Vindi Ferguson, South Golden Beach
I am a 17-year-old who was born and bred in Byron. My whole life has been affected by the extraordinarily progressive approach to environmental issues that the Byron Shire is so well known for. I‘ve protested against ScoMo and Abbott with my fellow students for action against climate change. I am shocked to now learn our own council is about to destroy essential wetlands near Byron for the sake of a bypass.
Our world is approaching a crossroads; the decision on how we as a nation react to the threat of climate change will shape our future for better or worse. I am dismayed that Byron Shire Council is considering furthering the environmental degradation that is causing the future of my generation to be in such imminent danger.
This bypass goes against everything I have known and understood about the morals of the Byron Shire community in my seventeen years on this planet. In following through with this bypass, the council, who are elected to act in mine and my peers’ best interests, are dishonouring us as humans by furthering the already irreversible damage to the planet we are supposed to inherit.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
