Blatchley Party
Dear Editor: If you live in, visit, or breathe the air of Sitka, I’d like to thank you for your support of the Blatchley library and its programs these many years. Bring your family to Blatchley for what will be a feast, to be held Saturday, Aug. 11, from 5 to 7 p.m.
Stay a minute or until the end. Bring nothing!!!! No program or speeches. Just food, family, and the babble of voices! This is NOT a potluck! All eating restrictions and ethoses will be accommodated. The menu will include a bagel bar, chicken noodle soup, and Back Door carrot cake.
If you cannot make it before 7 p.m., join me for a campfire in the Blatchley garden from 7 to 8 p.m. S’mores will be made. Call me with any questions. Thank you.
Kari Sagel, 966-READ
Sitka Hospital
Dear Editors:I have to object to the discussion of Sitka Community Hospital as an entity, much as we would talk about a business. To the contrary. Our hospital is the conversation between a group of talented doctors. Much as we would not sell our school system, with its cadre of talented teachers, we cannot destabilize our doctors. Sure, their dialog needs financial support. That side of things must be managed. But Sitka has doctors who can’t just be switched out. I know that I am far from the only one who has had them make numerous critical decisions keeping us on the healthy side.
Whatever management choice the Assembly makes for our hospital, our talented doctors must be kept at home. After reading the discussion about all of the options, I support the option of leaving well enough alone. These doctors do a great job for us. We should tweak the business end until we get it to let us keep them.
John Welsh, Sitka
Roadless Rule
Dear Editor:Last Friday’s Sentinel reported how our congressional delegates are teaming up with the State of Alaska and the USDA Forest Service to do a complete makeover of the Roadless Rule on the Tongass.
The current rule is harmful, apparently, because it protects too much un-roaded and un-logged Federal land in this region. Our pols and public servants argue that replacing it with a new rule making it easier for loggers to cut more trees and for miners to dig up more minerals will make life sweet for us here in Sitka.
It seems to me that at this point in time, with summer temperatures rising off-the-charts around the globe, with oxygen-deficient oceanic dead-zones expanding, with huge wildfires spreading from mid to high-latitudes, and with thousands of acres of tropical forests being deliberately and methodically converted every day to grasslands and oil palm plantations, our elected and unelected government officials might want to take a minute or two to consider whether what they propose is really in the public’s best interest.
They need to reflect on the fact that Tongass old growth forests serve a critical ecological function by sequestering atmospheric carbon and producing, through photosynthesis, life-giving oxygen. And they need to ponder the reality that since forests elsewhere are disappearing fast, forests here are become even more important.
I’m sure Senator Murkowski and her associates would argue that turning a few more square miles of forests into clearcuts per year on the Tongass won’t make much difference to rising temperatures. And they’d be absolutely right…at least up to the rapidly approaching point in time when any and all efforts becomes futile. Until then, we need to protect all the standing forests we possibly can, and take a lot of other actions too.
The current gang of policymakers that we keep here in Alaska, plus the ones we send to D.C., don’t see the urgency of addressing the coming climate catastrophe because they won’t acknowledge the severity of the problem. They are all (or almost all) in denial. This needs to change.
Sitkans should reject their efforts to bulldoze the Roadless Rule and, instead, throw support behind a bill introduced into Congress by U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell called the “Roadless Area Conservation Act of 2018”, also referred to as “S. 3333 — A bill to provide lasting protection for inventoried roadless areas within the National Forest System.”
Then in the upcoming primaries and again in November, Sitkans need to get out and vote for candidates who are fully informed about climate change and willing to push for essential mitigation and adaptation policies immediately.
Joel Hanson, Sitka
