Letter: Vote No on Question 6

Ballot Question 6 seems sensible: Water is vital, and we should protect nature. But it will not address threats to the Commonwealth’s water. Instead, it will limit land vital for green energy, the most effective way to counter climate change. It would do this to secure more outdoor recreation for people in Massachusetts, who have twice the national average and the fastest-growing access to outdoor recreation in the country.

The threats to water in the Commonwealth are not a loss of wild land. The threats are industrial wastes, landfills, sewage, lead pipes and contaminated wells. These problems will not be solved by protecting forests. They must be solved by regulations on manufacturing, disposal, farming and upgrades to infrastructure. Saying Question 6 will protect water manipulates public anxiety in order to advance another agenda.

The $100 million per year raised by the proposal will have the effect of reducing potential space for solar by securing more forests for recreation. This is the disposition of The Mass Audubon Society (proposal’s principal sponsor), which has misleadingly targeted ground-mounted solar as a serious threat to the Commonwealth’s trees, in online media, If passed, we will fail to reduce our MA carbon footprint -twice the global average- and fail to reverse our immoral use of the world’s atmosphere as a free carbon dump. It’s hard to lose some woodlands but solar farms are ten times better at keeping carbon out of the atmosphere than forests. Moreover, we can not site nearly enough panels on infrastructure to meet our needs, even without data centers.

Yet, environmental groups gripe about 5,000 acres -only 0.07% of MA land- dedicated to solar while being silent about the destruction of 1,600,000 acres of tropical forests in Puerto Rico and Jamaica, alone -20.0% of their land. This destruction is aggravated by our carbon-strengthening hurricanes, and Question 6 will only make this worse. It will also help turn the hotter summers we now have in the Commonwealth into wildfire zones that could, ironically, destroy any new “protected” forests in the coming years. 

So cast a NO vote on Question 6 because nature is more than today’s trees. It is the entire atmosphere we share with everything, forever. 

Think globally, Act locally.

Nick Shaw

Nick Shaw is a resident of Amherst and a retired environmental science teacher at Amherst Regional High School.

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