4a
Opinion
Monday, February 5, 2001
for comments, contact Chris Borniger or Nathan Willis at 864-4924 or opinion@kansan.com
Perspective
Preservation crucial to our nation's future
Last November, I voted for Ralph Nader, mostly because I liked what he had to say about the environment. Knowing
mostly because I liked what he had to say about the environment. Knowing that neither of the two major candidates represented my views, knowing that to a greater or lesser extent, I would have to suffer through the following four years, before the election I played it cool, trying to remain as casual and disinterested as possible.
And for a while after the election, I managed to uphold this front. But then I started to pay attention to Bush's Cabinet appointments — Christie Whitman at the Environmental Protection Agency, John Ashcroft for Attorney General — and the fear lurking in the recesses of my mind gradually started to impinge my daily thoughts.
I don't know if you paid attention to
Citlnton's last days in office, but I did, and the way that he set about effecting laws to preserve our country's natural heritage scared me. Despite their rather routine, matter-of-fact presentation to the news media, these initiatives seem fraught with a deep, underlying sense of foreboding, an apprehension reflective of Clinton's rightful concern for what might happen to unprotected lands under the Bush administration.
The New York Times reported Jan.10 that Mike Dornbeck, U.S. Forest Service chief, had introduced policies to reduce by 20 percent the amount of old-growth national forest land up for public auction during the coming year, effectively setting aside vast tracts of virgin forest, making them temporarily unavailable to the timber industry.
Matthew
Reeck
guest columnist
opinion@kansan.com
In the Jan. 14 edition, Bush stated his fervent opposition to such policies, expressing his desire to overturn as many as possible of these last-ditch efforts of the Clinton administration to protect our national lands. Bush says that these motions do not serve our national interests.
When a politician uses the words "national interest," I immediately become suspicious. The phrase calls to mind impregnable integrity, for no one would choose to act against our national interests. But the phrase is irksome vague. What exactly does Bush mean when he says that the preservation of old-growth forests does not fit into our national interests? If not this, then what does Bush include in our national interests, and whom exactly has he consulted in coming up with this opinion?
The United States is a remarkable country for many reasons, and one of these reasons would have to be our tremendous natural heritage. Yet to say "natural heritage" perhaps gives us too much credit. The vast majority of us have done little to deserve this gift.
Who benefits from the destruction of one of our country's greatest living treasures, our old-growth forests? The timber industry says that the quality of lumber from old-growth trees surpasses that of smaller, more common trees. But I wonder, if you realized that you had to choose between cutting down several hundred-year-old firs in the Pacific Northwest or reducing your consumption of wood-based products, which would you choose?
These trees do not belong to us, and one of their primary values comes in reminding us of that fact, in reminding us that we are born and we die, and yet the cycles of the natural world continue uninterrupted.
Bush's attitude toward the environment seems adolescent. In The Sibling Society, poet Robert Bly took the U.S. to task for living in perennial adolescence. He said that our adult citizens no longer act with social responsibility. However, I like to think that what mistakes we've made in the past were because of ignorance, that if we had had all the facts before us, we would have chosen differently.
We must stop now to consider our rates of energy consumption, how we consume more energy than any other country in the world. We must admit that our extravagant use of our energy resources cannot continue. We must re-evaluate the values that we want the world to recognize as American. I hope the Bush administration comes to see how the preservation, not the exploitation, of our nation's lands serves our best interests.
Reeck is a Manhattan graduate student in English.
John Trever/TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES
Kansan.com poll
Last week's question: Do you approve of KJHK's format shift to include more popular music?
Yes. The new format is much more balanced.
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I don't listen to KJHK anyway.
Next week's question: Are checkpoints where police stop every driver to check sobriety a good idea? Log on to www.kansan.com to cast your vote.
This poll is not scientific. Numbers do not add up to 100 percent because of rounding. Total votes: 2,625
Perspective
Bush's missile defense fosters fuzzy deterrence
For the last 40 years, politicians on Capitol Hill, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, have chased an elusive dream called National Missile Defense. If it worked, it would protect America from all incoming ballistic missiles. We could then pursue freedom and democracy safely and securely, snug behind our super shield.
There is only one problem with this dream — it's stupid. Even if you believe every point that Nielsen made,
National Missile Defense proponents make, it's still a waste of money.
Let's assume that missile defense works as well as it's supposed to (it doesn't), that it can't be fooled (it can) and that it won't disrupt relations with Russia (it will). Let us further assume that China, North Korea, and Iraq are developing nuclear arsenals that can reach the continental United States. How would a defense system affect U.S. diplomatic efforts in the event of an international conflict?
Proponents assert that because the United States would be protected from the missiles of our enemies, their nuclear arsenals would no longer deter us in our quest to aid our allies. However, assume that our adversary has 40 missiles and our system works 90 percent of the time. If an adversary strikes, 10 percent of its missiles will still get through, or, put another way, four urban centers will be obliterated.
