To the Editor,
Re: Are we holding onto our water?, editorial, June 11.
I happened to read the last paragraph of your editorial first and my eyeballs exploded, blood spurted everywhere as images of Richard Mitchell’s ‘worm in the brain’, danced freely before them. Read it in isolation and you might even share my chuckle.
Upon reading it entirely I was even more disappointed. It shows what I call mindless enviro-speak, the disease that is destroying our modern world. You list a problem and apparently, can only conclude that we need to reduce, etc.
Your editorial reads as if from a modern environmentalist: halt development, stop using the world’s resources and don’t waste anything.
Sadly, we ignore that human life has an overwhelming ‘man-built’ flavour. Opening a tap to get water, having a driveway and a car to wash, and flushing a toilet, all things that began in the mind of a human being. Those things did not exist in nature.
Our solution to a shortage of fresh, drinkable water follows the same path, technology.
Recently the Israelis have been desalinating water profitably for some 50 cents per cubic meter, a price that rivals trapping and purifying streams. Using well-designed nuclear power, another unlimited source of energy, also mindlessly opposed by the ‘greens’, would reduce the cost still further.
Have you forgotten that we live on ‘the water planet’? Even more, have you forgotten that you’re using a computer, one technology, to complain about a different technology, delivered drinking water?
In a world with more people, more human inventiveness is the answer, not a full scale reduction in human happiness through denial of using the earth’s bounty to support human life.
I trust you’ve not accepted the radical environmentalist viewpoint, that significant numbers of humans need to be eliminated to re-balance the world.
Gary Seinen,
Port Alberni
