Say it ain’t so, Daily Camera. You’re a paper I’ve grown up with and respected through the years, even when I disagreed with you. Say it ain’t so, “Erika Stutzman, for the editorial board.”

Click here to read the Camera’s endorsement of GMOs on taxpayer-funded Open Space/Public Lands.

To read the only locally-owned paper on the same question, click here.

“Co-existence,” when one takes over the other, not the other way around? When one sues farmers when seeds “coexist”? Shame on the Camera. This has nothing to do with PC. This has to do with real food vs. patented, dumbed-down food addicted to for-profit pesticides.

This fight isn’t just a case of David (local) vs. Goliath (Monsanto & Friends).  It’s also a case of local citizens vs. out-of-state monied interests—interests who, last week, showed they’re hyper-organized, renting out a room next door to the final public hearing and showing up hours early, signing up for all the early slots so the many anti-GMOers went home tired at 1130 or whatever.

This is a great story. This is not a local story, anymore. Monsanto (like Xcel) has realized this could be a major international story—a pricey precedent.

I respect Kevin, publisher at the Camera, to the incredibly small extent that I know him. I respect everyone I’ve known there, over the years. Growing up, my next door neighbor was Bill Jordan, a longtime columnist. I still remember touring the Camera, in awe, back in the day, when I was attending Casey.

And so this editorial comes as a shock akin to betrayal.

What does Boulder stand for? Does the Camera still represent what we stand for? This is one of those moments when we stand up and be counted as a caring, careful city that goes about its business for the greater good and with our grandchildren’s future firmly in mind. That’s something Republicans and Democrats care about. Boulder’s mindful development as a city, since the 1960s, is the reason we now win all those awards and attract all those businesses—because Boulder is Boulder.

If the commissioners vote the wrong way, they too will have betrayed Boulder.

Let’s keep the pressure on the commissioners to do the right thing and vote people’s interests vs. out-of-state Corporation interests. ~ Waylon Lewis

~

Live in Boulder? Want to continue to show Ben Pearlman, Will Toor and Cindy Dominico how Boulder citizens feel about this question?

Click here and vote.

~

Bonus: two food-for-thought quotes from the Daily Camera’s comment section, where anti-GMO comments are getting thumbed down:

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

—Edmund Burke

~

“Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the F.D.A.’s job.”

Phil Angell, Monsanto’s director of corporate communications. “Playing God in the Garden” New York Times Magazine, October 25, 1998.