MAPPING DISASTER

Thanks to Zachary Stahl for the excellent piece detailing the Salinas Valley pesticide use map. When the Moss Landing farm adjacent to our neighborhood decided to utilize methyl bromide and telone, use was rubberstamped and the original buffer zone, as set by the MC Ag CommissionerEricLauritzen’s office,included our front yards. This was later changed to the middle of ouronly access road. While their website says that they “protect the environent and public welfare,” the MC Ag Commissioner seems to have just the opposite agenda – to legitimatize restricted-use fumigants to the fullest in any geographical circumstance. Unfortunately, the real results of this promotion won’t be seen until someone produces a cancer map of the county in 2025.

Our future and our county’s agricultural future can only be furthered by responsible farming.

ORD-NANCE WARS

Thanks for your article about the Sanctioned Army Arsons at Fort Ord. I made the mistake of moving into student housing at a college on Fort Ord in the summer of 2008. Now I knew I was moving on to a former army base. However, I did not know until it was too late that there were legally sanctioned arsons on the base. (There was no warning of the burns to prospective students at the school’s orientation session I attended.)

I mentioned on an Internet bulletin board on campus how the unhealthful air impacted those with breathing problems. One staff member replied that “I could leave if I did not like it.” Another simply referred me to a link to some Army document stating that burning was the “most effective way” to remove unexploded ordnance. I’m sorry, but anything published by the Department of Defense in between 2001-’08, I’m going to look at with a very jaundiced eye. This is the same DOD that was manufacturing excuses to invade Iraq.

Now even if burning is truly the best way to remove unexploded ordnance and actually does not cause more harm than good, the Army will no longer provide hotels or relocation assistance during controlled burns. At the semester end, I moved off campus in a New York second so that my wife, who has asthma, would not be subjected to any more poisonous air.

There is probably not a lot I or anyone else can do about the Army’s chosen method of ordnance removal. Therefore, people from families with respiratory issues should not live on or near Fort Ord. Next time I will be far more careful about where I choose to receive an “education.”

ON THE OTHER HAND…

I see that the Fort Ord Community Action Group is hard at work trying to find an issue for its latest solution, a resolutionto find that the base’s cleanup process is a failure.

But, I question the group’s process, which has to make a recommendation to the state and the feds, but has yet to gather and evaluate all theinformation and data needed to makea valid recommendation.