Dear Editor,
With regard to Mr. Tom Fletcher’s right-wing anti-environmental rant in the April 16 Spotlight.
I would like to point out we all have a lot to thank environmentalists for, cleaner air and cleaner fresh water for starters.
That they haven’t been more successful has not been for a lack of trying.
Sadly they have been thwarted repeatedly by the obfuscations of extremely well funded corporate lobbyists with very deep pockets.
Patrick Moore is quoted in this article. He was a UBC ecology student at the time he joined Greenpeace in 1971.
He had grown up in a logging camp on the West Coast at Winter Harbour.
Mr. Moore was very much a staunch member in the anti-nuclear and anti-whaling campaigns, and was right out there on the front line throughout all of that.
It seems that his dissension came about the time when Greenpeace decided to take on the poor practices of the West Coast logging industry.
You state that wild salmon are three to five times as contaminated as farmed salmon.
What a sad fact that the oceans are so grossly contaminated with PCBs, mercury and hundreds of other contaminants, not to mention the huge Pacific gyre of plastic fragments, also vast amounts of plastic that wash up on Caribbean beaches.
We also have dead zones of considerable size, increased acidification, and an increase in the number of jelly fish, while many fish stocks dwindle.
All of the sad facts above might not be true if we had paid more attention to those “dummy environmentalists.”
Those vilified groups - such as Greenpeace, David Suzuki Foundation, The Sea Shepard Society - have been attempting to bring about a livable atmosphere and waters for every living creature riding around on this planet for over 35 years.
That would include Tom Fletcher and Patrick Moore I believe.
Too quote a great slogan of The BC Lung Association “If you cannot breather, nothing else matters. ”
Jim Hodge
Princeton