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Wednesday, May 30, 2012 1937 - 2012 · Celebrating 75 Years Orono Weekly Times - 5 HISTORICAL Continued from pg 4 where they recognize building owners who have restored significant old buildings with an eye to respecting their historical integrity yet bringing them into the new millennium. Among the recipients of this award are Carl Good and Joyce Kufta of the Newcastle Funeral Home, the Glystan family for the box factory and Ed Vanhaverbeke for the restoration of the apartment building on King Street East. The society is also proud of the role they played in ensuring the new big box stores in the downtown core maintained a look that blended in with the existing heritage buildings. "We are not against progress," Leslie stated, "We just want the progress to reflect the heritage we already have here and the feel of the community." As a result, Leslie says the village has a four corners that "We can all be proud of." Going forward the Society is working to digitizing their vast collection of documents and photographs so they can put it on line and create a virtual museum. And as for the old Catholic Church that was the initial reason for the creation of the NVDHS, it still stands today as a private residence. NVDHS members discuss all things pertaining to the villages' past in their room in the Newcastle Community Centre. The Historical Society room is open to the public on Tuesday and Saturday mornings. Pictured left to right: Deborah Leslie, President; Shellie Jackson, Director; Ron Locke, Member; Greg Forget CONRAD Continued from pg 2 of court in Canada or the U.K. It seems amusing that so many Canadians, who are very quick to criticize anything "American"-- became such firm believers in the U.S. justice system as it relentlessly pursued Conrad. We should note that even the imperfect U.S. legal system, eventually threw out all but three charges. Conrad certainly made mistakes; he was greedy (but that is not a crime in Canada); he relied overly on people who had great fame, but who turned on him. His biggest mistake was to annoy the people who run the businesses in the U.S.A. Those people determined that Conrad would be defeated and they chose the U.S. legal system to do their dirty work. Conrad then made another big mistake; he decided to fight those people on their home turf. That was an arrogant decision. Conrad could have easily avoided prison, but he believed that the U.S. legal system would prove to be fair and honest, so he bravely put his future in their hands. How many of us would have been as brave? Regardless of the pros and cons, the strongest reason to have Conrad free and back in Canada is that we need him. Most leading Canadians do little of interest, except work quietly and effectively at their jobs. That is good, but we need interesting, exciting and controversial Canadian content in our daily lives. Conrad supplies that! Ted Graham Orono OPINION by: Louis Bertrand Louis Bertrand is the constituency association president for the Green Party of Ontario in the Durham riding. The problem with NIMBY People don't like being called NIMBY. Unfortunately that's the response of the provincial government to opposition to the development of wind energy in Ontario. Obviously, the term is insulting but the more serious consequence is that it diverts attention from the real problems built into the province's plans for renewable energy. We need to dig deeper to get at the root causes of opposition to wind power projects. Let's start by noting that wind energy has global benefits but local impacts. Wind projects, as one observer put it, are "someone else's idea, for someone else's benefit, and for someone else's profit". Under the Green Energy Act (GEA) municipal land use planning is swept aside by provincial authority. Consultations with the public by developers are, most tellingly, done after the site has been planned and the locations chosen. Even if the project was genuinely beneficial to the community, with adequate safeguards -- in other words, everything the community might hope for -the debate is poisoned from the start and soon becomes some sort of trench warfare, with no graceful way out. Another important factor is how the land and the landscape are perceived. Rural residents have a sense of attachment to the land they own, the view from their porch and how that landscape changes over the seasons. Although it's hard for a consultant to quantify in a report, that sense of belonging to the land is real. When it comes to development, whether it's for a subdivision or a wind project, planners see one plot of land no differently than any other plot of land, just terrain to be transformed. Environmental assessments typically have a visual impact assessment report, complete with photos of the landscape with super-imposed wind turbines, but it can't account for the personal sense of loss of the non-monetary value of the landscape. Finally, the implementation of renewable energy in Ontario has completely missed the point of renewable sources: people power, not corporate power. The fuel is clean and free, as long as the sun shines and there are breezes -- no messy extraction, no leaky pipelines, no OPINION see page 6