Natural Resources Are Our National Treasures

Natural Resources Are Our National Treasures

People across America are celebrating Liberty Weekend. With tall ships, speeches, concerts and fireworks, we honor the birth of our nation and the 100th anniversary of the newly refurbished Statue of Liberty. It is a special time to reflect on our rich heritage.

Indeed, the colossal lady symbolizes the principles that make our country great. We can be pleased with the monumental restoration effort that has served to reaffirm those principles.

This is an appropriate time to remember, too, the natural resource that has also contributed to our country's greatness. It was the rich soil, the sheltering forests and the abundant wildlife that made life possible for the first settlers on our shore. Later the procession moved westward across the Great Plains with plows and herds and explored the mountains to mine the hidden treasures. They settled along the clear rivers and the pristine coasts. We owe a great deal to our natural resource heritage.

Thus I find it disturbing that while we willingly pledge hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain our historical landmarks, we seem at times insensitive to the equally valuable natural ones. Certainly the Grand Canyon is as deserving of preservation. Or the Everglades. Or the redwood trees.

I find it incongruous that in April, while workers were putting the finishing touches on our grand Lady of Liberty in preparation for her birthday party, a stand of giant Douglas-fir trees in Oregon was falling to the chain saw. Nearly 1,000 years old, those trees in the Willamette National Forest near Portland were quite possibly the oldest living things in the state.

The 56-acre stand, known as the Millenium Grove, was on public property. After an outcry at the sale by the Forest Service, the timber company was offered substitute lumbering land. It refused to accept the alternative as ``a matter of principle,'' and while environmental groups worked frantically to get a court injunction, the company toppled the oldest trees first, rendering the lawsuit moot.

Those trees had grown straight and tall long before the first European settlers sailed to our shores. They were magnificent monuments when the Declaration of Independence was only a dream, with a value far too great to measure in board feet. Those trees were part of our national heritage, too.

We are the stewards of that heritage. Collectively, we are responsible for the acid rain that is slowly killing our forests and lakes, for the pollution that fouls our rivers, and for the habitat destruction that removes from the world one plant or animal species every day.

Part of our heritage is the California condor that balances dangerously on the brink of extinction. It is the ivory-billed woodpecker that is gone from southern swamps and probably survives only through a small, recently discovered population in Cuba. It is the magnificent grizzly, the great whales, the declining wood stork and the whooping crane.

Part of our heritage is spending its last days in a cage at Walt Disney World in Florida, the last known dusky seaside sparrow, beyond saving now. Soon it will join the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet.

Locally, we seek to preserve the Battleship Texas with all its history and tradition. And well we should, for its lessons are of great value. But at the same time, we owe the same chances to the Attwater's prairie chicken that is vanishing from our coastal prairies and to the marine life so vital to our bays.

It is not a futile hope. The bald eagle, for example, is slowly being re-established across the country, as are the peregrine falcon and the osprey. Other alarming declines in our wildlife and natural resources can also be reversed, as long as people care.

Certainly the eagle, our national symbol, deserves the same protective effort we accord a human sculpture. Both have meaning far beyond mere feathered wings or copper skin.

On Liberty Weekend, we have every right to be proud of our country and the principles for which it stands. We can be proud of our Statue of Liberty and the tall ships that sail beneath it. We share in a priceless historic heritage, but we might also pause to reflect on the incalculable value of our natural heritage as well.