Editor:
Re: Fighting, funding forces of nature, March 25 letters.
I’m quite content to be one of the smug, righteous individuals letter-writer Francis Patrick Jordan speaks so disparagingly of.
On the contrary, his rant regarding “some monied individuals and groups indulge their worst instincts to purchase influence and power over politicians, the media and a duped public” is exactly the scenario environmentalists encounter and why they are what they are.
I would suggest he take a long look at the photo Peace Arch News printed along with his remarks; I do not see any who might, even remotely, resemble “slackers who sit in on endless green meetings before renting themselves off as professional protesters.”
He could not be more wrong in his estimation of an environmentalist. In their own individual way, they are passionate, cohesive and sincere in their pursuits of what they believe is right. Pernicious views like these – think columnist Tom Fletcher – just make us more determined.
Frances Saxton Manary, Surrey
• • •
Accolades to Peace Arch News, not only for publishing a letter by Bill Stewart but for a rebuttal letter by Francis Jordan on the same day, acknowledging that there are two sides to a coin.
Stewart, to me, is an environment extremist – but with every right to be heard – who dumped on columnist Tom Fletcher for daring to say a word against “environmentalists” (Green machine gathers here, not there, March 18 column).
Stewart evidentially believes that every “environmentalist” is a noble knight whose mission is to save the world. That is akin to believing that every priest is a man of God who can thus be trusted with children.
One of those noble environmentalists, Robert Kennedy Jr., who was in town last month to debate clean energy, once called anyone who was even a tad skeptical of the global-warming doctrine of Al Gore a “traitor.”
But here comes the irony. There was a proposal for an offshore wind farm off Cape Cod and the Kennedy estate, although the turbines would only be visible as specks on the horizon. Kennedy fought that clean-energy proposal with exceptional ferocity as if it was a precursor of the end of the world.
He thus represented that large group of self-proclaimed “environmentalists” who don’t walk-their-talk when it is ‘inconvenient’ to do so.
David Poole, Surrey