Letters To The Editor

Thu., Dec. 28, 2000

THE ENVIRONMENT

Reduced sales a beneficial trend

The media and corporate powers would like us to be worried about recent lower-than-projected retail sales. This is a major indicator of the condition of our economy. But should it be? Should we have an economy in which slightly reduced consumption is an indication of failure?

Just maybe some people have listened to, thought about and responded to the concepts of sustainability. The first steps toward sustainability include greater efficiency and reduced waste in the use of resources. Durability of goods is part of the equation.

Just maybe a few people decided not to buy the newest computer or latest DVD player, making do with appliances that were the latest and greatest five or 10 years ago. Maybe a few people have consciously chosen to take even more drastic steps. Rather than viewing it as a hardship, they freely and proudly made this choice to do their small part in reducing pollution, resource consumption, exploitative labor and the waste stream. Maybe a few people even decided to buy less in order to avoid credit card debt or to save money, which would also be necessary to live in a sustainable manner.

Don’t be alarmed. In fact, let’s make it a real trend. Rebecca L. Smith Spokane

Those `Lords’ delivered the goods

Paul Lindholdt probably drove to work in an automobile and sat down at his computer to compose the Street Level piece of Dec. 24. These things, and the road he took to work, were provided by what he refers to as the “Lords of Yesterday.”

The fact that he has the freedom to express himself - in English rather than German or Japanese - is due in great part to the efforts of the Lords of Yesterday.

Dam removal is an example of an environmental solution with great potential to do more harm than good by unleashing an avalanche of sediment stored upstream, with little evidence that it will solve the salmon problem. Meanwhile, the Western United States is trying to cope with a shortage of electrical power.

A future economy of technology companies will require a wide variety of metals obtainable only by mining.

Thanks to the outcome of the presidential election, extractive industries in this country will now be recognized for their fundamental role in our economy and will get a fair chance to succeed.

Regarding Dawn Mining’s nuclear waste, has anyone ever wondered about how much radioactivity was entering the water before the ore body was mined?

What we need to continue to prosper is a balanced perspective, to provide the things we need, producing them in an environmentally sensitive manner. What we do not need is the tunnel vision and narrow perspective of Lindholdt and those who have similar opinions. Andrew W. Berg Sr. Spokane

Quality of tree-hugging life, right?

I came to Spokane to spend the holidays with family and friends and happened to read Paul Lindholdt’s Dec. 24 Roundtable column. I must say, he worked really hard to raise environmental blather to a higher level of absurdity.

Farmers, ranchers, loggers and miners are the bad guys - again. They provide for our basic needs by creating wealth from the earth. This is bad. Economic concerns are bad, too. More important is “quality of life,” which somehow “hinges on the land.” What he means by this escapes me, except that maybe if we will just face east and bow to the land everything will work out. Even you Spokanites are bad. You are illiterate technologically. You need to be reprogrammed by the more sophisticated in Boise (of all places).

I suppose the column could be considered comic relief after a nail-biting election, except that Lindholdt is a teacher at Eastern Washington University. Suddenly, his thoughts aren’t very funny at all. E.A. Johnson Butte, Mont.

GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Nonsense gained quite a following

Do you realize the extent to which the American people, for more than a month, lived in a fantasy world?

In the 62 years that have passed since I turned 21 I have never seen a development that compares even remotely to the dream world that evolved during the recent political brouhaha. Adjectives such as absurd, nonsensical, impossible and incredible are insufficient to characterize what went on.

An astonishing number of Americans were successfully lured into accepting, as part of a legitimate process, the picture of people holding ballots up to the light, peering at them and then issuing a judgment as to their validity.

Then - and here’s the impossible denouement - they assert that, by such a procedure, they were actually able to discern the “intent” of the voter. Honest - that’s what they claimed.

A large part of public opinion, under the mantra that “every vote should be counted,” was manipulated into accepting this absurd assertion.

Had the struggles continued much longer we could easily have expected the utilization of Ouija boards and self-proclaimed psychics. Bernard E. Bobb Pullman

We better not rely on foreign food

Speaking recently at the University of Warwickshire in England, President Clinton said wealthy nations, including the United States, should end government subsidies to domestic agriculture and, instead, buy food from Third-World countries, where farmers grow crops “more cheaply than we.”

The Environmental Protection Agency has implemented tough regulations relating to the safety of food production in the United States that are expensive to apply to modern agriculture by the American farmer. Foreign countries are immune to these rules and regulations and have the use of many chemicals that are unauthorized in the United States. Are we going to allow the importation of food that has had chemicals applied to it, that the Environmental Protection Agency deems unhealthy for use by American farmers?

The change in administration could not have come too soon, if this is the attitude of the Clinton-Gore administration. I shudder at the thought of relying on foreign food production for our nation’s food supply in the coming years.

American consumers spend less of their income on food than those of any other industrialized nation. We are going to have to support agriculture in the United States one way or the other if we want a stable, healthy food supply. Either pay for it at the grocery store or with a government subsidy. Art Schultheis Colton

Bushes cartoon `malicious,’ wrong

Re: Opinion cartoon of Dec. 22. You are doing a tremendous disservice to both former President George Bush and President-elect George W. Bush by implying they are responsible for a previous recession plus a possible coming recession. By the time President George Herbert Walker Bush left office we were out of recession by at least two quarters. At that time, the Democratic Congress had been in power for approximately 30 years and had blackmailed successive presidents into signing onto overloaded tax-and-spend bills in order to provide for a ready military service as well as needed programs.

Since 1994, our Republican Congress has been able to hold the line fairly well on spending. Consequently, we have ended the past year with a huge surplus. Indeed, we cannot now blame the president-elect for any recession as he has had no power over the national economy. In fact, the economy started to tank when Alan Greenspan started raising interest rates and the Department of Justice began the suit against Microsoft, a private business. These two forces, along with the union-forced job relocation to Third World countries have had a terrible effect on the economy. And President-elect Bush had nothing to do with any of it. You should be ashamed to display such a malicious cartoon. L. Andrea Cocco Spokane

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