For those of you who missed it, last Monday was Earth Day. While I wanted to spend the holiday with my family and enjoy the traditional Earth Day turkey dinner, academic obligations forced me to remain on campus. I was pretty broken up because this is the one holiday where everyone in my family comes together to share and celebrate. We sing Earth Day carols like "Oh, Staked Earth Day Tree" and "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire Whose Smoke is Putting a Hole in the Ozone Layer."

OK, so my family doesn't celebrate Earth Day like this. In fact, we don't even celebrate it at all. My father works for a land development company, and if I ever associated with an environmental group, he'd probably recycle me for a new son. The fact is, most environmental groups are at best a nuisance and at worst deadly.

Take the Student Environmental Action Coalition, for instance. On Monday, they marched to protest a law that allowed burned and diseased timber to be available for harvest. Call me crazy, but if there are any trees that we should be cutting down, they sho uld be the ones that are already dead in their roots, right?

Another cause this group champions is the red squirrel situation on Mt. Graham, where a new observatory is being built. We're killing squirrels left and right for our selfish desires, and it's just not right. At least, that's all you keep hearing from the environmental lobby. The fact is that not that many of them are dying, and even if they are, so what? It isn't unreasonable to displace a few squirrels so that we can learn more about the universe we live in. One of the fundamental questions man has alwa ys asked is, "Where do we come from?" Are we going to seek out the answer, or are we going to let a few squirrels keep us from gaining more knowledge?

This begs the question, "What is more important, man or Earth?" In other words, how far should man go to keep people from logging, building, and driving? Is it necessary to hurt, or even kill people, to keep them from "damaging" the Earth? Some groups say that it is. One technique used to do this is the aforementioned staking of trees. When a logger tries to cut a staked tree into useful wood, bad things happen when the huge circular saw tries to cut a slab of metal. The rationale is that people won't cut down staked trees for this reason. The fact is, sometimes you don't see the stake, and people have died doing their jobs because of environmental extremists.

This, in all fairness, happens about as often as a pro-lifer kills an abortion doctor. However, it receives much less publicity because environmentalism is more popular. At least the pro-lifer thinks he is saving lives, while the tree-staker is only savin g trees. Again the question, "Man or Earth?"

I am not, in any sense of the concept, "anti-Earth." As congressman Bob Dornan has said, "I have never had someone come up to me and say, 'Congressman, I love dirty air and filthy water!'" I can't say that I do, either. But there are some fundamental fac ts that we must accept: People are more important than animals and trees; this planet has many natural resources, which are here for the use of man; and we cannot destroy the Earth, even if we wanted to, because Mother Nature is simply more powerful than us.

With reference to the third fact, this is not to say we cannot destroy ourselves. I'm certain we are quite capable of that. But no matter what we do to this planet, eventually it will return to its habitable self. Al Gore likes to say that this is a time of environmental crisis, and the car is more deadly than weapons. Don't let this rhetoric fool you. When a politician says that something is a "crisis," it usually means that we have to pass legislation before his term ends, so he can claim victory over t he crisis and be re-elected.

We do need some legislation to make sure no one dumps toxic waste in our water or puts too many harmful chemicals in the air we breathe. However, I fail to see the harm in building a telescope or cutting down a few dead trees. I also have no problem extra cting all of the fossil fuels we want, for several reasons. First, they are going to run out sometime. Second, the sooner they are gone, the sooner everyone drives an electric car, which is good for the air (until more studies come out). As the saying goe s, "Earth First - we'll mine other planets later."

Ted Dubasik is an accounting senior. His column appears every other Friday.