January 2009

Informative article

Thank you very much for your informative article last issue on “Healthy streams,” by Jodi Frediani. Those two pages were better than any textbook in explaining the problems caused by inappropriate activity along stream beds. I also appreciated the practical examples from local projects, such as channelizing the Pajaro River and Branciforte Creek. It’s wonderful to have such high-quality writing in a local publication.

—Allen Cypher

Aptos

Can we change?

Humanity is dying from excessive population and wasteful consumption. Humanity is killing itself through wars, inexcusable poverty, crime, tyrannies, and terrorism. Humanity is destroying itself through insatiable desires for power, fame, and material wealth. Humanity is denying reality and seeking to find security in gods and other make-believe ideas that are figments of needful imagination. Imagination also enables humanity to survive and to create the most beneficial factors of its culture when it learns and accepts the realities of life on this planet.

This is what we are. This is our biological and cultural inheritance.

We also have the inherited ability to make choices and to change our cultural inheritance.

We can choose to turn away from self-destructive consumption of our planet and violent terrorizing conflicts among ourselves. We know what we have to do. We know how we have to change.

Can we change? We can try, for the sake of all little children, now and in the future.

Those of us who are over eighty years old have seen significant social changes in civil rights, civil liberties, and economic equity. We have seen many beneficial material changes and improvements such as contraceptives, health-promoting and life-saving care, increased environmental and ecological knowledge.

But we have not seen significant social changes which would prevent worldwide poverty, crime, war, terrorism, and ongoing planetary environmental degradation. Are we doomed?

—Patricia Rayne

Aptos

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