To the Editor,
After reading Toby Gorman’s opinion (Environment an all-important issue, Saturday Beat, Nov. 12), I would like to provide the following excerpt from Richard Bach’s book One.
The book was written in 1988 and I have watched programs on TV going back as far as 1971 with the same warnings as we are hearing today – 41 years later – which kind of backs up the statement below of us having had millions of warnings and chances.
“Evolution made civilization steward of this planet. A hundred thousand years later, the steward stood before evolution not helper but destroyer, not healer but parasite. So evolution withdrew its gift, passed civilization by, rescued the planet from intelligence and handed it to love.
“A dear culture in so many ways, a gifted society, trapped at last by its greed and lack of vision. It ravaged the forests into desert, consumed the soul of the land in mine pits and waste, smothered its air and its oceans, sterilized the earth with radiation and poisons. A million million chances it had to change, but it would not. From the ground, it dug luxury for a few, jobs for the rest, and graves for the children of all. In the end, the children didn’t agree, but the children had come too late.”
I would like to touch briefly on development as one, local example.
We pave over more and more grasslands and forests and farmlands in order to provide housing for others who wish to move here.
I hear the argument from the development camp that these developments provide jobs and tax bases for the city.
Yes, the developments do provide high-paying jobs for some for a few months and then what? The land is gone forever.
We find that instead of our taxes going down because of more contributions, they actually go up as our infrastructures need to be increased.
And these houses? They will in most likelihood be put on the market in a year or two.
I have never understood the development camp’s argument that we have no right to keep others from moving here. It’s true, we don’t.
However, we have a glut of houses on the market, already built, already developed.
Why can people not purchase these houses instead of needing something brand new? Then, once all the houses already on the real estate market are gone, we could perhaps provide a new development of houses until these are gone.
How can anyone argue with the logic of that?
Petra Tschauner
Nanoose Bay