BE OUR GUEST: COAL MINING IS AN EXAMPLE OF NEED FOR ENVIRONMENTAL CURBS

When I read Jay Eastlick's column Oct. 1, "Government's burden is on citizens," what came to mind immediately was the bumper sticker, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." From the title, I thought that the article was going to remind us that there are no free lunches, that the things government does for us are costly, and that we citizens eventually pay this cost. This was fair enough. The problem with the column was that this message was buried within what was otherwise a one-sided diatribe against government. After an apparently gratuitous opening acknowledgement that "government does serve a purpose," the column deteriorated into a long explanation as to how government regulations only cost us money.

Eastlick went to great length describing how the newspaper business must, because of things like worker's compensation, unemployment, health insurance and the environment, pass certain costs on to consumers. The implication was that these costs come without benefit. In a sweeping indictment, the writer observed that "every product or service the consumer purchases has included in it the price of hidden regulatory costs for the myriad producers, suppliers, packagers, distributors, and contractors." Overlooked entirely was the fact that the lack of regulation can be even more costly.

My family was in the coal business. My father was a coal miner. I grew up in a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania during an era when there was little, if any, government regulation of coal mining. Running through my small town, during the years I was in grade school, was what once had been a freshwater stream. By the time I was old enough to notice it, the stream was the shade of dark tea. The stream had an acidity about the equivalent of battery acid and was utterly devoid of normal aquatic life. The high acidity had a plus side: The stream also served as an open sewer (there were no regulations of sanitation either), and the acid probably helped suppress water-borne diseases. In the center of town, there was an impressive mountain of coal refuse, taller by some measure than many of the surrounding mountains. Because of the unregulated way in which this mountain of waste was deposited, it smoldered continuously producing fumes of sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide gas. As a kid, I thought it was normal for coal-mining towns to smell like rotten eggs. During certain times of the year when the humidity was high, these vapors would dissolve in the mist and form droplets of acid that, quite literally, took paint off of houses, etched automobiles, and occasionally killed people weakened by coal-dust disease. Many years later, regulations by the government specified how coal waste could be deposited in a way that prevented combustion, and the fumes stopped. The stream is still polluted with acid-mine drainage, and the coal-mining operation is now closed. No telling how many of us have had our lives shortened by breathing polluted air for so many years; no telling how many of us had related health problems that cost money.

When I moved to Kentucky in the late 1960s, I was introduced to the incredible environmental devastation in Eastern Kentucky brought about by coal mining in an era when there was virtually no government regulation of coal industry in that part of the world. I was sickened during my first visit to the Eastern Kentucky coal fields by the magnitude and the extent of the "unregulated" devastation there. My father used to tell stories about how it was in the early parts of this century before there was worker's compensation. Whenever a miner was killed in the coal mine, the company would have men bring the body out of the mine and place it on the family's porch. This signaled the end of the company's obligation to someone who may have spent 20 or more years working in the mine. I can remember that even during my early lifetime, it was very common for miners to be killed working in what were then much less safe working conditions.

It is true that worker's compensation, safe conditions and environmental protection have a cost. It is unfortunate that we have only recently achieved a level of civilization at which the cost of doing business is beginning to include the cost of protecting people and protecting the environment. For too long, the American economy was "unencumbered" by government regulations and allowed the environment to be treated as an externality, as a dump. It seems to me somehow both fair and rational that the cost of protecting people and protecting the environment should be born by those who use the products of our economy. My point -- one that Eastlick's column failed to make -- is that regulatory costs are excessive only when they exceed the cost of the lack of regulation. One beautiful thing about a democracy is that while we may not all value the environment to the same degree, our government does offer a means of resolving our differences and ultimately providing for our general welfare.

Charles E. Kupchella is provost of Southeast Missouri State University.