Jo Faith, Newtown
There is an urgent sociological/ecological sustainable need for Byron Shire to return to the ‘old ways’ as we face the onslaught of overdevelopment, the pandemic, and community fragmentation.
David Pont writes in letters (2, September) ‘that successive Councils have fallen prey to “institutional forgetting”. In May 2000 the Byron Bay Wastewater Steering Committee established the Belongil Rehabilitation Working Group… faced with acid sulphate soils, catchment degradation, loss of critical habitat, and annual fish kills, the working group developed a fully integrated major regeneration project… kicked off with a $250,000 Commonwealth grant obtained by the Working Group.’
Return to the present. Byron Council’s plan to shorten the route of excess treated effluent to the Belongil carries the most serious of implications. Scientific evidence has now established that the COVID-19 virus is active in treated effluent, while negative results are being returned utilising nasal and mouth technologies.
In Byron Bay the treated effluent travels to the much loved Belongil, which is also a popular swimming beach for locals and tourists. As we witness the very cruel deaths of the aged – dying without ventilators, it is possible to hypothesise that the virus could be thriving in the sewers and toilet pans.
If we are to survive these perils we must first resist the corporatisation of Byron Bay by developers. The future for all sentient beings rests in our hands.
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. 
