Dear Editor:

Museums are museums with educational facilities. CMBG is not a school. This “use” issue is being considered in the context of town governance, its ordinances, and its collective language, terminology, history and precedent.

People have more familiarity with schools than museums. Yet, if anyone visits a multitude of different types of museums, and allows oneself to think outside their own conventional limits, one would be able to comfortably recognize CMBG as a museum.

A museum is a collection of things and is used as such. A school is used as a gathering place for students learning without a specific collection of things. Yes, we all learn from visiting CMBG, but without its collection of plants, it ceases to be CMBG. It does produce outcomes that deem it an educational facility, but what it is, in essence, is a collection of things - a museum. Its use is a museum.

Along with most all other botanical gardens worldwide, CMBG has identified itself as a museum from its inception, and has kept its designation as a museum up until this $30 million expansion.

This use moniker controversy is part of CMBG's ongoing permit appeal. Its resolution has grave consequences for our drinking supply watershed. The fact that CMBG's current demolition of 25 acres of natural forest in close proximity to our water supply, its replacement of natural soils, filtering vegetation, and topography, with blasted leveling and resurfacing for gravel and black top, is what we all need to feel very uncomfortable about.

Paula Ragsdale

Boothbay