The worthiest enemy of authoritarianism is authority. But who are the authoritative heroes available to us, and to the younger generations in particular? Who speaks a truth that everyone can get behind?
The rules are part of President Trump’s vast environmental deregulation agenda aimed largely at eliminating rules the fossil fuel industry finds burdensome.
How will we, as a community of creative, thoughtful and diversely capable individuals, respond to the circumstances at hand? How will we invest in a greener, healthier, more equitable future?
The things that attract young telecommuting families are changed by their coming, and in an effort to accommodate them, we create the things they travelled here to escape.
The move to repeal the water bottle ban was so controversial that the special town meeting attracted upwards of 100 more residents than had attended the Annual Town Meeting on May 7.
In her letter to the editor, Marcia Arland writes: “Plastic is cheap to produce and convenient. But what is not figured into this equation is the overall cost to consumers, communities, the environment.”
Not everyone enjoys separating trash, rinsing cans and bottles and loading their cars with plastic film bags for their next trip to town. We get that. And we don’t want to be finger-wagging scolds. We try to build team spirit.
Developer Jeffrey Cohen says the town should deal with the property no matter who eventually develops it since it will require the town’s capacities in both finding funding and shouldering liability for the legacy of dry cleaning chemicals that are still migrating across town in groundwater.
In his letter to the editor, William Foster writes: “I feel that the recommendation for the road to be one-way is very short sighted. The people that have built this town to be the “Best Small Town in America” have done so with few problems using the lake road.”
“I feel that GE is just one in thousands of corporations that are doing the exact same thing to land and to rivers all across the world. We here have our small part to play in that big fight which is to stand up for our land and our water and the respect for humanity.”
--- Pooja Prema, an organizer of the Mega March against PCB dumps
We should rescue the Housatonic and clean it as we have never in all the years thought before of cleaning it, and seek to restore its ancient beauty; making it the center of a town, of a valley, and perhaps — who knows -- of a new measure of civilized life.
“As a property owner in a beautiful little town there’s nothing I’d rather see than that property cleaned up. That’s helps my property value, it helps the town.” -- Mike Arnoff, owner of property adjacent to Ried Cleaners on Main Street.
In the meantime, an environmental report says postal workers exposed to basement air are at “chronic risk” due to naphthalene, tetrachloroethylene (PCE) and trichloroethylene (TCE).
