Am I a NIMBY? You Betcha!

Most of my adult life I have listened to disparaging remarks about the "Not in My Back Yard" crowd or "nimbys." Nimbys are accused of wanting all the benefits of industrialization and technology but fighting tooth and nail against using their own areas to produce the products or dispose of their refuse. No smokestacks. No factories. No cell phone towers. No dams. No pipelines. No high tension electrical wires. No exploitation of natural resources. No landfills.

In the meantime, mountaintops have been dumped into savagely polluted valleys in West Virginia and Kentucky, toxic high tech waste has been exported to poor nations, carbon  spewed into the atmosphere, plastics and chemicals have created massive dead zones in our planet's oceans.

Now our fresh water supplies and the very stability of the ground we stand upon are under assault from hydrofracking.

The strongest voices against environmental contamination and alteration frequently come from local opposition - the nimbys. If our only hope is to save our environment tiny little pieces at a time - the nimbys may be our court of last resort. Are they guilty of hypocracy? To some extent. But in the absence of leadership on our state, national and international levels, the movement to stop destroying our environment has to start somewhere.

When it comes to destroying the environment, MY BACK YARD is the planet Earth we all share.