Editor:
Plan B destruction continues. With seeming unbridled contempt for the environment, it appears timely for the woodlot industry to demand buffer zones be dismantled. These protective areas, legislated for Island watercourses, are already woefully thin. To appease the farm lobby, their size was cut in half against the recommendations of the government's own Royal Commission on Land Use.
Hundreds of thousands of putrid belly-up fish, nitrates in ground water, sickly green estuaries, fish-egg strangling siltation, wide-scale soil erosion, blood red rivers, very high cancer rates, rampant asthma, disappearing bee populations; it's all happening in P.E.I. on a massive scale.
A new proposal has surfaced questioning limits on land ownership by the potato industry. Are demands by woodlot owners to cut down to the stream's edge, or those pushing for potato acreage and more control of our land resources, happening now because Plan B proved that even the worst environmental ideas are now fair ball?
It appears P.E.I.'s anti-environmentalists are no longer unashamed to go public. Given what's happened, can you blame them for not wanting to go all the way? Is this partly why NDP fortunes are skyrocketing? Perhaps many Islanders do not support of this boundless destruction of our remaining forested areas.
Enough is enough. It's time to start fighting back or we will lose this piece of Island paradise to those bound by an insatiable and incredibly irresponsible greed. What is being passed down to our own children and grandchildren? Those responsible look into the mirror every morning and give themselves a passing grade. They will never change. Island communities must step up now and act for positive change to stop this idiotic environmental vandalism.
Rather than relying on successive governments to truly act in the public interest in these matters, we must all act in good co-operative faith to begin re-building a healthy P.E.I. for the land and Island families; or face our own tailored silent spring. Look around you; see how our people, wildlife, and treasured lands are all suffering.
John Hopkins,
Breadalbane
