To the Expositor:
While vacationing on the Island a few weeks ago, I read with interest the editorial of July 31, 2013 about the building of additional industrial wind turbines on Manitoulin.
If I were to choose one word to describe the content of this editorial, it would be the adjective sophomoric, to be understood in its plain meaning of shallow, immature, and juvenile. I say this because I live in a community in which a compliant municipal council welcomed the hucksters of green energy, which led to the building of more than 150 wind turbines with more to come, in an area much smaller than Manitoulin, known as the Municipality of Chatham-Kent. The result has been that property values here have fallen, there has been an increase in reports of people suffering mental and physical difficulties and sadly the building of the turbines has caused a sense of enmity amongst many members of the community.
The jobs created in building the turbines were temporary and many of them went to workers from outside the community and as for the industry that was expected to follow in the turbines’ wake, we are still waiting 10 years later.
The moral of the story is that the citizen who placed and paid for the full page ad which prompted your editorial should not be held up to ridicule but listened to. In case I have not made myself clear, I think your editorial of July 31 was a cheap, shabby shot concerning a subject about which you have little knowledge let alone the competence to understand. If the building of the turbines proceeds, it will bring grave harm to a beautiful part of the world.
At least you have partially fulfilled Tom Paine’s saying on your mast head, “who dares not offend cannot be honest” by offending in the interest of a qualified sense of honesty.
Jim Stevenson Ridgetown
