By Frank Young

What Value? What Measure?

In early December Governor Underwood addressed a coal futures conference in Charleston. Talking about environmentalists and environmental lawsuits, he told the group "This is not an economic issue for them; it’s a sociological and political issue." He added, "That's why it’s so hard to find compromise."

That statement by our governor tells us so much we wish we didn’t have to know about his value system. Apparently, his only measure of the value of resources is in terms of economics. How many dollars will the extraction of this resource generate? How many dollars will it cost to avoid unnecessary environmental destruction?

Political cynics might say he’d add, "How will proposed changes in mining techniques affect my political contributor’s pocketbooks?".

I believe that most folks consider many of nature’s gifts to be priceless. Priceless does not mean worthless. Priceless means having value beyond finite measure. Some things are worth so much that we would put no price on them. Our children. Our parents. Our other loved ones.

Likewise, the gifts of nature that enable this and future generations to live are priceless, although some segments of society place artificial values on these resources for purposes of commerce.

How much is clean water worth? Clean air? Clean soil upon which mankind may live, work and grow food? Again, except for the artificial economy, these resources are priceless. To put a price on the elements of our life support system, the environment, is to put a price on life itself. That’s because when the environment is debased and depleted, regardless of the "economic" value received, life itself will become worthless because it will cease to exist. Wasting and destroying a part of the environment is wasting and destroying a part of life.

Industrialists and other exploiters of environmental resources, and their political apologists, reel and make light of concerns expressed about conserving limited natural resources and protecting the environment from pollution and depletion.

At the risk of having this column labeled as "anti-corporate," I respectfully submit that it is the corporate mentality that all values are measured in terms of dollars, or other units easily converted to dollar values, that has created more human generated environmental destruction by pollution and depletion in the past century and a half than in all of the previous history of mankind’s habitation of earth.

Is it just a coincidence of time that the corporate economy, an artificial economy created by artificial institutions, has prospered most in parallel time with the most environmental mayhem? The answer is no, it is not a coincidence. To generate a "profit" in an artificial, corporate economy the human and natural systems must be exploited of the immeasurable "value" of labor and the priceless "value" of the environmental reserves on which life depends. In other words, corporate profit is the dividend corporations reap from the labors of real people and the pollution, waste and depletion of real, natural goods.

I think it should be the obligation and duty of government to regulate the artificial economies of mankind in such a manor as to minimize "profits" and maximize natural resource protection. But that doesn’t happen when the profit from exploitation is used to elect or otherwise instill government that unabashedly encourages wasteful natural resource consumption, at artificially low prices in the artificial, corporate economy.

Governor Underwood’s simple remark that "This is not an economic issue for them......." tells it all. It is perhaps the best explanation of what the battles over coal and other exploitation is really about. The battle is about the corporate drive to "profit" in the artificial economy, regardless of the actual costs to priceless resources.

I do not have all the answers. But whether by slip of tongue or honest openness, Underwood’s assessment goes a long way in defining and underlining the problems.