Your September 21 edition published a letter from Austin Byrne in Kitimat lecturing our municipal government and telling Nelsonite protestors against the Gateway pipeline to keep Nelson “noses out of the business” of another community.
Further in the same edition, True Religion columnist Reverend Simpson quotes this definition of community: “Spiritual and mental condition of knowing that the place is shared, a revealing juxtaposition, for sure.
Is humanity’s habitat a community? I think it is. Byrne thinks we cannot legitimately express an opinion about a morally-bankrupt idea for development in another part of BC than our own town. If that’s true, we are in trouble. What happens in another place than my own backyard will always concern conscious people.
Is my backyard perfect? Of course not, but I do fight against Nelson being “developed” by Neanderthal notions of growth and prosperity (Red Sands perhaps) and that gives me the right to protest the same pathology among developer minds everywhere, in Kitimat or Alberta, Africa or the Arctic.
That is my understanding of being a planetary citizen and how I contribute to constructing the global “noosphere” or gaia-mind.
C. H. Jeanes
Nelson