‘Letter to the Editor’ Archives
Letter to the editor: Garbage!
By MYRTLE LARSON Myrtle Larson was approximately 80 years old and lived on 16th Avenue near 28th Street when she wrote this letter. The new Garbage Transfer Station was never built. “Over fifty years ago I took a course in Chemistry at the University of Minnesota. The professor who taught the course was Dr. I. William Geiger. He was very special. He was a dedicated conservationist and environmentalist. He taught us that waste materials could be transformed into useful products. One such product is methanol which could be used for energy to run automobiles. We asked him why methanol was not being produced then and he said, “Oh, I suppose it is easier just to drill a hole in the ground and pump the oil out.” And, of course, he taught us that waste could be transformed into fertilizer to return to the soil. And so, we have been pumping out our precious deposits of fossil fuel at an alarming rate---not only for gasoline but for myriads of other things. [...]
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 [...]
