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Linda Whitlock

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From the RoundTable blog

Guilt is my faithful companion of late.

I feel guilty about the food I eat (clogs the arteries, don't you know) and the food I waste (the leftovers I throw away could feed a person for days in some countries). I also feel guilty about the packaging the food I eat comes in (fills up the landfills) and the plastic bags I bring it home in (ditto on the landfills and a waste of precious oil).

I feel so guilty over dropping a scrap of litter that I'll chase down an errant tissue flitting through the Wal-Mart parking lot. I even think litterers ought to have to pay those hefty fines posted on "No Littering" signs, though, come to think of it, I haven't noticed any of those signs in a while.

I haven't yet felt guilty over living and breathing, but if some environmentalists have their way that probably isn't too far off.

To forestall some of this guilt, I'm making changes in my eating habits, trying to use up more of my leftovers, looking for ways to recycle more than I already do, and buying reusable cloth bags for grocery shopping so I won't have plastic bags to recycle.

Despite these quasi-environmentalist credentials, I'm never likely to be a Greenpeace supporter or a candidate for membership in the Sierra Club. I don't, for example, believe the Earth is in imminent danger of a global-warming apocalypse, Al Gore notwithstanding.

While global warming may be real, our panic-mode attempts to fix it -- if it even needs fixing -- may cause as much long-term harm as good. The DDT ban and the ensuing surge in malaria deaths come to mind.

Such heretical thinking puts me at odds with many environmentalists. But the environmentalists and I do have something in common besides our dislike for plastic bags: a dislike for seeing every available bit of undeveloped land industrialized. That's why I've fallen victim to the NIMBY syndrome. I'm not at all happy about Norfolk Southern's plan to build its new intermodal facility near Elliston.

I live in Salem, so the facility won't be in my backyard exactly. But it's close enough. Especially since one of the highlights of my week is often a drive up U.S. 460 to the Christiansburg Cracker Barrel (I have to get my artery-clogging fix somewhere). I do admit I enjoy Cracker Barrel's food, clogged arteries or no, but I enjoy the drive even more. It offers me food of a different kind.

If I let it, that could make me feel guilty, too. The intermodal facility is supposed to bring jobs, after all -- lots of jobs, even after adjusting down the initial publicized estimate -- and who could be against jobs? Not me. My need to see cows grazing in the fields can't compete with the need people have to provide for their families.

But if the intermodal facility attracts those jobs in the form of more industry, as it likely will based on an analysis by Chris Behr of HDR Decision Economics ("Rail facility's effect unclear," Aug. 23), those cows and fields will give way in time to warehouses and factories.

Even before that happens, tractor trailers and the rail yard will impose their own changes on the countryside. Since a cow grazing in a field does something for my spirit a semi spewing diesel fumes just doesn't do, I'm not looking forward to those changes.

I'm not an area native. Born in Mississippi, I grew up in the military and lived in a dozen or so places before settling in the Roanoke Valley nearly four decades ago. When I first moved here, Virginia 419 was a long, mostly empty stretch of road from U.S. 220 to the GE plant. Now there's hardly an undeveloped piece of land left on it. The same, I fear, will be true of 460 between Salem and Shawsville not too many years hence.

Progress must come. Jobs must be created. And regardless of Montgomery County's planned lawsuit announced this week, the intermodal facility probably isn't going away.

So while the cows and fields are still there (and we can afford the gas and Cracker Barrel's food), we'll keep making those frequent trips to Christiansburg. They don't do a thing to ease my guilt over clogging my arteries. Ah, but they do wonders for my soul.

Whitlock, a Roanoke Times columnist, is an adjunct English professor who lives in Salem.