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May 1, 2024 Editor, The News-Gazette: The classic conception of 17th century political liberty included the principle of private property rights. Landowning by private persons is taken for granted in the American constitutional system. From the earliest period of the 19th century’s Industrial Revolution, private property rights trumped most notions of public rights.
But, times have changed. Today, the Maury River Alliance has learned that the presence of serious water pollution of the Maury River is a direct result of degraded pasture lands leaking into the waterways. These pasture lands are private property and, so far, the livestock owners responsible for the degradation of private pasture lands have a superior legal right to destroy riparian buffers and to allow livestock to defecate and urinate anywhere inside the private land upon which they forage.
DEQ maintains that some 20 miles of the Little Calfpasture River is victim to permanent damage from livestock and no amount of remediation in or near the riverway will return its health until the laws are changed to place the public interest in environmental health and safety above the private interests of private landowners.
DEQ asserts that “nothing can be done” to legally compel livestock owners to remove their privately owned livestock from their privately owned pastures. Unlike most states in the Union, private ownership of Virginia river-bottoms makes any effort to prevent contamination of river water impossible. Any environmental safety measures necessary to maintain natural living organisms in Virginia waters are constantly co-opted by a class of human behavior needing revision in the legal code.
Private land use creating a hazard to the health and safety of Earth’s plant, animal and human organisms should be subject to an enforceable legal remedy; not excused because private property owners claim legal immunity when their land use presents a clear and present danger to the rest of us.
There are no good reasons why responsible people have to put up with a dirty river. There are no good reasons a private property landholder should create known hazards to the health of a river.
Let’s change this. DON HENKE Goshen
