“The Legislature finds and declares that the State’s rivers and streams, great ponds, fragile mountain areas, freshwater wetlands, significant wildlife habitat, coastal wetlands and coastal sand dune systems are resources of State significance. These resources have great scenic beauty and unique characteristics, unsurpassed recreational, cultural, historical and environmental value of present and future benefit to the citizens of the State and that uses are causing the rapid degradation and, in some cases, the destruction of these critical resources, producing significant adverse economic and environmental impacts and threatening the health, safety, and general welfare of the citizens of the State.”

What you have just read is a confluence of ambiguity, also known as, a great gathering of nothing (or liberal legislation), but, a strategic nothing to be sure. From the Maine Natural Resources Protection Act (MNRPA), which was passed in the early 1990’s, has emerged a myriad of legislative acts which have served to lace the State with innumerable layers of constrictive regulatory bands effectively decimating our economy.

Because the MNRPA was written with such fluid ambiguous language, it’s lack of definitive parameters is now the fertile seedbed to every legislative manipulation to further “protect” any minutia of a microscopic organism discovered in a environmentalist daydream. Can anyone say job security?

Certainly not for the working men and women of Maine, but it definitely has been a boon for the environmentalist movement which largely functions off taxpayer funded government grants. How ingenious of liberal Democrats to craft legislation which is a veritable sugar tree of taxpayer handouts. For elitist entitlement seekers, simply creating a plausible endangerment for some micro-ecosystem will insure a tax funded research project with the inevitable tax hike as a consequence.

It’s more than ironic that the very people who are paying for this “research” bear the fiscal brunt of the findings. It’s no wonder that the size of Government is growing faster than the private sector; in fact, it’s safe to say that, in Maine, the private sector is shrinking. Overtaxed and under appreciated, Maine’s workers, our financial strength, has been bolting for greener pastures for some time now. As the environmental screws tighten, the speed of the exodus increases.

One would think that the leftist, out of self preservation, would see the handwriting on the wall and opt for a more common sense approach to the governance of our natural resources. That grasp of reality seems to be just beyond Augusta’s fingertips. So with our natural resources locked away out of our reach and many of our fellow Mainers leaving the State in search of a job, who is going to fund all the environmental mandates? With no funds to function and no citizens left to protect the environment from, will there be a future for the DEP?……. Just wondering…..a little.

But in the here and now, the enviro-leftist laws from Augusta have increasingly wedged a divide between the Northeast and the Southwest regions of Maine. A study by Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Maine, Kathleen Bell, showed that on many of the environmental regulatory issues, the Southwest part of the State voted favorable while the Northeast voted consistently against these measures. Interestingly, many of these regulatory laws have had more of an impact on the northeastern areas of the State.

One determent factor for the disparity in regional voting patterns given by Ms. Bell was the higher education of the South compared to the North. Really!! Well, La De Da!! Perhaps the study should have factored in the intellectually debilitating effect of liberal elitist arrogance or the impact of mind numbing self absorbed infatuation. Maybe the influence of free thinking common sense would be a better way to describe the thought process of hard working rural Mainers.

This points to the crux of the issue. Elitist snobs feel they know better how to run your land than you. Our State Government has exalted itself to landlord of the great State of Maine. But in a Government run by the people, even land that is “owned” by the Government still belongs to the people. The State has begun to make alarming grabs for private property under the guise of environmental protection. We must begin to demand that Augusta repeal back the legislative layers of this stinking rotten environmental onion until we can find a common sense balance between prosperity and the pristine beauty of Maine.