Even when it is playing out in the courts, the Maine Sunday Telegram is as silent as if it had lost its telegraphic code key that it taps out the news with. The Press Herald's voice is quite stopped up too, when it comes to news of those that would protect Wasumkeag , the beautiful wild island estuary complex.
Some of the editors and reporters there in the PPH/MST have grown old with their Sierran friends. Are Clubbers, themselves.
For it was Joan who sat through the many meetings of the Sears Island Joint Use Planning Committee as it wended its way through first its Joint use Plan, and then the line by line details of the perpetual conservation easement at meeting places in Searsport and occasionally in Augusta.
But it was a silent sitting, as Saxe peacefully dozed away the dreary hours of negotiations.
Meanwhile her henchperson Becky Bartovics -putatively representing the Penobscot Bay Alliance, but in actuality, given there IS no such Alliance, beyond a mailing list of donors and an executive director who occasionally pens the odd letter to an agency; in actuality, I say, Becky was effectively and hence inappropriately the voice of both her Alliance and the Sierra Club at the MDOT's Joint Use meetings. - while never consulting the thousands of members in the Maine Chapter of the Sierra Club -not once - during the years of negotiations with the MDOT's and industry's skilled negotiators.
Too much work. Too expensive, the Leadership intoned. Why harass Club members over a minor (MINOR?) thing like pi**ing on three decades of hard-fought Sierra Club precedents keeping the wild island whole and safe.
Like freely surrendering to the industrial hordes hundreds of acres of forest, meadow, cliffs, streams, beach, cobble & eelgrass.? Whatsa big deal?
Listen: do you hear that tiny hiss at the edge of hearing? It's the sounds of the late great John Muir, spinning, spinning, spinning in his grave.
1 comment:
Joan Saxe must have a political agenda that overrides conservation principles. Why else would she sacrifice the deepest reaches of Penobscot Bay for NEEDLESS industrialization? Let's not forget our friends at Coastal Mountain Land Trust and the Islesboro Land Trust either...maybe if we dug deeper, we'd find out that by agreeing with DOT, they're protecting their flock from taxation inquiries.
Where is the media asking the important questions like: what's a conservation preserve worth when it's next door to a port like the one we find in Newark NJ? and Why are we talking about building a new port when the re-vamped one at Mack Point is still under-utilized? and Who funded the study that says a new port would be useful in today's economy?
Post a Comment