‘Letter to the Editor’ Archives
Letter to the community: Corrected Minneapolis water facts
To all this Concerns: I commend the STEP-UP interns who worked with the Backyard Community Health Hub this past summer and for your in-depth study of water this summer! (Water is life: Drink and live, Sept 2019 issue) I believe that Water is the foundation of all wellbeing, so I am very grateful that you brought forward many ways of Water”™s importance to the functioning of our bodies. I also like that you made a strong case against the preposterous popularity of Water sold in plastic bottles. Thank you so much for this good work you have done. Unfortunately, there is a mistake in the blue box of “Additional Water Facts & Sources” that might lead readers to think that bottled water is cleaner than tap water, and I think that is not your intention. In this box of facts, you have the question. How often does tap water get tested??? The answer in your box says simply: “Tap water is tested roughly every year in the Twin Cities.” In [...]
Letter to the community: Pesticide pollution is perplexing: Arsenic 1938 to 2019
The StarTribune article entitled “Superfund Site Mostly Clean,” Aug. 1, 2019, B1, page 1, is incomplete and leaves questions unanswered. For example, reporting that there are only nine property owners who refused soil testing does not tell the whole story.Though the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is tracking this, the number of properties refusing testing puts the onus or blame on the property owners as if they are the only problem remaining. When the EPA tested a total of 472 yards, it refused to test outside a three-quarter mile radius of the original site of contamination at 28th and Hiawatha. This three-quarter mile parameter limits our knowledge of how far out arsenic soil contamination extends. So, we do not have a true measure of how far out and how many properties are still contaminated with arsenic. In addition, the StarTribune article refers to East Phillips alone, as if the wind only blew [...]
Letter to the community: Don”™t go down the path of ugliness
I am a former 13-year resident of Phillips, during which time I was an activist and sometime-contributor to the Alley. When I saw “The Rand Report” I thought: Another interesting column. On reading further, I was saddened. The piece is a classic rant, full of angry statements backed up by unsubstantiated or non-existent evidence. (Sound familiar these days?) For example: “The Irish, as indentured servants, were worked to death with greater frequency than slaves.” Since at the time, Africans were counted as 4/5 of a person, it would be hard to calculate this even if there were any figures.  I have all good feeling for Irish people and Irish culture, and know they were badly mistreated by people who had immigrated to America before them, but were there any Irish chattel slaves (meaning that they and their offspring were property of the master)? Any Irish-aimed Jim Crow laws? Any laws written to discriminate against the Irish in banking, [...]
