Allstadt, Russell Fossil-Fuel Debate
Topic Of Column In New York Times
COOPERSTOWN – Under the headline, “Much Ado in Cooperstown, N.Y., Over Vote to Dump Fossil Fuel Stocks,” New York Times business columnist James B. Stewart has assessed the multi-week debate in The Freeman’s Journal/Hometown Oneonta between Lou Allstadt and David Russell on the Village Board’s decision to divest fossil-fuel stocks from one of its pension portfolios.
“The trustees of Cooperstown, N.Y., hardly expected their village (population 1,834) to emerge as a flash point in a national debate over climate change and socially responsible investing,” Stewart, author of the 1992 best-seller, “Den of Thieves,” on the collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert, and an eminent business columnist, wrote in an article that went up on www.nytimes.com this afternoon and is due for publication in Friday’s print edition.
Stewart is familiar with Cooperstown through attending the Glimmerglass Festival, and was at The Otesaga last summer to hear the festival-sponsored discussion of the Salem witch trials that featured New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin.
Interesting doings in my old home town. As a native son of Cooperstown I would like to proffer the perspective of another native son, truly one of the first in our sometimes forgotten neck of the woods – James Fenimore Cooper. While the esteemed novelist is credited with creating the first “western”, narrating the American origin story as an unrelenting push to the sunset of European manifest destiny. But he is uniformly neglected as one of the earliest progenitors of the nascent environmental and ecological movement whose mantle was soon thereafter carried with such distinction by Thoreau and his fellow transcendentalists. Cooper’s avatar and ethical champion throughout THE LEATHERSTOCKING TALES, – Hawkeye, nee Natty Bumpo is the American original. Born a native son of the King’s colony, his opinions and actions clearly state a position of conservation, ecological and cultural consideration, and a close moral and ethical management of natural resources as ” treasured gifts” from the common maker above. Cooper’s position is consistent and perfectly clear throughout the five novels, decrying the “wasty ways” of the settlers of his father’s town (and attendant region) as they slaughter “a thousandfold flock of(carrier) pigeons” or gill-netting hundreds of the “salmon of the lake” ( Otsego Bass) by the hundreds, just because they could. But, today’s townspeople should judge for themselves; Read the books. They are terrific! One adapts quickly to the circumambulating loquacity of our early nineteenth century author. But the stories and images of our town and lake and the land that was lost are wonderful. Our most honored native son, Cooper would have certainly assented to the positive, ethical position of the Trustees abstaining from an “immoral gain against the gifts of him above.”