Friends of Green Cove respond to criticism

I am writing in respectful response to Ray Stapleton’s spirited ‘Guest Shot’ (In Defense of the Never Forgotten National Memorial, July 27). Mr. Stapleton claims that our group is opposed to the ‘Mother Canada’ project in large part because we erroneously believe Green Cove to lie within a ‘ Wilderness Zone’ in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park. Not so. Our oft-repeated view, shared by all 28 of the retired senior Parks Canada managers whose Open Letter he cites, is that all zones of all national parks are protected from all development damaging to first their ecological, and then their commemorative, integrity. As a wide range of independent scien- tists and other experts agree, the ‘ecological integrity’ of Green Cove will be forever shattered by sending in, to cite p. 14 of the draft Detailed Impact Analysis, the “excavators”, “cranes”, “drilling trucks”, “graders”, “bulldozers”, “compaction rollers” and “paving and curbing machinery” needed to “prepare” the site for its concrete-and-steel transformation. And in the process of construction (destruction), the capacity of both the natural and human worlds to tell their stories (to preserve their ‘commemorative integrity’) will likewise be shattered. Mr. Stapleton mentions, for instance, the importance of Green Cove to a Mi’kmaq storyteller like Tuma Young. I refer him to Tuma’s extraordinary recent study L’nuwi’teytasik Ke’kanakweje’ka’tik: Thinking About the Mi’kmaq Use of the Green Cove Area (available at http://www.friendsofgreencove.ca) which concludes that the ‘Mother Canada’ development would be both ecologically and culturally devastating.

Sincerely, Sean Howard Spokesperson, Friends of Green Cove