Under the banner of environmental protection, barriers of all kinds have been erected to discourage domestic raw material extraction. But because raw materials obviously must come from somewhere, when extraction is obstructed in one region this activity and all associated impacts are simply shifted to some other region – often magnifying environmental impacts in the process. (Quoted from April 2017 Humanist News & Views)
Dr. Jim Bowyer is an environmental consultant, a professor emeritus in the Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Minnesota, and the author of “The Irresponsible Pursuit of Paradise.”