Letter to the Editor
Contributed by Elinor Benjamin
The Chronicle Herald
January 30, 2020
Thank you to Gail Lethbridge for raising the Owls Head park issue in her Jan. 25 column. We should all be howling about the secretive way the province delisted Owls Head from a group of lands needing protection in hope of letting Lighthouse Links build golf courses.
Even the Chinese, often no great friends of the planet, have taken radical steps to halt development of golf courses to conserve water and land. Golf specialists say they are working to make golf courses less reliant on pesticides and less destructive of wildlife habitat, as many now are, but since golf is big business, they can hardly be disinterested parties.
It was encouraging to read subsequently that the federal government is no longer negotiating with Nova Scotia’s Lands and Forestry Department for Crown land for the proposed golf course.
I hope this will bring this chapter to a close, as I hope the prospects of government support for an Inverness airport meet a similar fate. Someone in the tourism business in Inverness told me the economic spinoff has been underwhelming. Sports entrepreneurs always seem to appear with bags of promises at the whiff of public funding or public land, when opportunity for personal gain arises.
Does our planet need more golf courses? Or golf magnates? What is for the public good?
Elinor Benjamin, Dartmouth
