Editor:
Re: Stay on top of oil issues (Feb. 15 issue of The Gazette)
Mel Lungle’s lament over foreign oil industries’ abhorrent efforts to export our oil and gas reserves as quickly as possible, at the expense of all of the value-added potential that such reserves represent, and our environment, is well taken.
Were it only the oil and gas resources, it might not be so bad but the same must be said for other resources, among them coal, potash, cod, salmon, raw logs and dimension lumber, grain and so-on.
The cod are all but gone and one might reasonably expect that some fundamental lessons have been learned from this one resource but it seems not to be the case. And the less said about asbestos the better, although history will condemn our nation for the criminality of mining and exporting the stuff.
Apart from foregoing a vast value-added economy – all the jobs, industries, research and development, social goods and national prosperity accruing to the responsible and profitable exercise of adding value to raw goods – I’m saddened at what will be the fate of future generations who will discover that this vast homeland of theirs has been stripped to the bone!
Let’s not pretend that we are unaware of the consequences of unbridled pillage; in our own time, Newfoundland stands as a prime example of what happens when a stupendous resource is demolished under the banners of “resource management” or, worse yet, “economic development.”
It seems to me that a long list of so-called “ ministers for fisheries and oceans” were more interested in their obscene pensions than their obligations.
We all face the prospect of aging in an increasingly poverty-stricken land.
In less than a century, we have utterly destroyed and exhausted vast resources and their marine and terrestrial ecoscapes: the northwest Atlantic, the tall grass prairies, our forests and so-on, and the plunder continues. And we will have bequeathed, well, what?
Mountains and oceans of garbage, blighted landscapes, poisoned soils and water, polluted air and global warming.
Dave Milton, Grand Forks
