I have seen pristine wilderness. There is little enough left in our country, and probably less in many other place in the rest of the world. Theodore Roosevelt had a vision, and many followed, building a network of protection for our natural resources and splendor. We are finally on the road to cleaning up our air and our water.

I have also seen what logging does to a mountain. I have seen what coal mining does to a countryside. I have choked on the smog of Los Angeles. I have tried to hike through “private land” riddled with barbed wire fences and no trespassing signs. We have all seen the stewardship of our land by the oil companies in the recent BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Do I need to point out that our private enterprise system has absolutely no incentive to keep nature alive, keep the wilderness preserved, and keep the Grand Canyon clean? Private enterprise will use the land, until it is used up. That’s how it works. And the land, that took millions of years to form, is used up in a few decades of logging, drilling and paving. Private enterprise is the pimp that would turn our parks into prostitutes while they paid out, and wretches after they become used up.

Perry wants to roll back clean-air regulations, expand offshore drilling, open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, and repeal many of the EPA’s mandates. I am in disbelief that a politician can stand up and say those things and a majority of people latch on to this as a good thing, because it supposedly would spark 1.2 million good American jobs.

Maybe we should just pave the whole country. That would create even more good American jobs, at least while the paving lasted. Never mind that we’d have no room for cows to graze. But then, we will deal with that problem 20 years down the road. Maybe we could use the Grand Canyon as a dump site for nuclear waste. It’s a big enough hole to take all our waste for decades, perhaps centuries to come. Oh, we would even create a whole new industry by importing nuclear waste from France, Russia, Japan and China for centuries. That would create a lot of good American jobs. Never mind that the water of the Colorado would give us all 5 arms, 6 fingers and 3 eyes. The more the better.

Here is a slogan that would work:

Perry, the super-Bush, for president.

Good American jobs for a few years.

Trashing the country for generations.