The following is a letter to the editor that appeared in the Richmond Times Dispatch on August 2, 2002. What follows is a response written by me. Editor, Times Dispatch: Almost two years ago President Clinton signed an order to protect some of the best unspoiled areas of America's national forests - places where we love to hike, hunt, and fish. Yet instead of celebrating this landmark environmental policy, the Bush administration repeatedly has whittled away at the core of the wild-forest policy and failed to defend it in court, despite years of study and majority support among the public for such protection. Already more than half our national forest land has been hammered by logging, while national forest timber amounts to only 3 percent of America's yearly timber yield. The more than 440,000 miles of roads that scar our national forests - roads built for the logging industry and paid for by our tax dollars - have destroyed wildlife habitat, caused mudslides, and polluted our waters (more than 80 percent of the nation's drinking water originates in national forests). We have enough roads. It is time to safeguard our remaining forests. Weakening this historic rule would turn back the clock on national forest protection. It is not too late to ask President Bush to be a responsible steward of our publicly owned forests, and to be responsive to Americans rather than to big logging corporations. - Hap Hapgood. clover. Editor, Times Dispatch: Hap Hapgood believes that our forests should be protected. But protected for whom? Rocks? Spotted owls? If one’s moral code leads him to believe that the ultimate standard of value is Man’s life, then the answer is obvious. Consequently, if we hold Man’s life as the standard by which to base decisions and long-range planning, then our nation’s forests and all other land must be owned and protected by private citizens. However, Hapgood believes that the proper “responsible steward” for the environment should be the federal government. But it is not coincidence that environmental problems occur on government land far more often than on private property (see Love Canal in New York). Property owners have an incentive to take care of their land. Thanks to the profit motive, Weyerhauser and other “big logging corporations” plant far more trees on their land than they harvest, and there is more forest land today than 80 years ago. The same statistic holds true for the number of deer, bears, and wild turkeys in the forests. Therefore, the ultimate act of responsible environmental stewardship would be for President Bush to overturn one of Bill Clinton’s many immoral acts against liberty and return the federally-owned forests to the people. America’s founders knew that reason dictated that private property rights were the only way to uphold their ultimate moral value of Man’s right to his life. Unfortunately, reason is precisely what the environmentalist movement lacks. -Bob Murphy. Richmond