Author
Maggie Hughes
Aerotropolis arguments continue despite loss of affordable fuel.
Hamilton business man Michael Desnoyers is fighting mad. He feels that the city of Hamilton is not listening to the public, when it comes to the Aerotropolis.
This is the name given to the economic development plans that need the Airport of Hamilton as an anchor.
If you take into account how many years the city has stubbornly stayed with their plans to use agricultural lands around the J.C. Munroe airport as it's only future economic direction, then you have to start wondering also.
Many things have changed in the past six years, but the City of Hamilton has kept pulling out the same option for future job growth, turn agricultural lands into industrial lands.
More and more main stream news outlets have jumped into the Climate Change boat.
More cities in Canada are showing they too are hearing what use to be the "alternative news" message about Oil shortages and climate change.
Richard Gilbert predicted that only when high gas prices forced the issue, would the majority of the public ask for change. The people of Hamilton are now asking for change from the city, but the city isn't listening.
Again, Hamilton is far behind other communities when it comes to alternatives to Climate Change and the loss of fossil fuels.
Instead it is aggressively pushing proximity to the Airport as the "only" choice for future job growth.
Calling itself a "Transportation Hub", means it should also incorporate shipping and rail in its future.
We already have a Port that has thrived in past years, with rail lines leading right out of the docks, fully serviced, why would we want to turn any potential crop lands into industrial lands, and load taxpayers up with the costs of making these green lands fully serviced?
Making empty brown-lands that are already fully serviced into industrial lands makes more sense than ruining green lands.
Since Trade Port is behind this incentive, and is now linked to South Jet, the warnings of the super highway trade corridor are starting to come together. Although SPP meetings are not made public - and you have to ask why, they are connected to the Super highway that is in full swing and on its way into Canada.
In Hamilton if you ask the main stream press about SPP or the super highway, you get ignored. The topic most certainly gets ignored.
Connect the dots from the super highway to the Mid-Penn or the Niagara Corridor and you begin to see why the Airport is important to some.
There is no doubt about the rising costs of fuel, and the dwindling supply. There are however new television commercials produced by fuel companies, that say there is not an Oil shortage, it has always been available in the U.S. If that was always true, why ship Oil in from the Arab states all these years?
With the loss of Artic ice, the focus is now more on who gets the rights to whatever fuel sources there may be under the water.
This old thinking has to change. There is just too much evidence and damage to society that comes from putting the desires of fuel companies and trucking companies ahead of base logic - that ordinary people are losing their jobs in the thousands because of high fuel costs.
Rather than focus on the elephant of lost glaciers, which is our drinking water supply, and the fact that the loss of Artic Ice has change our weather patterns and adds to the heating of the planet, the powers that be are pushing for planes.
What is more important here. Shouldn't we all be more concerned with the weather change, and fuel loss, and the need to supply local food in our future?
Oil is so embedded into our North American society, that what ever resources are left, must go toward getting off this dependency. We in Hamilton are not preparing.
Other cities are struggling to keep whatever land they have left for food crops, while Hamilton can't seem to wait to destroy future needs.
Maybe Desnoyers has a point.
Maggie Hughes
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