WHERE ARE THE BIKE RACKS DOWNTOWN?
Editor:
Where are the bike racks downtown?rnSince last fall I have made it a point to participate in lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
One of my contributions is to bike to work and to do my shopping downtown on my bicycle on a regular basis.
The town is certainly not accommodating to bicyclers. I haven't found a bike rack anywhere, except the grocery stores!rnIf the town continues to allow more big development, the traffic congestion in the summer is going to be a major problem.
Why not support people that think GREEN. Put up bike racks all over town please!
Katharina RiedenerrnOsoyoos
— (OSOYOOS TIMES — August 29, 2007)
[b]INVESTIGATE GE FOODS[/b]
Editor:
This is a response to two recent challenges in the Times to the bills tabled in Parliament by Alex Atamanenko, the NDP Agriculture Critic. The bills in question are C-448 to ban terminator seed technology in Canada, and C-456 to require mandatory labeling of all genetically modified ingredients in food, since GMOs (genetically modified organisms) are found in a majority of processed food in grocery stores.
Atamanenko's Bills tabled in Parliament are not partisan ploys to scare people or to create irresponsible labeling spending sprees, as both Conservative critics suggest and imply.
It is of importance to everyone regardless of party affiliation to be well informed about these bills that seek to protect people from what we are unknowingly putting into our bodies, and with ensuring that farmers, at least in Canada, can continue to grow and to harvest their own natural seeds.
There is a big difference between GE (genetically engineered) and conventional breeding methods, and it is ignorant and dishonest to position that the difference is only one of efficiency.
GE foods can be created by gene deletion and gene manipulation, methods that cannot occur in conventional breeding methods. The GE methods are called recombinant DNA technology. Information about this technology and its effects and dangers to consumers of whatever political stripe or persuasion can be found by anyone on the Internet.
It is easy to test your doubts and to satisfy curiosity by Googling, for instance, soy and genetic engineering, tomato and genetic engineering, or trees and genetic engineering, or terminator seed technology, or insulin and genetic engineering, or however you want to put your question.
You can then compare some facts with the critics' obviously partisan, largely misinformed or spun common sense positions.
For instance, to support his political stance against the Bills in question because, he says, there is nothing to fear from genetic engineering, one critic refers to the benefits of Humulin for diabetics. That is highly misleading. Humulin is the human insulin whose production depends on genetic engineering (GE) techniques that do not introduce unrelated species of genes from animals or plants into the human DNA.
Techniques are methods and methods are indeed useful in genetic research. Engineering, however, is a human power idea. Engineers seek to create modified foods by transferring foreign genes into a natural species' DNA, as is being done for instance to strawberries and to tomatoes by splicing fish genes into them, to make them frost resistant. (Fishberry is a name already current. What can one call a fishy tomato?)rnIt would take too long here to go into the urgent reasons for banning terminator seed technology. The technology means: the intent to produce seeds that will not germinate. I leave you to figure out how that will help to feed the world.
The reader can become informed about work for terminator seeds through various websites, most especially ETCgroup.org/upload/publication/pdf_file 635, and also the Sierra Club, Mothers for Natural Law, and others, One does not have to be a member (I'm not) to appreciate the public-spirited and honest information at such sites.
It is of no use to seek full and un-spun information from Monsanto or other agribusiness giants, or from reluctant regulatory agencies. Was it useful to seek information about lung cancer from the tobacco companies?
One of the debunkers of Atamanenko's bills quotes a nameless plant breeder at the Univ. of Sask. Crop Development Centre, who says point blank that social concerns should not impede progress. In other words, that people don't matter. (That man deserves to be fired.) Clever technological engineering feats aren't automatic progress for humanity. If the natural-to-species quality of the DNA in the food people eat has been tampered with, that is indeed a social concern, and people need to be told, at least on labels. The same critic claims we're concerned with what's in our food, not how it was produced, as if there is a difference. How food is produced is what determines what's in it.
Anna Vakar, Oliverrn& Alice Rix, Penticton
— (OSOYOOS TIMES — August 29, 2007)
