Watch PU for updates on our petition to the EQB!

This Land Ain’t Your Land, This Land Is My Land!

Apparently RPF’s petition to change the Exceptional Value waters regulations [Link] has gotten some folks’ attention. We received a call the other day from a reporter for a pair of national trade journals of the oil and natural gas industry, asking us (paraphrased) what we had against oil and gas drilling. She explained that the petition aimed at maintaining water quality on public lands (in this case, the Allegheny National Forest) amounted to being against oil and gas exploration. Probably the ever-vigilant industry lobbyists in Harrisburg tipped her off, because her initial statements sounded so much like the pontificates of industry on clean water--it will simply cost too much, especially for (fill in the blank with the name of the embattled industry).

We explained that while folks may have mineral rights on public lands, they don’t have the right to diminish the rights of the rest of us. There is no right to degrade water quality, but you can get permission to do so (simply by asking, usually), and on public lands the standard is supposed to be higher. An “Exceptional Value” designation doesn’t stop a discharge, just one that degrades water quality.

Folks around the ANF are making headlines these days. The Native Forest Council has issued a press release (dated May 3, 2000) taking the PA Department of Agriculture to task for making a grant to the “Allegheny Hardwood Utilization Group” (or “AHUG”). According to the press release, AHUG sponsored an essay contest and awarded a first prize to an 8th grader that wrote, using “Star Wars” as a metaphor, about some hero-logger slaying a Darth Vader-like “preservationist.” The bad guy’s efforts result in area schools receiving less money, and he also has a bunch of people duped on the issue of “forest health,” because once he is killed, they wake up from a trance (the essay is no longer on AHUG’s site). The judges were “a panel of AHUG’s Education Committee members as well as distinguished citizens.”

There is still some info on the AHUG site about the contest, like it was conducted in cooperation with a couple of elected representatives, two of whom we have mentioned before, State Sen. William Slocum, and State Rep. James Lynch. As we reported before, Rep. Lynch wants to give local people a veto power over stream designations, in effect making water quality degradation a constitutional right. Sen. Slocum is another story altogether. On May 9 he was sentenced to one month in jail, five months of home detention, and a $15,000 fine for pleading guilty in Federal court to charges stemming from him dumping sewage in a stream while employed by a town in northern PA. Wonder if he was one of the “distinguished” citizens judging the essays? 

Maybe the subject of the next essay contest should be obeying the law? In fact, Sen. Slocum, if you are so concerned about education, why don’t you appear before every 8th grade class in your district and talk about the consequences of flagrantly disobeying the law? That would probably be better public service than you could ever provide in the state Senate.

But back to AHUG. The Native Forest Council is also concerned that AHUG, partially funded with taxpayer dollars, is bringing in Mr. Ron Arnold to speak at their annual banquet this week. Mr. Arnold is affiliated with the “Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise”, and as the bio on the site says, is “[h]onored as the Father of the Wise Use Movement.” The Council attributes some pretty strong and inflammatory (and coarse, besides) language to Mr. Arnold (or is it Father Arnold?) regarding conservationists (click [here] if you want to read it; it has been slightly edited).

Perhaps while Mr. Arnold is here, he will take a trip to southwestern Pennsylvania and see the effects of longwall coal mining with which numerous private property owners have had to deal [link to past PU]. It would be interesting whose "property rights" he would defend, the rights of individuals to live in a home with running water and normal doorways and windows, or the "rights" of multinational corporations to extract every penny’s worth of coal from the earth. After all, he claims that the environmental movement was in "active denial" when it thought that the wise use movement was "a mere front for industry, created by industry, paid for by industry, controlled by industry"[ http://www.cdfe.org/wiseuse.html ]. His web site is bedecked with red, white and blue and references to the American Revolution. What could be more American than living in your home and not having to worry if the garage will stay attached? Would he be embarrassed to learn of the links between these multinational corporations and Pennsylvania groups purporting to represent poor beleaguered individual landowners? Or would he tell these homeowners that’s just the way the free enterprise system works; anyway, wasn’t the coal company kind enough to wrap a steel cable around your house and park a water tank in the driveway? You have been compensated. What are you complaining about?

We share the Council’s concern that rhetoric can be powerful. We use some pretty strong words ourselves sometime, but they are aimed at adults, and we don’t encourage violence or breaking the law. It’s especially deplorable when children are pushed out ahead to take the shots. If your concern is school funding in the face of logging cutbacks, let the adults discuss it. Or do the children sit on the school boards of northern PA and make the important decisions?

And while what you say at home in front of your children is your own business, do you want to teach them that the way to deal with adult problems is to kill with whom you disagree? Especially when the disagreement is about a public resource? Everybody’s resource.

Back to the oil and gas industry. Don’t attribute motives to us. Our being “for” clean water on public lands as provided by law is simply that. Your mineral rights? Fine--but with rights come responsibilities.

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