Duck-and-Cover Generation
To the editor:
Growing up during the Cold War we children were assured that we’d be safe if we just hid from the atomic bomb. In school we practiced squatting against the cinder block wall and covering our heads from potential danger.
I grew up with that Duck-and-Cover mentality. The Vietnam war protests on my small college campus forced me to look up from my hiding place. Soon I understood why we were carrying a coffin with hundreds of names affixed. I understood that my classmates and I had a story to tell the world and nothing would get in our way. I stood up from my safe cover and asked questions and learned. Those in power discouraged our quest for truth, but we understood more than they wanted us to.
There is a term that offends me more than all the swear words ever uttered. “Trust me.” If someone says that I automatically think, I trusted you until you commanded me to do so. Those words alert me to the obvious counterpoint “but don’t trust the rest of what I say or do.”
John Martin appears to be one who, if not saying the words, infers them by his demeanor. I had always believed in the man. Until now. I don’t believe Mr. Martin and Mr. Irving are playing fair. One needed money, one shared money, and now the first has power in our legislature.
Trust me – This mining operation will in no way harm the water table of the Fish River water system. Trust me – J. D. Irving will be using a new type of mining that will for sure keep poisons out of the river. As a matter of fact, Trust Me – The levels of arsenic which are naturally occurring in Maine waters, will actually go down due to our high-tech water treatment.
I recall when nuclear energy plants were the cleanest form of electricity. “Trust me. There are so many safeguards in place, nothing could ever go wrong.” Then Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 – human error. The Soviet Union’s Chernobyl Reactor in 1986 — a combination of human error and deficiencies in design. And in 2011 Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi disaster – a tsunami – a natural occurrence impossible to foresee.
Our planet is in the throes of unpredictable change. Not enough rain on the west coast, too much rain on the east coast. New hurricane patterns, jet stream variations, record snowfalls. We just don’t know how the weather in our region may transform with possible catastrophic results even in the best-practices of mining operations. What once was safe, can revert overnight to catastrophe.
For an example of what could go wrong, one has only to look north to British Columbia at the Mount Polley open pit mine controlled by Imperial Mining (which is owned by billionaire N. Murray Edwards, a heavy contributor to the B.C. Liberal Party and B.C. Premier Christy Clark’s reelection. Sound familiar, Mr. Martin?) Studies indicate that the 2014 disaster, one of the biggest environmental disasters in modern Canadian history, developed in part from a layer of glacial till that had been unaccounted for by the company’s original engineering plan. It will take decades to see the full scope of the disaster as toxicants work their way up the food chain to aboriginal peoples. For now there will be lots of environmental abatement jobs for engineers involved in the monitoring and cleanup of the once pristine Quesnel Lake and its connecting waterways.
John Martin and so many others see the possibility of hundreds of jobs for a crippled Aroostook County economy. Population outmigration has reduced the ability of schools and municipalities to pay their bills. We need jobs. No doubt about that. But more importantly, we need to retain and preserve the riches we already have – namely clean water. When so much of the United States is crying for water, we are rich in it. And farmland. When food sources dry up in the west, Aroostook County has the potential of becoming a new breadbasket for our nation. But not without clean water.
We can’t afford to entrust our waters to any entity with an eye to material wealth. Our forefathers entrusted us with pristine waterways. Native Americans beg to regain control of earthly riches that were taken by force. Are we listening to the wisdom that comes to them from long before John Martin strolled through his backyard and pronounced that we should “Trust Him?” He assures us that no harm will come to our waters. I’d prefer to place my trust in People who are part of the spirit of the earth.
I’m sorry, Mr. Martin and Mr. Irving and the rest of your invested friends. I don’t believe it is within your power to generalize your belief that all will be fine if we just allow the mining of one mountain that happens to contain raw materials that we need for our myriad of electronic gadgetry. Should we not consider all possible consequences?
There’s maybe a 20-year lifespan for this money-making venture. And our grandchildren will be able to read in history books how families in Aroostook County used to pack a picnic lunch, take a canoe down the rivers, and pull fish into the boat to cook over a campfire for an evening meal. Those rivers, their fish, and even the safety of a swim will be no more. All because we, the Duck-And-Cover Generation, believed in the Powerful who said, “Trust me.”
Martie Pritchard
Chapman
