Development fears end where courage begins

We are on track to becoming the first generation since the United States was founded 236 years ago that will leave a future for our children with fewer job opportunities and a lower standard of living than we had.

Our progressive taxes, mountains of laws and regulations, and high labor costs have seriously reduced our industrial capacity. Now our environmental fear of developing any new natural resource has completely halted our long historical upward march from hunting with flint-tipped spears to the stars. In swapping personal freedom for big government security, we will leave this world to our children with fewer opportunities than we had. It's time to reawaken the American spirit that lies dormant in our hearts and learn to dream again.

Mankind only increases its standard of living by combining natural resources with technology. The human intellect is used to transform natural resources into our physical standard of living. It's not enough to just have technology in a vacuum - we need physical resources to build our world. For instance, we need metals to manufacture our latest electronic devices, natural gas to heat our homes and crude oil for everything from gasoline to plastics to pharmaceuticals.

It's no secret our legacy oil fields and mines today are running out at the same pace as our children's future job opportunities. Yet, in today's environmentally conscious world, we are too fearful to develop our own abundant natural resources and prefer instead to import them from less environmentally conscious countries. The problem is we borrow money from people like the Chinese so we can import raw materials from third-world countries, and then leave the bill for our innocent children to pay. Brilliant.

In today's environmentally conscious world, every single new natural resource development project is deemed "too risky" for one reason or another. How are we ever going to increase or even maintain our current standard of living as our legacy mines and wells run out?

I contend that the American worker is up to the task and Alaska has more than abundant natural resources under our feet. We can stare down fear and risk to develop all our natural resources safely and efficiently - and better than anyone else in the world. Those people who fear all development are just fearing fear itself, as Franklin Roosevelt said, or are acting like "shrill eunuchs," as his elder fifth cousin Theodore Roosevelt called the timid detractors of his Panama Canal Project. When Theodore Roosevelt made the incredibly courageous decision to complete the greatest engineering project in world history and join two oceans, he issued the simple telegram to his head engineer in Panama: "Make the dirt fly."

When our ancestors contemplated signing the Declaration of Independence, they knew it would be committing treason against the most powerful empire on earth and would amount to a death sentence should the American Revolution fail. With courage burning in their hearts, they stared down fear, pledged their lives and gave birth to the land of the free and the home of the brave - not the land of the government shackled and the timid.

Natural resource development creates jobs and tax revenue. Revenue funds research. Research develops new technologies that deliver more natural resources in an even safer manner. It is an economic and technological loop that pulls all of mankind forward.

Alaska, with its abundance of natural resources, stands on the doorstep of greatness. We have more natural resources than most other countries, not to mention other states. We can - and should - develop our own natural resources per our state constitution and become the most prosperous state in the union. The alternative is to join a cacophony of shrill eunuchs that suffer from lack in a land of plenty.

I believe each person on this earth that breathes oxygen has a purpose. Likewise, each state in our union has a purpose. In Kansas they grow wheat. In California they develop the latest computer technology. In Alaska we develop our natural resources. It's what we do. It's our purpose and justifies our existence to the rest of the country and the rest of the world.

Theodore Roosevelt said: "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."

He dared mighty things with the Panama Canal. Alaska dared mighty things when it built its magnum opus: the 800-mile long trans-Alaska pipeline. It's time to step out of the gray twilight of development fear and dare mighty things once again.

Daniel Hamm lives in Palmer and is an international Boeing 747 freight pilot.