Preserve our natural resources for use at home

Letter to the Editor:

Can the Nebraska Supreme Court declare a state law unconstitutional?

This was the legal question when their governor approved a pipeline to cross that state, passing through the Nebraska Sandhills. Major public concern is that a rupture in that pipeline would extensively damage the Ogallala aquifer underlying most of Nebraska, primarily its vast sand hills and parts of neighboring states:  Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas.

Nebraska sand-filtered waters are perhaps the purest anywhere in the world with its very low population, virtually no industry or manufacturing and abundant, lake-filled sand hill grasslands. Such high quality water is itself highly saleable in today’s national and international markets.

Pipeline accidents could ruin this naturally pure, delicious water with offensive petroleum odor and taste, even more repelling than toxic pollution. Nebraska citizens understandably resist this pipeline, which Montana and other states have been attempting to approve to provide “jobs, jobs, jobs,” which, upon completion of pipeline construction, would logically decline to mere maintenance and service jobs.

Why don’t the citizens of these natural resource-rich states realize that true wealth is in the use of their natural resources to produce and market real products rather than selling and shipping raw materials out of the country for manufacturing and processing elsewhere, even to such foreign countries as China and Japan?  

We have been selling off our coal, oil, gas and minerals while closing down our timber industry and threatening our dams and agriculture. Wealth lies in energy production and product development. We have actually lost our employment opportunities and destroyed our economy by transferring overseas such industries as high-tech and auto manufacturing.

Why not use and apply our natural resources right here near point source?

— Clarice Ryan, Bigfork