New York City, New York, U.S.A. Earth is one hell of a place to be born.

In the early 1950s, the Corporate Culture was making great economic advances and Highway Commissioner Moses had too much political power. He built highways to everywhere in the city and out of the city, perpetuating the urban sprawl that is now the Boston-Washington Megalopolis. Northern New Jersey was turned into the bedroom communities of NYC and as commuter traffic increased geometrically, the emissions from burning leaded gas clouded the sky each morning after rush hour and it stayed that way all day.

Money was being made hand over fist as the fossil fuel industry collaborated with the automobile industry and children were being raised in front of the television singing commercial slogans instead of nursery songs. Incorporated industry made a quick profit by dumping their wastes into our atmosphere, our water table and our naturally-regenerating, life-supporting habitats instead of protecting our good health from the toxic chemical pollution that resulted. Love Canal caught fire and the toxic wastes dumped into the water burned.

As a teen in the late ’60s my friends and I threw lit books of matches into the Passaic River to watch the oil slicks on top of the water catch fire, then we petitioned the Government to pass the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts in the 1970s.

The Corporate Culture is the spawn of the megalopolis and human belief in money gives it the power to more recklessly harvest our natural resources to build larger cities and destroy what is left of our life-supporting habitat on Earth. Corporations exist only to make a monetary profit and have no greater goal.

These government sanctioned, legal fictions of non-responsibility are now destroying life on this planet by suing for their right to make a pecuniary profit. Then the U.S.A. Government suffers post traumatic paperwork stress syndrome and the corporate takeover there allows the GOP to shut the government down. What happens to our National Parks, National Forests, National Rivers, National Coastlines and our atmosphere?

All is reduced to whatever value the Corporate Culture places on it and the National Park Service Employees are forbidden to do their job because the Federal Government won’t afford their pay. This leaves our life supporting habitat open and defenseless from the fossil fuel corporations, which have set their caps to have more power over the miracle of life on Earth by laying open our National Monuments to fracking, dumping, timbering and sand extraction for the environmentally unsustainable growth of the megalopolis.

The newly appointed Secretary of the Interior has stated that our National Monument is merely a crop that is ready to be harvested. The balance of nature and life is the art of God, but the Lords of labor and money have no appreciation of anything beyond the megalopolis and their corporate deep pockets.

No Mountain Valley Pipeline! Got Oxygen? Water for Life. Ban Fracking now! Protect and preserve our National Parks and National Waterways. Preserve species diversity and our atmosphere.

Linda Emrich

Hinton