Opinion

Letters to the Editor

Secretive corridor project already doing damage

To the Editor:
    Recently, I participated in an all-day sidewalk picket on June 16 outside the Cianbro headquarters in Pittsfield. From 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., scores of us from 19 different towns took turns holding our signs that communicated to Cianbro Construction Corporation the general message: “Cease & Desist: Withdraw Your East-West Corridor Plan.”

    Residents across the middle of Maine have suffered this threat for the past two and a half years with no details divulged by Cianbro concerning this secretive project.
    Over a year ago, Cianbro CEO Peter Vigue stated in public that a town that objected to the Corridor would not be traversed by it.
    Many towns since have strongly shown their objection by passing moratoriums and ordinances and opposition among Maine citizens continues — and is growing.
    Yet, Vigue and his PR people persist in saying that this private multi-purpose corporate project is moving forward without any documented data that suggests that the State of Maine would benefit.
    Meantime, in a widespread region along the likely Corridor track, property values are dropping, people have postponed property improvement projects, a few residents are even moving away and others are choosing to not buy land here at all.
    The threat of this vague and forbiddingly huge and unprecedented project is truly blighting our region and upsetting our lives in a profound way. If this project actually becomes a reality, Maine will never recover its unique character and autonomy
    It is time that Cianbro withdraw its ill-conceived and destructive plan that is designed to service Canadian corporate interests.
    If Canada wants a corridor, it should be built in the country of Canada. Maine should not be a sacrifice zone to enable Canadian corporations to accumulate wealth at our expense.
    Andi Vigue, the current president of Cianbro and son of Peter Vigue, responded to the sidewalk picket when questioned by a Ch. 5 WABI reporter by saying that “the project is in its final phase of development.”
    You may hear all Andi Vigue’s comments on YouTube as well as WERU Radio interviews of some of the picket participants who can be heard accompanied by a slide show of the picket.
    Go to YouTube and type in “cianbro picket” to access both of these very informative pieces.

Sidney Mitchell
Dover-Foxcroft

 

American progress not so good for agriculture

To the Editor;
    10,000 years ago a cycle of glacier collapse led to the melting of the North American glaciers, which at that time extended as far south as to a point said to have been south beyond the present location of St. Louis, Missouri.
    Where the glacier had existed there then remained a gravel pit from coast to coast, where nothing would grow until a rich layer of soil had been reproduced, and from whence came this soil, in recent years called by Americans, the Breadbasket of the World, up until the 1940s, when I was in grammar school.
    Mindless, harmless, natural recycling of animal wastes made it possible, but it took 10,000 years to produce agricultural land, by free ranging birds and animals — millions of buffalo, billions of passenger pigeons.
    The American Indians were nomadic, constantly moving, so their culture was harmless to natural soil processes.
    When the Neo-European invasion moved west, having destroyed farm soils on the East Coast by ignoring their depletion practices, the rich soil reported then in the mid-West has been claimed to measure up to seven feet in depth, as documented by the farmers who established cemeteries in which to bury their dead.
    Since that time the depletion of farmland by mechanized agriculture, the replacement of draft animal manure by tractor exhaust, has badly depleted soil to the point that chemical fertilizers are necessary in order to produce a crop.
    Meanwhile, and during recent times, machinery has developed oil and coal, the automobile, electric power plants, flying machines — all fueled also by fossil fuels.
    A core group has organized, calling themselves Republicans, and has made themselves very wealthy, able to purchase political power, the Koches and the Bushes.
    They are less than 1 percent of all the people, and each one is capable of producing only a pint and a half of NPK fertilizer per day in the form of human urine, a very effective plant growth stimulant.
    But by means of pipe and pure water the people convey their human wastes to American rivers, and thus into the seas, corrupting the waters and warming the seas, in the process filling the oceans with great masses of solid waste. Meanwhile since 1928 the U.S. population has swollen by six times on the diminishing nutrients agriculture has wrested from distant soils.
    Soon, very soon, the Greedy Political Ones will be using their money to buy foods that the Common People cannot afford, and the people will turn on the rich and destroy them, but to no avail, for the rich will have exhausted the Earth’s ability to support human life. Even unto the tar sands.
    Life must have started at different times throughout the Universe, some earlier, some not yet. Is this why we have never heard words of warning from planets like ours with communications capacities. Is progress (aka greed) always a killer?
    To fertilize your garden with your urine, it should be diluted 20:1. Urine is usually sterile when emitted. Interested? Check out SUSANA, the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance.

Charles MacArthur
Sangerville

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