Mining

Press, 31 August 1989, Page 12

Mining

Sir, —L. W. Allott considers that “locked-up forests are of no use to anybody” (August 25). Forests shelter many living things, part of God’s creation. We experience solitude, companion-

ship, even enlightenment in them. They bind the soil, preventing floods and protecting farmland; they produce oxygen and purify the air. They are, in short, of use to everyone except a corpse. Forest and minerals should be exploited, he says, because “they were placed there for the use of man.” They are useful being there now. Use is one thing, destruction another. Why must things be "used” in the most destructive way? The raw materials for atom bombs, chlorofluorocarbons, drift nets and 2,4,5-T have been “placed here for us.” Are we therefore under a moral obligation to destroy the ozone layer, explode nuclear weapons and so on? Presumably prussic acid was also placed here for our use. Is L. W. Allott therefore going to drink it? — Yours, etc., D. J. ROUND. August 26, 1989.