Absolutely! If a company is knowingly and directly doing harm to the environment beyond the legal parameters allowed by law they should be accoutable to the community for damages incurred. No one is for a polluted community. However the larger question is to what the legal parameters should be at what costs. As they should, elected legislatures at the demand of the people insist upon legislation that fosters a proper balance between the community and business' interests. Eco-terrorists and radical environmentalists make the argument that all industrialization is wrong, that any use of wildlife areas by business is unjust and humans in general are the largest threat to the environment. This position simply fails to meet any standard of logic. The reality is the environment itself has no bias toward anything- it is us who has a bias toward the living conditions we create. Nature in all its wisdom burns down hundreds of thousands of acres of woodlands a year, leaving flat blackened ground in its wake. It is the hand of man that prevents wild fires by removing dry tinder and catalysts for wildfires to preserve an environment we find acceptable. I can site numerous instances where man through our reasoned abilities has interjected into nature a status quo absent in nature itself. Animals themselves kill capriciously for numerous reasons. Man seeking just manners of bring food for process has created procedures it deems more humane for the process. In the past businesses in their zeal to create greater profits in the ephemeral have pursued them with negligable disregard for the communities themselves. Properly the people organized and lobbied their legislatures to create parameters that took both the business interest- which is a human interest- into account and the enviornmental interest- which is also our interest into account. The staunch libertarian advocates who argue the market will determine the proper ends with regard to the environment fail to meet the necessary complexities of the issue- they simply won't. And those who seemingly would shut down business and impose some anti-progressive preservation of nature fail to understand businesses can meet the requirements of community standards and in most cases do a service to the enviroment itself. The sagacious hand of man can and has continually created a less polluted community while advancing business and medical science for the last 30 years. This has, and will continue to be acheived through the democratic process, which in the end serves all of us for the better.
