The following appeared in an editorial in the Mason City newspaper.

The following appeared in an editorial in the Mason City newspaper.

“At present, Mason City residents seldom use the nearby Mason River for any kind of recreational activity, even though surveys of the region’s residents consistently rank water sports (swimming, fishing, and boating) as a favorite form of recreation. Since there have been complaints about the quality of the water in the river, residents must be avoiding the river because they think that it is not clean enough. But that situation is about to change: the agency responsible for rivers in our region has announced plans to clean up Mason River. Therefore, recreational use of the river is likely to increase, so the Mason City council will need to increase its budget for improvements to the publicly owned lands along the Mason River.”

The author suggested that the government should increase budget for the lands along Mason River. Because the used-to-be poor quality of the water in the river will be improved by a cleanup plan with which an agency come up, water sports will increase consequently. However, there are several missing points in his deduction, which could make his suggestion unreasonable.

To start with, the author assumes the residents in the region are avoiding water sports in Mason River due to the river’s poor water quality. However, there is no substantial evidence illustrating this is the case. To be sure, the quality of the water may not be ideal, but still workable for water sports. Also, the author didn’t provide compelling evidence before he attributes to the poor quality the decrease in water sports in the river. There could be other factors that caused such phenomenon, from tighter family resulted from budgets economic collapse, cultural motive of an assiduous working attitude, to many residents moving away from the region. The author neither proved the existence of “it”, nor did he gave a more comprehensive consideration of “why”.

Supposedly, the phenomenon does exist, and the main cause is the poor quality of the river water, the author may be too confident about the effectiveness of the cleanup plan. All we can obtain from his reasoning is some anonymous agency claiming to be responsible for the cleanup. We cannot say for sure how much authority it demonstrates, i.e if they could actually invest money and put efforts into the plan, or whether the final result is up to our expectation. It’s likely that it’s a stalling tactic to avoid further complaints, or it’s a standard routine “announcement” to deal with every complaint. Moreover, if the agency is kind enough to devise a workable plan, facilitated with sufficient budget and reliable and experienced cleaning staff, we still don’t know how long it takes before we can expect a final result. After all, there’ s something called fate, and that is the most unpredictable factor in this event.

Let’s say the author is a reliable prophet: the cleanup plan turns out to be a big success, water quality improves, and residents are willing to go back to have some fun in the Mason River, there’s no reason to assume a similar situation of the lands along the river will as well. If the Mason River is faraway from the main street area, it could be that people drive all the way to the river for a relaxing weekend and head back to town after, without exploring the area nearby. Airports in almost every city, and every country is a living example. Although seldom taken as a place for recreational activities, airports are always good spots with a large number of “visitors”. However, the neighboring area of the airports are rarely developed due to its remote location from the major area of the city, and the purposive visit of their passengers. So we cannot simply expect an increasing utilization of the lands along the river, even if the cleanup plan turns out good.

In conclusion, we cannot obtain enough information of the effectiveness of the cleanup plan and the subsequent increase of water sports and more utilization of the lands along the river. Thus, still open to debate is whether or not the budget for improvements should be prepared.