To the Editor:

“Maine, the way life should be.” These are six words, 23 letters that every Mainer has taken for granted for too long. I am a Mainer, and I too have taken my state for granted.

Now is a time we need to work together, as a community, to protect our state’s natural resources. If we all raise our voices as one, we will be heard loud and clear.

I am a hunter and a fisherman. I love the outdoors just as any Mainer, but if we don’t come together as a community to protect our health and our state’s environment, one of these days we will find ourselves and our state cleaning up a big mess we didn’t create.

This summer, I attended a “No Tar Sands in Maine” rally led by the Natural Resources Council of Maine, and learned of a terrible proposal to pump tar sands oil through Maine.

We need to keep dirty tar sands oil from polluting our state. We need to ensure that Maine’s 50-year-old pipeline doesn’t carry dirty, corrosive tar sands oil through our state, along the Androscoggin and Crooked rivers, through the Sebago Lake watershed — the drinking water supply for 1 out of every 7 Mainers — and into Casco Bay.

An oil spill from this pipeline would devastate the environment and economy of Maine, and put people’s health at risk.

When the pipeline fails and Maine’s waterways become polluted for more years than most of us will be alive, that’s when I will hear all those quiet voices saying, “I told you so.”

Do something now. Don’t wait. Be a part of the solution and not part of the problem.

Chris Comeau
Brunswick