Learn from the past and change the future

To the Editor:

I am writing respectfully in response to Mr. Glen Hancock's article (The Kings County Advertiser, March 18, 2008).

The notion that "change is inevitable and we have to learn to live with it", regardless of its impact, implies that we have no control over what happens in our own communities; that we are doomed to follow the same path others have taken, regardless of the outcome we know will follow.

On the contrary, I believe we can, and must, learn from the mistakes of others and ourselves. Ontario is now struggling to save its remaining farmland because people are finally realizing that its value as agricultural land exceeds its value as developable real estate.

We in Kings County have an opportunity to avoid the same fate simply by respecting and following the county's own bylaws protecting agricultural land from development.

Other articles in the very same issue of your paper speak to the importance of agriculture in our community: the legacy of beekeepers after 50 years of effort and education; Acadia students embarking on a seasonal cookbook emphasizing local foods, producers and the ever-expanding ''buy local" movement; and, the local branch of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank facing the prospect of delivering 25 per cent less food to starving people throughout the world because of escalating world food prices while 16,000 children die daily from hunger and malnutrition-related illness.

I personally do not accept the notion that all change is inevitable. Rather, it is up to all of us to decide what we're willing to do to ensure that the changes we do make are positive ones, and that the decisions of today create a better world for tomorrow.

Audrey Haig-Stewart

Greenwich, N.S.