Re: “Sewage pollution too high: groups,” Oct. 4.Yet again, we have environmental groups showing us how our sewage is harming the environment, along with a plea to forge ahead with the current Capital Regional District plan.
For several years, these groups have made it abundantly clear that you are either for this plan or you are against ocean ecosystems. In this black-and-white thinking, where is the space for those environmentalists like me who strongly support sewage treatment but think the current plan is ill-designed?
There clearly is none. They have no time for critical examination, no time for neighbourhood impacts, no time for those who come to the CRD with solutions that could treat sewage to a higher standard for a similar or better price.
The result is that while we pro-treatment advocates argue with each other in this “for it or against it” dichotomy, the CRD keeps trucking along with its unexamined plan; old-school secondary treatment dumped without proper consultation in Victoria’s lowest-income neighbourhood, ignoring our interconnected sewage and storm drain pipes and refusing to look at modern technology.
Those of us who want sewage treatment should not be on opposing sides. We all want to stop fouling the ocean. We have common enemies, and they are poor leadership, bad planning and crappy project management. If we continue to ignore these, all of us, citizens and ocean creatures, will lose in the end.
Meagan Klaassen
Esquimalt
