Monday’s Letters to the Editor

Saving the world

EDITOR: Between the Democratic National Committee’s refusal to hold climate change debates and Trump’s rollback of environmental protections, it will be up to ordinary citizens to save the world. As Timothy Egan notes, we can do this by shifting toward plant-based foods (“Fake meat is going to save us,” June 22).

No need for fancy electric cars and other expensive solutions, although people can still do that if they can.

Some argue that we can breed animals in sustainable ways. According to Bloomberg News, over 40% of the U.S. land mass is already dedicated to animal agriculture and over 95% of that is for factory farming of animals. Plant-based agriculture, in contrast, requires a fraction of the land and resources that animal foods require.

Whereas moving to so-called sustainable animal agriculture would reduce the amount of animal foods available, raise prices and further the divide between the haves and have-nots, a shift toward plant-based foods would allow more foods to be grown without GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, etc., so that even if we lost a percentage of the crops to the birds and the bees, there would still be plenty to provide abundant, healthy foods to people of all income levels.

Everyone has to eat. And there is a lot of power in our food choices.

KAMAL S. PRASAD

Santa Rosa

Treating lake weed

EDITOR: The Santa Rosa Recreation and Parks department should be commended for trying to limit water weed chemical treatment to the boat dock area of Lake Ralphine. The chemical treatment was done June 14 and weed was gone along the boat dock by June 16. But unfortunately, the chemical then spread to other parts of the lake, affecting all lake weed growing near the shores.

The claim is that this chemical does not harm wildlife. However, indirectly the chemical is quite deadly to wildlife. It collapses the wildlife food chain. It starves microorganisms, fish and birds all the way up to swans, whose whole diet is lake weed. Lake weeds are a prime source of oxygenation of the lake, and thus help inhibit toxic anerobic cyanobacteria blooms. The chemical interferes with the lake weed’s photosynthesis process.

As is now being done at Spring Lake, the city could, in the future, choose an easy and simple wildlife preserving and enhancing method, i.e., mechanical removal of weeds near the boat dock.

ROD HUG

Santa Rosa

Reuse plastics

EDITOR: Please don’t recycle your plastic. Most of the plastic waste from recycling winds up in the ocean or strewn on beaches, or is incinerated, adding to aerial smudge. Only about 9% is actually recycled, and much of that is reused to make new versions of waste.

If you choose to buy plastic, you should own it. Ideally, you would keep your plastic waste forever, or until such time as science develops microbes able to digest it. As the Greek philosopher Diogenes suspected, there are no honest humans, but an ethical person could keep his waste plastic under his bed, in a spare closet, in the guest room, and when space runs out, in piles in the backyard.

If for some reason this isn’t feasible, then plastic waste should be sent to our own Sonoma County landfill, where it will contaminate our own groundwater, instead of polluting the ocean, or Malaysia. And by the way, dog owners: Instead of sending plastic-wrapped poop to the landfill, why not pick it up with a reusable container and compost your pet’s offering in the backyard?

PHILIP GARLINGTON

Santa Rosa

Power vs democracy

EDITOR: With the latest ruling by the conservative-leaning Supreme Court, another nail in the coffin of American democracy has been set.

Yes, both parties have been guilty of gerrymandering; but the Republican Party’s successful implementation of Project REDMAP in 2011 has led to a situation where Republican power at the state level is completely out of proportion with voter preference. In 2018 in Wisconsin, for example, Democrats won every statewide election but failed to win majorities in either legislative chamber.

But gerrymandering is just one example of the Republican Party’s all-out push for power over democracy. Add previous coffin nails: the court’s removal of the Voting Rights Act and removal of campaign finance restrictions (Citizens United); Republican states’ enacting of voter ID laws and voter roll purges that target minorities; Florida’s recent dilution of the ex-felon’s voting act (enacted by the Florida voters); the stripping of power of newly elected governors in Wisconsin and North Carolina by outgoing Republican legislatures; Mitch McConnell’s blocking of Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Court; and the outrageous behavior of Oregon’s Republican senators in leaving the state to prevent a vote on climate change.

Sadly, I don’t think many more nails are needed to permanently seal the coffin.

CHRIS CARPENTER

Petaluma

Harvard’s decision

EDITOR: Reprehensible conduct and ideology take many years, even a lifetime, to transmute into wholesome, more humanistic actions.

Whereas it may be true that teenagers are in kinetic personality development, it is not likely that such extreme and frequent actions evidencing gleefully displayed prejudices committed by Kyle Kashuv and friends may be “erased” by a letter of apology (“Harvard misses out on a lesson in character,” June 19).

Any apology (confession, retraction, explanation, excuse) prior to Harvard’s action to revoke Kashuv’s admission may have been a more convincing antidote to the venom of Kashuv’s missives; however, saying “I’m sorry” well after such misdeeds rarely reaches the heart of antisocial or discriminatory tendencies and is, in this instance, self-serving. In violating Harvard’s high standards of conduct and ethics, “sorry” failed to vindicate Kashuv’s obvious ethical malfeasances and justified its revocation of admission.

With alums the likes of Ted Cruz and Bill O’Reilly, Harvard could hardly be accused of “liberal elitism” in this decision, as David Brooks correctly asserts.

ROB LIROFF

Petaluma