Environmental root of war
I am backing our country’s preparation for war against Saddam Hussein based on some cold, hard facts of economic life. Like our global oil dependency or not, oil remains vital to our way of life. Prosperity is the direct result of oil and oil products are the life’s blood of our internal combustion engines and oil-fired power plants. More important is oil’s role as a substitute for coal in power generation plants. I have always enjoyed hiking the high ridge tops of Fayette County. On my many walks over the decades, I have seen the truth of what has been documented by Penn State’s School of Forest Resources where they have been monitoring acidic precipitation deposits in Southwest Pennsylvania since 1979. In 1984, the Laurel Hill area of Cambria, Fayette, Somerset and Westmoreland counties had the highest deposition rate in North America – roughly 110 pounds of acid-forming sulfates and nitrates per acre.
Most precipitation today is 20 times more acidic than normal rainwater which adds about 43 pounds of this poisonous solution to our forest soils per acre, per year. In 10 years, 430 pounds of acids pollute every acre in the Laurel Highlands. What do you think this means to our nation’s long-term prosperity?
Vigilance of our nation’s soil must be our country’s first priority. We need clean air, clean water and healthy farms and forestlands. Without this blessing of abundant forest products and abundant crop production, our nation would not enjoy any hope at all. Take away our forest blankets which slow down run-off and help to control soil erosion which would pollute our waterways, and America the Beautiful will become like Japan, Korea, China and many other nations who have stripped their mountains of sizable timber, leaving the lowlands vulnerable to devastating flooding.
And what do you suppose is pumping most of these sulfur and nitrous oxide gases into the local atmosphere? Coal-burning power plants from as far away as Illinois, Indiana and from nearby Ohio, West Virginia and western Pennsylvania.
This acid rain leaches calcium and magnesium from our soils, depleting a forest’s reserves of these essential chemicals, which are the building blocks of cellulose (wood fibers). Since calcium is a basic building block of plants (any local mountain farmer will tell you that mountain soils are naturally low in these important plant building minerals in the first place) we will be unable to replace forest growth.
Already, Penn State forester hydrologist Bill Sharpe, who studies acid rain’s impacts, is warning of a gradual increase in the death of our nation’s forests. The changes are subtle, like the emigration of Al-Quida terror cells into our cities, but definitely the changes to America and its “way of life” have and will continue to be impacted.
We must keep the oil flowing in order to minimize coal-burning power plants and thus help to slow down what would otherwise be a more rapid destruction of our forests and, over time, our ability to feed everyone in America.
This call for vigilance is no less important on behalf of some dumb old red oak stand as on behalf of a few maniacal fundamentalist suicide murderers living under the rocks in our cities. Vigilance is needed in order to keep the pipelines flowing full of oil, or we will destroy more forests, produce greater erosion and flooding in our lowlands and make our forests vulnerable to insect and fungus attacks.
Onward to Iraq and its oil fields. We have seen the real enemy of peace in the world, and the enemy is us.
James K. Lilley
Markleysburg