To the editor:

Pictures of our neighbors lined along roadsides, holding signs of protest, reveal a range of concerns: due process, school lunches, support for public media, scientific research. Some people are delighted by the shock and awe of President Trump. Others are appalled.

Low-income folks in the North Country need to be aware of some of the budget cuts proposed by President Trump: to the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program that might now be helping you to heat your home; to rental assistance programs, including Section 8 housing; and to the CDC’s Chronic Disease Prevention program which provides community-based care and screenings for cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Your heat, housing, health could be in jeopardy. Meanwhile, do you know about the proposed increase in the age for work requirements for SNAP benefits in the Agricultural Bill?

Everyone over about 60: Remember acid rain, and what it did to our forests? Proposed rollbacks of air pollution rules could bring sulfur dioxide back into the Adirondacks.

But unfortunately, by far the biggest story on the planet — the climate crisis — makes it onto very few protest signs, and is often lost in the flurry of reporting about the chaos.

Slashing programs that predict catastrophic events, reducing FEMA staff trained to clean up after them, denying North Country farmers pay back for climate-focused agricultural programs they have already paid for, and even denying that it exists at all will NOT will make the climate crisis go away! And in the meantime, other countries are eating our lunch on construction and design of infrastructure and in renewable energy production, much cheaper than fossil fuels …

Representative Stefanik: Are you on all this? You cite your “environmental” work on invasive species prevention. Do you know WHY there are more invasive species in the North Country?

Katharine Preston

Essex