Pathological is the only word capable of describing the burning hatred expressed by some for any attempt to protect, preserve or promote conservation of the environment and wildlife.
Deposed House Majority Leader Tom DeLay condemns the Environmental Protection Agency as the "Gestapo" and wants the agency abolished. Then there's Congressman Charles Pombo of California, who is unflagging in his efforts to sabotage the Endangered Species Act.
Pombo is the Republican chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. If he has his way, the ESA would be emasculated, and protections for a variety of species would be removed. Extractive industries would get the green light for oil drilling, lumbering, mining, and real estate development with little thought for the land where endangered species might live. The idea of finding ways to conserve and protect resources and provide sensibly for humankind's needs would be lost.
The mentality that would squander species demonstrates a lack of conscience and a profound ignorance of history.
Dozens of nations, especially in Africa, have wantonly killed off wildlife and stripped the land of forests with stupefying avarice to fulfill immediate wants. They've turned large tracts of their homelands into desert wastelands and left their inhabitants helpless to deal with famine that takes thousands of lives.
Rep. Pombo, and others of the same mind, is showing the same disdain for irreplaceable resources. In Pombo's case, he's driven by political ambitions to serve masters of his public career, the industries that support him. Tomorrow's fate of the environment is not an urgent consideration on his agenda. Nor do industries that want to abandon protection of endangered species have much on their minds except improving profits quickly.
Americans today are living in a frightening era. The nation's leaders have spent an enormous surplus and now offer IOUs for hundreds of billions of dollars in new debt, promissory notes mostly in the hands of foreigners.
This recklessness is too much even for President Bush's political allies, who've revolted and said enough is enough.
And so, too, abuse of the environment is too much for the National Association of Evangelicals, now willing to throw its weight behind efforts to reverse global warming caused by pollution.
Richard Cizik, the association's vice president, cites the Bible's Genesis 2:15 as grounds for the new pro-environmental effort: "And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it."
Perhaps a coalition of evangelicals and the Sierra Club could slow Pombo's push for extinction.
