I just returned from a several-hour snowshoe outing in our wonderful Yukon wilderness.
The sky was crystal blue and unfortunately the distant air was blue too! The entire time, I smelled the distinctive, putrid smell of burning plastic and a cocktail of other toxic fumes from the Carcross dump, which is more than 10 kilometres away.
The valley in the distance was filled with the blue smoke created by this burning. Your article Waiting to Inhale (the News, February 9) and the comments from the Department of Environment kept coming to mind as I tried not to concentrate on the gagging stench.
The statement that it would “cost too much and require too much regulatory change to stop burning” with regard to our dumps is shocking coming from the Department of Environment!
Is the department not there to protect our environment? Statements like that coming from an Environment official are scary. What price do we put on people’s health and the right to breathe clean air?
Would Pat Paslawski’s opinion change if he lived downwind of the dump? He is welcome to come by the dump when it is being burned and breathe deeply.
So where do we go from here? Do we close the hospitals because they “cost too much”? Do we go back to dumping our raw sewage in lakes and rivers because sewage treatment “costs too much”?
This is the 21st century, not the 19th century. What message is he sending on behalf of the Department of Environment?
Do people’s health and the health of the environment come second to spending money to deal with the garbage we created?
Maybe the Department of Tourism should post some photos on their website of the blue, toxic haze hanging in the valley east of Carcross and let the rest of the world see our pristine air quality!ÂÂ
Jim Schaefer
Via e-mail