Environment

I was amused to no end by the 3rd paragraph from this article:

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels announced this morning that the city will reverse its decade-old policy and use road salt to melt ice in future storms.

The mayor set certain conditions for using salt: on hills, arterials or snow bus routes, and on routes to hospitals and other emergency facilities when at least 4 inches of snow is predicted, if ice is predicted, or if extreme cold is expected to last more than three days.

The city earlier refused to use salt, saying it's bad for the environment, and instead spread sand over the roads.

I lived in Seattle and back in 1995/96, they still weren't using salt on the roads. They just used minor amounts of dirt, which had the effect of making for slightly dirtier ice. I'm not sure what the intention of the dirt was beyond that goal.

Maybe this is just my ignorance talking, but isn't salt from the environment? And I might be totally wrong, but wouldn't it not be much of a stretch to think that nothing that comes from the environment could possibly be bad for the environment-at least not once you really think about it? For example, lava burns down forests and stuff and kills hillbillies who refuse to leave their trailers when forest rangers say 'You should probably leave your trailer because there is a a river of molten magma coming straight for you,' but lava deposits extremely rich minerals into the soil, and like 10 years later bunnies and flowers and trees and rainbows return to the area.

So if that's true, and man comes from the environment, along with cars, stereos, and lightsabers, couldn't you argue that in the long run that it would be impossible for man to be bad for the environment because man is part of the environment? I submit that you can. It's not as if man doesn't have dominion over the earth or anything.