Robert Chamberlain
columnist
quoin@kaasan.com
The misguided assumption that proponents make is that there is a correlation between number of missiles and level of deterrence. The position that one can simply add the number of missiles and decide who has the "stronger diplomacy" is based on that assumption. In actuality, no president will ever be able to accept the destruction of a major U.S. city for anything but the most critical of foreign policy goals (i.e. to protect the U.S. or Western Europe from invasion). Thus, to have diplomacy with impunity, our missile defense would have to be able to destroy every incoming missile.
This is still possible, but it requires that most of an adversary's missiles be destroyed on the ground before they launch. Unfortunately, most ballistic missiles are stored in silos that are impervious to conventional weapons. So for our system to be effective, we will have to launch a massive pre-emptive nuclear strike to cripple the enemy's retaliatory capability. Thus, although it is called National Missile Defense, it is actually only useful as a first-strike weapon. This is massively destabilizing in a crisis situation because both parties believe that they must shoot first in order to achieve their goals. Therefore, their propensity to strike increases dramatically.
So how do we avoid a nuclear holocaust if we can't shoot down incoming missiles? We convince our adversaries never to launch. Just as we are deterred by the potential destruction of our cities, so too are our adversaries deterred by the potential destruction of theirs. The cost of the strike is so much that it no longer is worth whatever benefit it might have achieved.
Where technological solutions failed, deterrence prevailed. So rather than waste billions of dollars on "fuzzy deterrence," President Bush should renounce his intention to build the defense system and rely instead on our stockpiles. To do so is fiscally prudent, militarily effective and politically astute. To do otherwise is just downright stupid.
Perhaps the best example is the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein had huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. However, he chose not to use them because he assumed that the U.S. would destroy Baghdad if he did.
Editorial
Chamberlain is a Topeka junior in political science.
Ordinance could punish dogs unfairly
The law's language could lead to penalties dogs and owners don't deserve.
Lawrence enforced its new dangerous dog ordinance for the first time on Jan.16.
Five residents whose dogs were deemed "dangerous" were ordered to either register and confine their dogs, give the dogs away to someone outside city limits, or have the animals put to sleep. Failure to comply with these orders could result in jail time for the owner.
The ordinance was passed in July 1999 to rid the city of dogs with a history of violence.
While this ordinance is appropriate in that it holds owners accountable for the actions of their dogs, the ordinance's ambiguous wording raises concerns about unjustly punishing relatively nonviolent dogs and their owners. The ordinance defines a dangerous dog as one that "threatens or attacks the safety of human beings or domestic animals." This definition is vague and could possibly be improperly applied to a variety of situations.
Although the disciplinary measures prescribed by the ordinance may be justified for dogs that commit unprovoked acts of violence against humans, they are too severe to enforce on a dog that gets in a single spat with another dog. Dogs are territorial by nature, and they instinctively defend their territory. Although owners should make every effort to prevent dog fighting, sometimes such situations are unavoidable.
Perhaps fining the owner would be a more appropriate measure in the case of many dog flights.
The dangerous dog ordinance needs more specific criteria on which to judge whether a dog truly is extraordinarily inclined to violence. Isolated complaints should be judged on an individual basis, and the responding police officer should have more power to determine whether the situation is serious enough to deem one or more dogs "dangerous."
Responsible pet owners should not be forced to choose between caging, killing, or giving away their dogs because of a single incident of violence between two animals.
Andy Marso for the editorial board
Andy Marso
free for all 864-0500 864-0500
Free for all callers have 20 seconds to speak about any topic they wish. The Kansan reserves the right to edit submissions, and not all of them will be published. Slanderous statements will not be printed.
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I went to the basketball game on Monday and I have to say, Missouri's dorm district startlingly looks like the Joliet Federal Penitentiary.
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There's more pothes in Lawrence than missed Chenwith shots. That's a lot of pothes.
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For everybody who looks at our basketball record and says that we suck: We've lost two games all year and are ranked No. 3 in the country. That's not exactly sucking.
As a GTA, I am tired of freshmen lying to me why they skipped class. We're not all idiots, so go to class. That's what mommy and daddy are paying for.
Even after I graduate, I'm going to keep calling KU Info. It's the greatest thing.
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I love how on the outside nobody reacts when guys from the basketball team come into Mrs. E's, but on the inside we all act like a bunch of eighth-grade girls who just saw N'Sync.
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I just wanted to call and thank the compassionate students who helped me after I fell on the dangerously slick sidewalk in front of Marvin Hall today, Feb. 1. Thanks to those students.
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Free Kevin Hoskinson.
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I am sitting here working at KU Info and I just want to tell everybody; We can tolerate giving you phone numbers a whole lot better if you just had a paper and pen in hand.
XFL: more like Sucks FL.
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I would like to say that the fifth floor of McCollum smells like human excrement, and it's absolutely disgusting.
A gives pot smokers a bad name. I smoke weed and I got a 4.0 and I'm an electrical engineering major.
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Was it just me, or does anybody,else hear the random mooing in Malott Hall?
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