TAX-SUPPORTED ELITES SWELL ENVIRONMENTAL EXTREMISM

I would sooner consent to being governed by the first 500 names in the Boston telephone directory, than by the 500 faculty members of Harvard University.

William F. Buckley Jr.

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On Friday last, we published a letter critical of a column I wrote in this space last Sunday. My column concerned the efforts of an environmentalist outfit, the Sierra Club, to exterminate every last mining job in Missouri, and many other jobs besides. The sneering, contemptuous letter we published on Friday made no attempt to refute even one of the many facts cited in my column. The letter was proudly signed by 16 individuals, whose sole mode of identification was to call themselves "we local Sierrans."

My column had decried "... elites well-paid people with time on their hands whose incomes tend to derive from tax-paid sources, such as university faculty. The miners whose jobs they eliminate typically never got close to a college or university."

Herewith, a further identification of the signers of the letter we published on Friday:

1 Alan R.P. Journet: Biology Department, Southeast Missouri State University

2 Steven N. Trautwein: Biology Department, SEMO State

3 Walt Lilly: Biology Department, SEMO State

4 Russell Kullberg: Biology Department, SEMO State

5 Michael Delgado: Biology Department, SEMO State

6 Alan Bornstein: Biology Department, SEMO State

7 C.T. Train: Biology Department, SEMO State

8 Richard Stiehl: Biology Department, SEMO State

9 Kathy Stiehl: Mathematics Department, SEMO State and wife of Richard Stiehl, of Biology Department, SEMO State

10 Henry Spratt: Biology Department, SEMO State

11 Anne Spratt: employee at local industrial firm and wife of Kenry Spratt of Biology Department, SEMO State

12 B. Ray Knox: Earth Science Department, SEMO State

13 Jack Smoot: believed to be curator, Bollinger Mill State Historical Site

14-16 Patricia Smoot McDaniel, Sylvia Taylor and Dunstan Lawrence are either currently listed as undergraduates at Southeast, or have been so listed in the most recent student directories the university publishes. Care to guess which departmental majors they have declared? (Naahhh. That'd be mere speculation.)

Contained in this list are no doubt several academicians of good and productive reputation; several are even American citizens. Professor Ray Knox achieved prominence last year when he headed up local efforts to pass the so-called "Natural Streams Act", a list of whose Cape County supporters would be roughly defined as donors to the local Sierra Club. Statewide and locally, the Sierra Club joined with a host of other extremist environmental organizations to endorse the Act. These organizations supporting the Act most emphatically did not include the Board of Trustees of the Missouri Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, among whose members I am honored to serve. A resolution to endorse the Act went nowhere fast within our Board, composed as it is, I am proud to say, of free market-oriented, conservation-minded individuals.

The Act was stoutly opposed by such responsible organs of mainstream opinion as the Missouri Department of Conservation, The Missouri Ruralist, The Missouri Farm Bureau and editorials from most Missouri newspapers. Not a single state legislator from either party who hails from south of the Missouri River (the region most affected) could be found backing the Natural Streams Act.

That proposed legislation was easily the most sweeping grant of unrestricted power over private property that any group of citizens ever proposed to grant to government in the 170 years since Missouri achieved statehood. The Act held wide leads in every public opinion poll during the runup to the 1990 election. By Election Day, however, the people had gotten a whiff of the totalitarian scent wafting around it. The cunningly named "Natural Streams Act" was crushed in every Missouri county, urban and rural; voters slam-dunked it by an astonishing 12-1 margin in Cape County, and by unheard-of margins of up to 20-1 in counties across the state.

Proposed legislation, Sierra style.

During the months before the November, 1990 election on the Natural Streams Act, this writer hosted a weekly television program "Behind the Headlines" on our local cable access channel. I was desirous of doing a program on the Natural Streams Act. Accordingly, I invited the chairman of its local support group, "local Sierran" Professor Knox (whom I had never met before then), to be my guest. He readily accepted, and I found Professor Knox to be a gentleman of earnest good will. On that program, we explored the issues and his case for the Act, and he was treated with unfailing courtesy, respect and intellectual honesty by this writer, the program host.

We're pleased to allow readers to decide for themselves who is being fair, who is being honest, and who is prepared to lay all the facts before the people, so that an informed public can make the best decisions.