Aldo Leopold, a father of American land conservation, reminds us, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”

We are in danger of losing our breakfast, lunch and dinner if Garfield County commissioners approve a zoning change requested by Bedrock Resources to rezone rural land to industrial next to the region’s largest organic farm, Eagle Springs Organic Farm in Silt. We ask our county commissioners to obey the existing land use resolution which, requires them not to approve the zoning change.

The Unified Land Use Resolution (2007) 7-103 requires that the “nature, scale and intensity of the proposed use be compatible with adjacent land uses and will not result in adverse impact to adjacent land.”

---

---

Further, section 7-201 clarifies the protection of agricultural lands by stating, “Land use changes on land adjacent to or directly affecting agricultural operations shall not adversely affect, or otherwise limit the viability of existing agricultural operations.”

For the existing asphalt plant Bedrock operates on rented land, the company divulged that it emits 1.9 tons of particulate matter, 3.3 tons of nitrogen oxide, 0.93 tons of volatile organic compounds, 5.81 tons of carbon monoxide and 1.69 tons of sulphur dioxide each year.

---

---

With the prevailing west winds in that area, those 13.63 tons of emissions would blow directly towards the most valuable 155 acres of Eagle Springs’ certified organic farm and directly towards the people who live east of it and all along County Road 346.

We need farmers who invest millions of dollars in their properties, as Eagle Springs’s owner has done with solar panels to power his greenhouses, to know that their investment to provide the rest of us with our breakfast in a healthy, safe manner is secure.

We need Eagle Springs’s food available to us, not a polluting industry in land long designated for agriculture. County commissioners, we ask you to do the right thing, and allow this region in consideration to remain rural and healthy.

Illene Pevec

Carbondale

In his Feb. 21 letter, “Why religion has no place in politics,” R. W. Boyle calls on “the women of America” – all of whom apparently are clamoring for free, government-sponsored contraception – to emulate Aristophanes’ comic heroine Lysistrata in order to bring religion-obsessed Republican men to their knees.

No modest proposal, this! Alas, the scheme won’t work.

The sex strike conducted by Lysistrata’s Athenian women succeeded only because they were joined in solidarity by a contingent of Spartan women led by Lampito – a strapping gal whose counterpart in contemporary American culture is that mama grizzly from the wilds of northern Idaho and Alaska who is packing heat (if not a Glock, then raw female vitality) named Sarah Palin.

Somehow I don’t see the legions of American women who identify with Palin joining in common cause with liberal Democrats in their war on pregnancy.

Indeed, in the real world in which Aristophanes lived, the Athenians, after bankrupting their treasury, eventually succumbed to the Spartans.

May history repeat itself.

Chad Klinger

Carbondale