arbitrary guidelines and then by that great weapon of the regulatory arsenal, a federal manual, so as to become our environmental cops, and that by means of its wetlands policy a tiny parcel of one's privately owned land which is dry for all but one week per year may be declared "protected" and regulated (controlled by others)?

8. Can she analytically conclude that there is a practical difference between the Okefenokee Swamp and a farm field gully?

9. Is she aware, as are a number of us parents who have children in the public school system, that Cape Girardeau's high school students truly need a new building, and that it would please those who are taxed to pay for it and to have it constructed expeditiously and with minimum expense?

10. Is she aware that the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution contains more rights than just the means of dodging self-incrimination at the hands of prosecuting attorneys? (Hint: The answer pertains to the right of citizens to acquire and hold private property without intrusive interference.)

If Dr. Conway can truthfully answer no to questions 1 and 6 and yes to any other four questions, then I arbitrarily assign her a passing grade and am hopeful she may yet escape being stereotyped as an out-of-control environmentalist. She may also escape being labeled as one of those who in their fervor to save "endangered species" seem to care very little to nothing about constitutional rights, timeliness of construction projects, other people's jobs, disease prevention and common sense.

DR. JAMES L. FLETCHER

Cape Girardeau