Dear Editor,

Imagine that you owned a river. Not a piddly puddle but a big powerful body of moving water such as . . .

the Ottawa. Maybe the King of England or France gave it to your long gone ancestors for favours to the Crown. Over the generations it has been divvied up and resold so that there’s scarcely a foot of riverfront land that isn’t privately owned. Still, the river, the water that runs through it, the air that moves over it, the transportation that it affords, is owned by those who live near enough to actually go there and make use of it.

There’s a concept that I find strange, that if someone owns a piece of land, they can do whatever they feel like doing and it’s nobody else’s business. If land were a static thing, then that could be held true. But that’s not the reality, plants and animals, water and air, move around according to their organic needs, sometimes regardless of who holds paper on a theoretically rectangular patch of land surface. So, if you and I own the river, how should we look after it?

I don’t think it’s a good idea to put materials we don’t feel safe to keep and handle near the shore, knowing that the land inevitably drains toward the river and that once pollution hits the water it’s nearly impossible to ever have clean water afterward. So, we should be circumspect, even extremely so, before new perils are introduced. It’s enough that there are stashes of unknown substances already dumped in many locations. Maybe they are innocuous, non-harmful substances or maybe people didn’t recognize those hazards when they were stashed there, or just maybe they were unscrupulous villains who could make money by ‘getting rid’ of waste and the people who had made the waste didn’t bother to know where it was going.

There are proposals to establish new landfill beside an old one at the Pontiac Industrial Park, and a plan to collect and shallow bury nuclear waste upstream at Chalk River. Neither of those plans seem to me to be well-enough thought-out, so I lose sleep over thinking about a future where the river is no longer safe and I can’t afford a ticket to another planet. So, folks, what do you think about this? Should we say go ahead, stash away and we’ll figure out later if it was a good idea or not? I’m just trying to get the most return from my share of this river we own.

Robert Wills

Shawville and Thorne, Que.