THE NAME OF THIS MONSTROUS ABSURDITY IS ORIGINAL SIN. Perhaps some of the new readers of Atlas Shrugged will take the time to read and understand The Speech and whether life is imitating art.

It's the ubiquity of the nature of Original Sin in cultural traditions that intrigues me. In Genesis, it is the acquisition of the knowledge of right and wrong. The Greeks unbundled the myth, with Prometheus punished for bringing fire and Pandora's box containing all the difficulties.

The Native Americans may or may not have legends about dangerous gifts in the earth. Last week it was uranium in the Southwest. This week it is coal in the Northern Plains.

Some members of the tribe warn that developing coal would betray the tribe's duty to protect the earth. Sweet Medicine, a mythic Cheyenne prophet, predicted centuries ago that digging up the "black rock" would rob the tribe of its identity, they say.

Some people have a better appreciation for tradeoffs.

Tribal values are rooted in protecting the land, yet their resources often seem like the only path out of poverty, says Garrit Voggesser, senior manager of the National Wildlife Federation's tribal lands conservation program. "Tribes have tough choices to make ... between their cultural and historical legacy and extraction," he says.

The article offers a lot of material for the ethnographer. The dilemma is not a new one: imagine the English lords of the early 19th Century who insisted that the new railways put their trains in cuttings and then cover the cuttings in the line of sight of the manor so that those tradition-destroying machines would not intrude on their traditions. They came around only much later. It wasn't until the 1930s that the Great Western Railway got around to putting the addresses of the lords on their locomotives.