Excerpted From: TOLL ROADS NEWSLETTER #59 June 2002
By Peter Samuel
Editor

"Tampering with Nature" was the name of a great special report by that commonsense contrarian reporter John Stossel on ABC recently. Tampering with nature "is good" was the theme of the report.

Of course he's right, in saying that usually mankind's tampering is good. We humans have been tampering with nature ever since we learned to collect seeds and to scratch the ground with sticks and plant them, and weed them, and protect the plants from other species, then to select the seeds of the best plants and discard the weak ones... We have tampered with nature in damming rivers for water supplies or barging, in making fertilizers, vaccines, anti-biotics ... virtually everything we manufacture and build is tampering with nature.

And of course roads are tampering with nature. They say the very first roads tended to be animal tracks, but then humans worked out they could improve on those tracks and made their own, then tried arranging stones to make them more suitable. And then came the wheel which needed modifications to walking ways and sledded freight.

Tampering with nature is our nature as humans. It is a measure of the sorry grip being gained by the absurd environmentalist ideology that such obvious truths need to broadcast. Anyway, it was great hilarious, exhilarating fun to see someone putting the case so forthrightly, so confidently and so professionally on a medium where usually "tampering with nature" is treated with a glum frown as self-evidently BAD. Our television stations need a thousand more John Stossels.