I wrote this letter to the editor (of the Hazleton, Pa., daily newspaper and submitted same yesterday. There is no end apparently to the list of boondoggle projects the loclal industrial widgets keep coming up with (industrial “parks”, bidness campuses, roads, anthracite coal mining stripping pits, rock quarries, subdivisions of McMansions, etc.)
Dear Editor:
Folks will lose plenty if this “cargo” airport is built and goes into operation. And our state’s fish and wildlife heritage also will lose – a lot.
I lived and worked within a good walk or so of heavy-duty asphalt/concrete runways at Air Force bases in South Korea, New York state, Georgia and Oklahoma and completed temporary duty assignments at bases in Iceland, Japan , Saudi Arabia and Honduras. I recall more than a few tales of sleepless nights – nights filled with fighter jets and bombers taking off in the pre-dawn darkness and transport craft like C-130s, C-141s and C-5s rumbling in line for takeoff at the same hour.
But aircraft are only part of the picture we should consider before allowing a “new” airport to drastically alter our way of life. Such operational ports also require jet and aviation fuel depots (petroleum-based fuels,) which, as we all should know by now, already cost a helluva lot and are going to become scarcer as the days go by. Then there’s the truck traffic. I get enough of this just listening to the pre-sunrise din of Route 93 and Interstates 80 and 81.
Progressive wildlife biologists are telling us that roads and other human artifacts, like parking lots, are to blame for population declines in species after species of wild creatures. And roads also serve as conduits for the poaching crowd. We can no longer take nature’s persistence for survival as a given. Consider how much of the native countryside we have already taken for strictly human uses like transportation, shopping and housing. There are only tiny undisturbed wildlife habitats left across our region. Even forested ridge top forests around here seem doomed to disappear. Conservation biologists have found that: The number of plant and animal species living in an area depends on the size of that area and its connectivity to other natural country sides. The landscape of the United States is crisscrossed today with more than 4 million miles of paved roads. Yet walking as a way of getting from point A to B is lost amid the clamor for cheaper gasoline.
I’ve not heard a peep from any major cargo-oriented corporation that thinks it would somehow benefit financially from a cargo airport near Hazleton. And even if there are millions of dollars out there to be spent on such infrastructure, it would make a lot more sense to invest them in making our municipalities more walking and bicycling friendly than they are today.
A new cargo airport? What’s the matter with Hazleton’s present airport? And I’ve not heard a clamor to make the Avoca airstrip bigger than it is.
Alan C. Gregory
Lieutenant Colonel, Retired, U.S. Air Force Reserve
PO Box 571, Conyngham, PA
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