I WRITE in response to the plea from Anne Campbell for a publicity campaign requesting people to refrain from dropping disposable face masks (Letters, August 20). Alongside her letter was a photo of a gull with a mask in its beak.
I have been campaigning against disposable products of all kinds since 1981.
Around about 2006, a documentary filmmaker called Rebecca Hosking made a film of the damage plastic was doing to the birds, fish and crustaceans in the Pacific. Parent birds were feeding their young with plastic bags, thinking they were jellyfish. The babies were eating them, dying a long, slow death from starvation.
Bodies decomposed, leaving the plastic still able to do the same to some other poor creature.
Rebecca came back to Devon, showed her film to all the traders in her town, and without exception they all stopped giving out plastic bags. Modbury was the first town in Britain to go plastic bag free.
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In 2007 The Daily Mail took up the campaign and gave out cotton shopping bags to readers. Other newspapers like the Daily Record took up the campaign, and also gave out cotton shopping bags. The Daily Mail also took up the campaign against plastic bottles. For a couple of years people started using canvas or cotton shopping bags.
But nobody understands the link between humans and nature, so humans have gone back to throwing their garbage on the ground. Mostly due to ignorance of the green chain or web of life we are all part of.
But a lot of the antisocial behaviour which is damaging the environment, and the sentient creatures we share it with, is due to people just not giving a toss.
So, Anne Campbell, if you think a publicity campaign, or any other kind of campaign, is going to clean the place up, you are going to be very disappointed, as I have been over the last 40 years.
Margaret Forbes
via email
I WAS fascinated by the very recent announcement that the site of the Dounreay nuclear facility, the UK’s site for the development of fast reactor research from 1955 to 1994, should be available for other uses in 313 years time, according to a new report. At a clean-up cost measured in the billions of pounds, is it a shameful legacy that we will leave for future Scots to clean up.
I have put this laughably accurate date in my electronic diary although I do not expect to be around to celebrate the event.
A target date has also been set for the clean-up of a highly contaminated area called the Shaft. Built in the 1950s, it apparently plunges 65.4m (214.5ft) below ground. Radioactive waste was dumped there from 1959 to 1977, when an explosion ended the practice. In stark contrast, scientists say the loss of ice in Greenland lurched forward again last year, breaking the previous record by 15%.
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A new analysis says that the scale of the melt was unprecedented in records dating back to 1948. A major international report on Greenland released last December concluded that it was losing ice seven times faster than it was during the 1990s.
Using data from satellites, as well as climate models, the authors conclude that across the full year Greenland lost 532 gigatonnes of ice – a significant increase on 2012.
There would seem to be an increasing possibility that by the year 2333 the Dounreay site might well be under the sea.
Brian Lawson
Paisley
AT the weekend we were able to happily applaud the Scottish Baroque Ensemble for hiring a fishing boat and reaching the coast of England ten minutes before the Covid deadline on Saturday morning. It is a sad irony indeed that only hours later a brave Sudanese teenager was drowned trying to make the same journey for which he was prevented by our Westminster government policy. The fact that he and his friend were trying to cross the Channel in a child’s plastic boat proves they were not in the hands of traffickers.
I do not remember where I found this prayer, and I do not know if you are politically incorrect enough to print it, but some of your readers may be glad to use it.
“Lord God, no-one is a stranger to you and no-one is removed from your loving care. In your kindness, watch over refugees and victims of war, those separated from their loved ones, anyone who is lost, and those who have no home or have been forced to flee. Bring them back safely to the place where they long to be and help us always to show your kindness to strangers and to all in need. Grant this through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
Lesley J Findlay
Fort Augustus
Yet again the Government has caused chaos in the holiday industry by announcing late on a Thursday that tourists in certain foreign countries face quarantine if they don’t return before 4am on the Saturday. The main changeover days for holidays are Saturdays and Sundays, therefore thousands of people will be trying to crowd into airports and planes on the intervening Friday.
To solve this problem, the government could make its criteria for removing countries from air bridges a little more strict, and by this method they could have announced on Thursday 13 that anyone arriving in the UK after 4am on Monday 17 would need to quarantine. Thus people booked to fly back during the intervening weekend would do simply fly back as scheduled.
Geoff Moore
Alness
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