This is exactly the kind of thing I have been pounding the drum about in my many warnings about how anti-humanism has poisoned the environmental movement.
King Cove is a remote town in Alaska with an airport that can only handle flight in good weather. This means that when people become seriously ill and need hospitalization, they often can’t get from King Cove to life-saving help.
There is a simple solution that can save lives and not materially impact the environment. About 20 miles away, there is an all weather airport from which sick people from King Cove could be flown for medical help if they could only get there. So the people of King Cove have asked for permission to build a simple gravel one-lane road which could be used for such evacuations. They even offered a land exchange to minimize any overall environmental damage.
No! says Sally Jewell, the Obama Administration’s Secretary of the Interior–even though this could lead to people dying. From the Fox News story:
During an August visit to Alaska, Jewell was told that building a road that connects King Cove and Cold Bay was vital. But in December, Jewell rejected the road saying it would jeopardize waterfowl in the refuge. “She stood up in the gymnasium and told those kids, ‘I’ve listened to your stories, now I have to listen to the animals,” Democratic state Rep. Bob Herron told a local television station. “You could have heard a pin drop in that gymnasium.”
Shameful! But alas, as I point out in The War on Humans, such despicable callousness toward the value of human life is now rife in the environmental movement.
If it were Jewell’s loved ones at threat, if it were the swells who attend Davos or fly private jets all over the world to urge we “save the planet,’ the Obama Administration would demand that a paved highway be built to provide shovel-ready jobs. But they don’t care enough about the powerless people of King Cove to give them a better chance to live when they become seriously ill.
Hope and change! Anti-humanism, Wesley? What anti-humanism.