'Get Serious' 

Editor:

In your editorial ("Our Last Best Chance," April 11), the North Coast Journal understated the concerns of the Yurok Tribe, and the Bear River and Trinidad rancherias. As you describe it, in their dismissal of the Monument Ridge project proposed by Terra-Gen in 2019, the nonindigenous community, sacrificing the hope of prosperity and fossil-free energy, generously bent over backward in atonement for the genocide of the tribes' ancestors.

Somehow you missed the point made by the Wiyot elders at the Adorni Center in those last dramatic moments of the supervisors' vote. Terra-Gen offered the Wiyot a million dollars to back off. As traditional protectors of the earth, tribal elders stepped forward.

In their response, "We do not sell our Mother," they nailed it ... not for the tribes alone, but for all of us. If, as you state, these offshore turbines play an "outsized" role in global efforts to wean from fossil fuel, they also make an "outsized" contribution to immediate catastrophic CO2 accumulation. Like nuclear power plants, like turning our carbon-sequestering forests into biomass for marketable wood pellets, like our insane wars for power, a monster industrial project like these giant turbines further degrades and disempowers us.

Our coast and harbor, last on the coast to retain some of its pristine beauty, oyster beds, salmon, pelicans, biological functions, will be lost forever. We have barely begun to address our own consumptive habits, and have rejected the humbler universal rooftop-solar partial solution. We need to get serious about what we're facing, rather than perpetuating denial by throwing the responsibility for our atmosphere on to a multinational- corporate industrialization and colonization of the shoreline and ocean. Tribal concerns address human survival. They are our concerns, too.

Ellen Taylor, Petrolia