When do we wake up and smell the sewer?

To the Editor:

The very qualities that bind us to this area and make us rejoice over our magnificent county are at risk of being destroyed, along with our capacity to be self-sustaining. Nova Scotia is under siege.

Our beautiful shoreline in Digby Neck is being targeted for a rock quarry to build roads in the U.S. Like a bad disease, if this gets approval it has the potential to spread further along the Bay of Fundy and threaten the already struggling fishery along with the impact on quality of life and tourism.

The Avon Peninsula faces a similar threat with a 1,200-acre gypsum quarry that could ruin the watertable as well. The forests are being overharvested beyond sustainable levels, risking the same fate as our fisheries.

Our air quality has been diminished with the funnelling of carbon emissions from the States resulting in smog alert days. Nitrate levels exceed the standards in some Valley wells and the situation could get worse, according to some experts.

Our agricultural region - the economic crutch for the area with the best farmland in Eastern Canada - is on the fast track to disappearing. Despite Kings County being the only county in the province with a strategy to protect prime agricultural land, the door has been blown open to development proposals ever since the approval in 2006 of the Gerrits’ retirement home on farmland.

There are three huge proposals in the wings: 300 houses on 47 acres of prime land in Weston; residential and commercial development of 400 acres west of Wolfville; and a proposal, in waiting, for 200 houses on Collins Road in Port Williams.

And these projects are on ‘protected’ agricultural land. We can only imagine what’s happening elsewhere in the province.

They have a new buzz word for such developments, “cluster housing”, which is an attempt to make it more palatable when destroying good farmland. The Smart Growth concept which considers keeping denser populations in urban areas rather than urban sprawl onto farmland has not reached here yet.

Then there’s the aggregate industry exploiting our soils with so little control that areas under 10 acres can be extracted anywhere without an environmental assessment — under four acres, one doesn’t even need a permit.

We have the largest pit east of Quebec in Coldbrook and it keeps on expanding. One has to be concerned about the impact on the watertable.

There’s sand mining on prime agricultural land where the topsoil is set aside temporarily, a process which, according to soil expert Jack VanRostel, is very destructive to soil structure and its future capacity to grow crops.

The lack of vision by the province has resulted in millions being spent to twin the 101 so that more traffic can move more quickly, use more gas, produce more carbon emissions, develop more farmland when it’s expected that in 40 years the oil reserves will be gone along with the fish.

The province is focusing on environmental protection laws for wilderness areas, but ignoring legislation to protect farmland, and hence, our future food source when we can’t afford to import.

Global warming is threatening our very survival on the planet. We can do our bit by expressing outrage at the loss of our natural resources. It’s time to speak up and to sign those petitions that attempt to stop the destruction as we continue to extract, exploit, deplete, destroy, pollute and pave over our natural resources, all in the name of progress. When do we wake up and smell the sewer?

Leslie Wade

Coldbrook