Putting a price on carbon promotes local agriculture
To the Editor,
I enjoyed reading about and seeing the gorgeous photo of the “rotating plethora of colorful fruits and vegetables” featured in your article on Templeton Valley Farms’ organic bounty (Pajaronian, Focus on Agriculture, Aug. 17). The diversity and vibrancy of the farm sounds like a slice of paradise that we’d all like to have as our food source. But we are up against a very aggressive ag industry whose products are mass produced and trucked great distances to stock grocery market shelves in all directions. Many of these foods are genetically modified, saturated with herbicides and pesticides and offered at “discount” prices — we pay the cost in our health and lack of vibrancy instead.
What if we were able to address that situation by changing the basic conditions that allow it to keep operating? What if we put a steadily rising fee on carbon that made it less and less profitable for big ag to transport all those less-than-healthy foods far and wide? And what if 100 percent of that fee came right back to all of us, households, to fully offset the rising cost of fuels that the fee would trigger? With a Carbon Fee and Dividend, we could help create more markets for the kinds of nutritious varieties of foods that Templeton Valley Farms provides. And we’d be helping to slow down the global warming that is producing extreme weather and salt water intrusion already threatening our precious farmlands. If it sounds good, call our congressman Jimmy Panetta and tell him you’d like the Climate Solutions Caucus that he is a member of to consider Carbon Fee and Dividend!
Lynda Marin
Santa Cruz
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The past history of the Pajaro Valley
To the Editor,
Thanks to Steve Bankhead’s column “This week in Pajaro Valley’s Past,” of Aug. 3 for the pictures and article about Bank of America coming downtown, and the tearing down of the Chevron Service Station.
During the 1940s and early 1950s this place was the most popular station in town. On Saturday nights we would pay our $1 for gas and “cruise” the drag, then park on Main Street and see who else was “out.” Of course, we would all end up at Carroll’s Drive-In, then back to town.
How things have changed since that time. Behind the station was a house on Fifth Street my cousin lived in that was before the back-entrance driveway to Purity Store. It was sold (house only) and the new owner moved it to Sixth Street next to the Colendich family, then another house that was on the corner of West Lake and Rodriguez Street was moved next door. Then, apartments were built and that took up the empty lot. No more ball games for the kids.
Next to the driveway (store’s) on West Fifth, lived widow Attridge’s two-story home, my eighth grade teacher. Her only son was Arthur Attridge, attorney of Salinas and former judge.
Mr. Bankhead is so good at selections of this paper that really are “past history” of the Pajaro Valley. Keep going, dude!
Mary Miller-Jones
Grants Pass, Ore.
