LETTERS: WHAT HAPPENED TO `WASTE NOT, WANT NOT'?

To the editor:

I have recently read to articles on the recycling issue and find myself searching in vain for one point of importance missing in both: the lost value of "waste not, want not."

What I have read seems more concerned with the cost of recycling and the inconvenience of coming up with a reasonable way of doing it. Environmentalists have pushed for laws to regulate the situation, but while saving our wetlands they have created unreasonable demands on our farmers and landowners.

Critics of all environmental efforts do little for the situation. They see any regulation as an imposition on their freedom. But the same could be said of any law, if you apply that way of thinking.

As a child, part of my raising included using everything as many times as was possible before throwing it away. We were an average-income family at times with income lows, and whatever we had we utilized to its fullest. We threw things away and had trash picked up each week, but my mother was not about to throw away a jar or bag or piece of foil that could be reused.

I'm talking about values that have somehow dissipated from American life in recent years. Our trash piles are indicative of our laziness and our lack of gratitude for the gifts bestowed on us by a very generous creator.

It seems that wastefulness has become an acceptable style of living with all kinds of excuses to back it up. Sad, isn't it, that someday we may not see the forest for the trash?

CARNE LITTLE

Cape Girardeau