Bill Sherwonit, in his Feb. 4 commentary, viewed the care of planet Earth and its inhabitants in a simplistic manner involving only two possibilities: exploitative development versus environmental conservation. He doesn’t seem to recognize that between these black vs. white — red vs. green — extremes, there are many shades of gray. Note that when you combine the colors red and green, you actually get gray.
There are many good examples, both in Alaska and elsewhere, of middle-of-the-road, reasonable care. A couple here in Alaska: harvesting of fish and wildlife species while working to maintain optimum populations of all involved species through careful research and management, and development and acquisition of petroleum products and minerals while carefully preventing damage to almost all of the associated wild/wilderness lands.
If you work at it, you can have both — reasonable conservation and reasonable development.
— Jim Lieb
Palmer
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