Usually, Traveler Country news waits until after breakfast, but not so this morning. This news item wafted over the air while Jo was waking up:

EPA sued over Missouri streams.

The Coalition for the Environment, a St. Louis based environmental activist group, had been working with EPA and Missouri Dept. of Natural Resources to enact water quality standards for 150,000 miles of Missouri streams for five years. It seems their patience has given out.

It was just a short mental slide to the efforts to put or prevent a new casino at the Missouri-Mississippi confluence…an area which agencies, sportsmen and environmentalists have worked long and hard to retain in a natural state for fishing, birding and other outdoor recreation. www.savetheconfluence.org

Save the Confluence is a coalition of outdoors organizations from duck hunters to bird watchers, from the Conservation Federation of Missouri to the Sierra Club and local churches, one group being for preservation and recreational use of natural resources, and the other being primarily against the expansion of gambling in Missouri.

Natural resource issues sometimes make strange bedfellows between groups you wouldn’t think had anything in common, and adversaries of groups you think had natural like-minded interests. Too often, emotional appeals are used on issues which actually need clear-minded thought, since few things in this world are entirely good or bad, black or white, or sometimes entirely clear, even to us. Actions on other issues, however well thought out and totally rational, often die for lack of any emotional force powering them.

Traveler tries to steer a middle ground, keeping the best interests of the resources and the people in mind. Feel free to tell us how you think we are doing.