I was dismayed and disappointed after reading “McGinnis trashes recycling mandate” in the Altoona Mirror on Sept. 19.
As an educator who spent much of his career working to foster respect for the earth and caring for the environment, I find it very counterproductive when a role model for our youth says that recycling is “nonsense.”
McGinnis claimed that recycling “has been endorsed by people who don’t care about freedom and property rights.”
Oh, really? I endorse recycling for those very reasons.
As a child before recycling was mandated, I remember people not respecting my family’s rural property rights when they would illegally dump recyclables and garbage down a “sinkhole” near our home.
As I see it, my family should have had free access to clean, unpolluted water from our well which was jeopardized by pollution when people weren’t recycling.
McGinnis claimed that recycling is “nonsense.”
In Blair County, garbage disposal costs four times more than recycling does. Nonsense? Recycling makes perfect sense to me.
To add insult to injury, McGinnis stated that the recycling movement “nonsense”was “put out by the hippies in the ’60s.”
He needs a history lesson.
A fellow Republican — Richard Nixon — was the one who was instrumental in beginning the environmental movement when he started Earth Day and the EPA during his tenure as president, and I can’t think of a more polar opposite to a hippie than Richard Nixon.
Nixon took a proactive environmental approach in reaction to our country’s many lakes which were so polluted that they were on fire.
How quickly we forget.
George Dempsie
Williamsburg
