"A conservative speaks..."

I found this excerpt particularly though-provoking. It certainly reminded me to look beyond the simplistic political divisions. Hope you enjoy it as well...

Excerpts from G.K. Durnil, "A Conservative Speaks", Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly #424, January 12, 1995.
... excerpts from a previously-unreported speech by Gordon K. Durnil, former U.S. Chairman of the International Joint Commission (IJC)...

... Let's wrap up this discussion with some practical reasons why conservatives should be interested in and leaders for environmental protection; interested in what we are doing to ourselves and to our childre with some of the chemicals we use and the processes we employ. I start with the presumption that all reasonable people prefer clean air and clean water; that such people are opposed to unknowing exposures to various poisons to our children, our families and our friends. So where do we start? The best way, the least expensive way, the conservative way and the least painful way to accomplish the goal of protection from the most onerous pollutants is prevention. Just don't do it in the first place. Governments, jointly and singularly, will never have sufficient funds to continue cleaning up all those onerous substances lying on the bottom of lakes or working their way through the ground. So for economic reasons and for health reasons, prevention is a conservative solution. Let's not continue to put in what we now are paying to clean up.

Conservatives want lower taxes. Conservatives want smaller governments, with less regulations and fewer regulators. Pollution prevention, instead of all the high-cost bureaucratic mandates and regulatory harassment at the tail end of the pollution trail, can achieve those conservative purposes. If you don't make an onerous substance in the first place, you won't later need to regulate it; you won't need regulators or the increased taxes and fees to pay their expenses. If you don't discharge it, you don't need to buy a government permit with all the attendant red tape and bureaucratic nonsense to which businesses are now subjected. Pollution prevention corrects not just the physical health of our society, it promotes economic health.

Conservatives believe in individual rights. We believe in the right to own private property, and to use it as we see fit. Private dry lands should not be deemed to be wet by a remote government. Such actions violate our basic constitutional rights. But is not the insidious invation of our bodies by harmful unsolicited chemicals the most flagrant violation of our individual rights?

We conservatives bemoan the decline in values that has besieged our present day society. We abhor government and media assaults on our constitutional right to freely practice our religion in today's value neutral, politically correct society. Why then should we not abhor the lack of morality involved in discharging untested chemicals into the air, ground and water to alter and harm, to whatever degree, human life and wildlife?

We conservatives preach out against the decline in learning in our schools; the increased incidence of juvenile crime; we worry about abnormal sexual practices and preferences. Should there be evidence (as there is) that some of those things are being caused by chemicals, environment, should we not add them to our litany of concerns?

We preach self-reliance, but can we be that if unbeknown to us mysterious chemicals are affecting our ability to be reliant upon ourselves?

We conservatives believe it unconscionable that government programs such as welfare are tearing at the fabric of the family. We are upset with the growing incidence of birth ouf ot wedlock, of single parent families; with children bearing children. Why then are we not so concerned with the cause, and the increased incidence, of childhood cancers? Why not visit the local children's hospital and visit with those brave youngsters with inffective immune systems trying to fight off the devastating evils of cancer? Observe the parental pain. See how that circumstance tears at the family. Why not add childhood cancer to our concerns about the family; asking why the emphasis is still on how to cure it, instead of on how to prevent it?

... The symmetry of nature is loaned to us for human use over relatively short periods of time; seventy or eighty years, if we are fortunate. Each of us has a moral duty to not disrupt that balance. For centuries humans met that moral duty, but over the past one half century we have become just too urbane to worry about such mundane things. We have unknowingly done with chemicals what we would never have intentionally done had we pursued the moral basis of the conservative philosophy I described earlier.

Daily we are being exposed to more and more informaiton about the need for environmental stewardship; about the need to exercize precaution before putting harmful chemicals into the environment... we are unintentionally putting our children and our grandchildren in harms way. And I have concluded that we need a basic change of direction.