
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, May 1, 1990                   TAG: 9005010361
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PUT ACID RAIN NEXT TO RECLAIMING CITIES

LET'S COME down to earth about Earth Day. Let's not get too excited about acid rain over the Great Lakes and smog over the Grand Canyon. How about cleaning up the environment where we live and work and have our being?

It's going to take much more will and work than one weekend a year, picking up beer cans along the highway. It's going to take more wealth than all the gold in Fort Knox. But if we want to restore our great cities to the centers of culture, learning and civilization they once were, we must spend the money and effort.

What does it mean to the world view of America if we have clean air over Kansas but New York City, our main port of entry, looks like Calcultta, India? We must wrest our inner-city streets from the indolent, the drug-addicted, the drug dealers and prostitutes. Each resident of the inner-city will be given a choice: to be part of the problem or part of the solution.

If part of the problem, they will be relocated on one of those obsolete Army bases the Congress is so reluctant to close. If part of the solution, they will be given paying jobs working for local contractors and builders to clean up the slums, block by block, street by street.

This can be done - one city at a time! This way we'll learn from our mistakes and avoid the costly debacle of the "War on Poverty" and the "War on Drugs," during which we've tried to do everything at once and compounded the problem, rather than waiting to see what works and what doesn't.

Reclaiming the streets of New York by constructing garden apartments and condominiums with open spaces for parks and recreation areas will have unending benefits for the city. Suburban families will be lured back from their outposts in New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

We really have no choice! We must reclaim our great cities. We cannot continue as a viable, believable, world-class nation if our centers of business, commerce and the arts continue to deteriorate as they have for the past quarter century. America owes the world this example of responsible stewardship of the environment in our little corner of this beautiful planet. ALICE H. MOYLAN ROANOKE

by CNB