Ray Bates on trash in our environment: Our mission is to participate now and not burden future generations via our lack of actions to resolve the causes and effects of what soils our regions and destroys environments.
In March 2020 many often-overlooked truths abruptly entered into our lives; the one made abundantly clear was that we are in this together. We must support each other as we learn how to improve the conditions conducive to our collective wellbeing.
Ray Bates: “The dark underworld of falsehoods and conspiracies needs to be challenged with reasoned arguments. If we accept all the information that we are being fed as being factual and cease to examine its source or intent, I fear that our mutual day of reckoning looms large with unimaginable consequences.”
Ray Bates on COVID-19 lessons learned. “The first is the importance of an adequate health care system for all. The existing inadequacies and inequalities that have been jarringly exposed because of COVID-19 must be corrected and replaced with services that will enable us to defeat this pandemic and also to be ready for the next one when it rears its deadly head.”
Ray Bates: To move around our communities without the many negative possibilities caused by a nearness to traffic is a physical and mental health-enhancing factor that community decision makers need to recognize and work to develop.
“We must be extremely cautious with its endorsement of business proposals that allude to a mystical pot of gold and not be seduced by economic rhetoric. ” Ray Bates on how to revive rural Nova Scotia’s economy by attracting new residents and given current ones a reason to stay.
Ray Bates: “There was a period of time when one knew that a toilet would be required soon but for many of us the passing of years or medical conditions have drastically abbreviated the frequency need into a now-means-now.”
Ray Bates reflects on the new decade. “Long-term goals are being made in our immediate time frames where we have the most control. We must strive to make the right choices today to assist the right conditions tomorrow..”
Wherever he looks Ray Bates sees corporations exploiting Nova Scotia’s natural resources as if there is no tomorrow. This must stop, he writes.
“Northern Pulp’s proposal “to dump 62 million litres per day of treated waste into the rich fishing grounds of the the Northumberland Strait … is not any kind of a solution; it would be an environmental calamity,” writes Guysborough resident Ray Bates..