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Our environment's most dangerous enemy: Town Hall?

October 13, 1998

I don't parrot industry's party line, that we should lobby for and applaud looser environmental standards. To the contrary, the least we owe ourselves and our children is an open mind.

With open mind then, which choice promises a healthy environment, and constitutes sound social policy?

1. To sprawl new factories over all available virgin land, while our towns and cities decay into a patchwork quilt of glass-strewn vacant lots; or
2. To keep our undeveloped lands natural, while rejuvenating our established areas with new industrial construction.

The notion I have to hold until disabused of it is that factories belong on established ground when practical--not on virgin land, of which too little already remains. But, as a professional engineer, under sworn oath to counsel my clients honestly, what are my obligations when it is demonstrated--time and again--that:

• If the client builds on green fields, the State will go out of its way to offer every kind of financial, technical, and moral support; but
• If he builds in town he will be harassed to the point of near insanity, kicked when he's down, sometimes without respite until the failure of his business, his life's work, is near certain.

So it appears that I have a sworn professional obligation to advise my clients to hunt down any remaining green fields they can find, and pave them over with asphalt and concrete--but I eagerly await word to the contrary from any city or town in America.

Dear Reader: please choose what you want to do--

 

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