Pride and gratitude
EDITOR: I had an opportunity to attend the August 7, Tuesday night meeting of the Sebastopol City Council. I was impressed by the dedication and sincerity of each of the council members, and with what careful and intelligent consideration they gave to each agenda item. When you consider how hard these volunteers work and how many hours of service they give to their communities without pay, one can’t but feel pride and gratitude.
When you consider that these remarkable community gatherings happen all over this country every day in the exercise of democracy, it’s extraordinarily comforting. Whatever hard time we might be going through as a nation, our core is strong, very strong.
The traditions of democracy — public participation in decision making, equal opportunities to hear and be heard by our elected representatives, paid and volunteer — remain unfazed by targeted efforts to degrade our democracy from without and from within our borders. I suggest that anyone who is despairing of what is happening to our country right now attend a council meeting in their home town or county. We ain’t broke, not even close.
HolLynn D’Lil
Graton
Dishonest pretext
EDITOR: The White House and the Department of Interior are using the fires in California as a dishonest pretext to give the timber industry the green light to loot our public lands. The claim is that the fires are the result of too many trees.
Their solution is to “thin” our forests, by which they mean to clear cut them. By this logic, turning forests into deserts is the ideal way to prevent forest fires. Their plan is to actually pay timber companies to take our valuable resources; talk about adding insult to injury.
The reality, though, is that none of the fires that have been so devastating to California have started in forests. They have started in brush lands where there is indeed too much dry fuel. Some thinning or prescribed burning of dense understory can certainly help in reducing the risk of fire, but any such work must preserve the integrity of the forests.
The most important factor in this is to leave the oldest and largest trees; they function as shelter and seed stock for younger trees; they are the most valuable to a healthy forest ecosystem, as well as absorbing the most carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, they are also the most valuable to the timber companies.
At a time when climate change is demonstrably increasing the severity and frequency of wild land fires, it would be sheer folly to reduce California forests’ ability to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Larry Robinson
Sebastopol
Thorough!
EDITOR: I just read your article on the town hall. Well done! As I wasn’t there, I really appreciated such thorough coverage. Now I’m eagerly awaiting the SW report on last night’s SWMC meeting. I hope it is as thorough.
Walter Muelken
Sebastopol
From our comments section
REGARDING OUR COVERAGE OF THE HOSPITAL
How many times must all of the taxpayers in the District go through this insanity? Notify the State that the hospital will close in 30 days, and then see if the interested parties come to the table. There are too many loose ends that need to be clarified before anything else can be done. History has proven time and again, there can be no successful negotiations with a gun (the unknown) to the District’s proverbial head. Continuing to muddle along only prolongs the agony and leads to poor decisions. Stop trying to save face, and do the right thing!
David Warburg
Sebastopol
