waste & abuse

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 27, 1999 | by Sean Paige

In Mother Earth They Trust

A lawsuit brought by logging interests last month in Minnesota contends that the U.S. government is breaching constitutional fire walls between church and state by adopting an environmentalist "religion" called deep ecology, as U.S. Forest Service land-management policy. Fighting for their livelihood, which has been endangered by a 25 percent reduction in harvesting on area national forests during the last four years, the loggers also are suing two environmental groups that have tied up timber sales in court.

"They're imposing this belief on me, and on everyone else in America," one of the plaintiffs, third-generation logger David Glowaski, said of the increasingly close affinity between the environmentalist ethos and Forest Service policy.

Although the lawsuit has been dismissed as "scary" by one milquetoast Minnesota newspaper -- "The judge should hoot this litigation out of court," scoffed another -- the loggers' arguments may not be as far-fetched as some say. A federal judge in New York, for instance, recently ruled that a public school's Earth Day ceremonies became "religious" when kids were asked to pray to, and bring gifts for, Mother Earth.

"You can preach that trees are sacred, that the earth is my mother, the sun is my father and all that" the logger's attorney, Stephan Young, recently told the Los Angeles Times. "But in demanding that the government accept your beliefs, you've crossed the line."

Where the plaintiffs may have erred, however, is in blaming the environmental groups for pressing deep ecology on the bullied and badgered Forest Service. As anyone who has watched the Service's transmutation into a shadow park service under Chief Mike Dombeck realizes, it's not as if the young "ologists" who've taken over the agency from the old-guard foresters need any arm-twisting in that regard.

Ladies First - but Not So Fast!

Women fought hard to earn the right and opportunity to serve alongside men in the U.S. military. However, they are leading a retention retreat that is exacerbating an already acute staffing crisis in the services, where women today comprise 14 percent of active personnel.

In the Army, where the recruiting problems may be most acute, nearly 50 percent of female soldiers don't complete their three-year term of service. For men, the attrition rate over three years is 28 percent. And among all services, 38 percent of women are leaving early, while men are jumping ship (or pushed overboard) at a lower rate of 33 percent. White female soldiers are leaving at considerably higher rates (54 percent) than blacks (37 percent) or Hispanics (43 percent), according to U.S. Army statistics.

Although officially barred from taking early departures, soldiers can be chaptered out -- or forcibly discharged -- for psychological or disciplinary reasons but often can opt out because of pregnancy, parenthood, personal hardship or to attend school. The most significant reasons for female attrition are: substandard performance in initial training (which accounts for 27 percent of early female departures), medical condition originating before service (which skims off another 20 percent), pregnancy (there goes another 17 percent) and physical disability (which ends the military careers of about 6 percent).

The debate is bound to increase over whether these numbers signal a failure of female recruits or a failure of the military to meet their needs and may raise questions about whether the estimated $35,000 cost of recruiting a new soldier (plus the $65,000 bonus some recruits now can receive just for signing up) is being wasted on female recruits, given their low retention rates. California Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a Democrat who sits on the House Armed Services subcommittee on Military Personnel, has said the attrition rates represent a dramatic rejection of the military that requires further investigation, and the Army has -- what else? -- launched a study of the subject.

Bright Ideas

The government pays people not to work and farmers not to farm, so why not reduce traffic congestion and the need for building new freeways by paying drivers not to drive? Why not, indeed, asks Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, which is proposing to pay citizens up to $2,800 a year to limit their time behind the wheel.

"I think it's the only answer to solving this nightmare of highway congestion we have in this country" a DNR official recently told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He said the rebates could cost taxpayers $800 million a year, a sum offset, he claimed, by a reduction in spending on new highways.

The DNR's proposal is only one of dozens being considered to discourage driving and reduce the need for a 20year, $20 billion highway-improvement plan for the state, which environmentalists warn will ravage 25,000 acres of bovine habitat.

Citizens who want to participate in the program would somehow bring their car to the state's division of motor vehicles, according to the plan. There, for a $30 fee, mileage Nazis periodically will check their odometers. A family of five could collect a $1,200 rebate if members drive less than 10,000 miles per year.