Mother Earth deserves priority

Mother Earth deserves priority

By Jim Swarzman

Crime, gun control, health care, affirmative action,
immigration. Each of these are important issues, and have received
much attention lately.

But all of these things are inconsequential compared to the
possible effects of the human race not developing and maintaining
proper stewardship of our plant Earth. And a very dangerous
movement is afoot in the Congress of the United States which
threatens to reverse many of the hard-won gains of the
environmental movement ­ and it reeks of political payoff and
American Big Business’s self-interested pursuit of short term gain
at the expense of the long term greater good.

Over the past 25 years the environmental movement has "grown up"
from a movement composed primarily of grassroots organizations to
one with a number of well-organized groups with significant
political clout. Many of these organizations are well known: the
Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, the Nature Conservancy, the
Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council,
among others. And they have played a key role in the painstaking
efforts to craft and pass legislation to protect our environment,
fighting the political muscle of Big Business all the way. More
importantly, these environmental organizations have used our court
system to force compliance with these laws, often suing U.S.
government agencies which refused to enact or enforce the laws.

But the new Republican-controlled Congress has wasted no time in
designing legislation that seeks to dismantle many of our
environmental laws and protection mechanisms. This process is being
helped along by the fact that many of the key committee’s new
chairmen are staunch anti-environmentalists whose ideological
leader would seem to be former Secretary of the Interior James
Watt.

Without going into the substantive detail of the many individual
issues, and with the acknowledgement that from a global perspective
it is imperative for international cooperation on environmental
protection, I want to share something with you. I don’t remember
where it came from, so I can’t give credit where it is due, but I
think the following passage puts the entire issue in the proper
perspective:

If the Earth were only a few feet in diameter, floating a few
feet above a field somewhere, people would come from everywhere to
marvel at it. People would walk around it, marveling at its big
pools of water, its little pools and the water flowing between the
pools. People would marvel at the bumps on it, and the holes in it,
and they would marvel at the very thin layer of gas surrounding it
and the water suspended in the gas. The people would marvel at all
the creatures walking around the surface of the ball, and at the
creatures in the water.

The people would declare it precious because it was the only
one, and they would protect it so that it would not be hurt. The
ball would be the greatest wonder known, and people would come to
behold it, to be healed, to gain knowledge, to know beauty and to
wonder how it could be. People would love it, and defend it with
their lives, because they would somehow know that their lives,
their own roundness, could be nothing without it. If the Earth were
only a few feet in diameter.

I urge each and every member of the UCLA community to take a few
minutes to call or write your congress member or senator to let
them know how you feel about this issue. Urge your friends and
family members here and in other parts of the country to do the
same.

As is true for any political issue, our representatives have to
be informed of the feelings of their constituents and of the
political ramifications of voting a certain way. And in the grand
scheme of things there is no bigger issue than protecting our
planet Earth.

Swarzman is a senior economics student.