My Vision for Lebanon
My vision of the city of Lebanon may vary from what some people seem to have.
I envision driving to the Lebanon Village Marketplace via the backside of the fire station and not having to dodge all of the potholes.
I envision being able to turn on the tap in my kitchen sink and being able to drink the water that runs from it; yet the rate charged to users seems to keep going up.
I envision driving in Lebanon and not seeing police vehicles pulled in driveways investigating dealers of heroin.
I also envision the City Council hiring city managers to work while they are getting paid.
Lastly, I envision being able to read the Valley News opinion pages without letters about the never-ending Co-op saga.
Dorothy Hood
Lebanon
The Real Obstacle to Peace
It’s unfortunate that Alv Elvestad (“Peace Process Fails,” March 31) is either oblivious to or unwilling to acknowledge important facts concerning the Palestinian propaganda he cites. First, Elvestad needs to recognize Palestinian efforts from 1948 to the present to destroy Israel and exterminate its Jews rather than really trying to make peace.
From 1948 to 1969 there were no “settlements,” but unprovoked terrorist attacks by Palestinians and surrounding Arab countries, killing thousands of Israelis. Numerous Israeli attempts to make peace with the Palestinians were spurned. Elvestad claims that the amount of land consumed by “settlements” prevents formation of a Palestinian state. Nonsense! Built-up “settler” areas constitute 1.7 percent of West Bank land and the total occupied land is around 6 percent. Palestinians have always said no to peace. No less than Bill Clinton and Dennis Ross accused Yassir Arafat of walking away from a peace deal meeting almost all Palestinian demands, including 95 percent West Bank land and all of Gaza.
Elvestad claims that the two populations are of similar size and that Palestinians’ birth rate is much higher than Israelis’. Today Jewish Israel has a birth rate of 3.0 per woman (highest in the developed world), and the Palestinian birthrate has dropped below the Jewish birth rate. Moreover, Israel’s high immigration rate due in part due to virulent anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere and the Palestinian emigration rate are resulting in significant Israeli population increases and Palestinian population decreases.
Peace will not come until Palestinians stop their attempts to obliterate the state of Israel and until they stop claiming the land of Israel.
Elvestad’s last ridiculous claim is that the U.S. won’t be able to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians because of its support for Israel. This is hugely contradicted by past successes in brokering peace between Egypt and Israel and between Jordan and Israel. Given the large sums paid by the U.S. to both the Palestinians and Israel, no other country has the leverage and world standing to help broker peace.
Stuart Richards
Norwich
Future of Our Shared Landscape
Last Saturday, on a beautiful April morning, 175 people filled the Nugget Theater to capacity to see The Messenger, a documentary about bird survival in our changing world. While the film concluded on a sobering note, it encouraged us all to participate in conservation. If we each join in, we can help guide the future of our shared landscape.
Here in Hanover, protected lands from the Connecticut River to Moose Mountain provide essential habitat for migrating and breeding birds. Our sincere thanks to Linde McNamara, who sponsored the film’s showing and had the vision to bring this important message closer to home. And the screening would not have been possible without the support of the Hanover Improvement Society, which made the Nugget available to us.
Ann Munves Malenka
Education Committee Chair
Hanover Conservancy
Dubious Claims About Chemicals
I found the letter from “The Dartmouth Professor of Chemistry,” Gordon W. Gribble, Ph.D., to be insulting to the author of another letter and to the Valley News audience. Gribble states he has written letters to the Valley News starting in 1983 and continuing until 1989 to support the use of Krenite S, one of the several herbicides being used by Green Mountain Power to kill “weeds and scrub trees under power lines.” Well, this is 2016, and I just looked at the precautions required when applying this harmless chemical, and, as with so many other Dow products, it seems to have changed its stripes. It is not “harmless to animals” as Gribble insists.
Twenty years ago before Monsanto (Roundup and Rodeo) and Dow had enough evidence-based research to claim the safety of glyphosate, which is used in all GMO industrial farming, they insisted it, too, had a “short life” and was not harmful to anything.
If people have doubt about these herbicides that the Ph.D. recommends, please inform yourselves by reading about how to “handle them when applying” and how to keep them out of the food chain.
Thank you, James Minnich. I had received a notice from Green Mountain Power and fortunately kept it. When you wrote your letter, I called GMP immediately and was amazed to hear back at 5 on Monday morning. Despite the hour, everyone was cheerful — reassurances were given. No spraying is needed anywhere near my organic hay fields, and I wish it didn’t need to be done anywhere.
Charlotte Metcalf
Norwich