By Staff
I am only 14, but I feel I must write to you concerning the proposed landfill in Conecuh County and what this could do to people's health. I am a state gold medalist in the aquifer event in the Science Olympiad program and have studied water supply and water quality.
I learned that runoff from landfills can kill livestock and pollute wells. With a landscape filled with resources altered forever for the worse, who would want to live here? What about my future and the rest of my generation? That is what is up for grabs here.
The stench from landfills is not only unpleasant, but unhealthy. Even if area wells were protected, the air pollution would make this area unpleasant at best. No child should play in polluted air. Asthma would keep many more of our people indoors or on the road to other cleaner places. In Arizona, there is a valley so polluted with runoff from garbage and fumes that public air quality warnings are common. When the impure air settles, no one can venture outdoors. Nearly everyone there suffers from respiratory disease.
Will our leaders doom all of us to this? How could our young people enjoy Conecuh County's greatest asset next to its people, the beautiful outdoors? We would simply be cheated out of our heritage. The hunting so popular for generations here would suffer as well with the air and water fouled. The choking cloud from landfill decomposition would cripple us physically and economically.
What would we have left without the pure countryside? Just today, my cousins and sisters and I went on an excursion into our grandparents' wooded land. We enjoyed the tumbling water in the brooks and climbed the rolling hills. We drank from a pristine spring. I hate to think that my children and their children will not be able to enjoy these old woods. We dream of building our houses on this land. Please don't ruin what our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and several generations back worked so hard to establish for us.
How can you put a price on nature? How could you bulldoze paradise to put up an odious heap of sadness and sickness? My family always taught me to be proud of where I'm from, that people are worth more than money. I hope our leaders think of this when they vote.
I ask our elected officials to speak for us, the residents of Conecuh County and the future of our county. I trust you will do what is right.
Alex Baggett
Repton