Limiting the Population in Campaign to Cut Smog

In your editorial (Dec. 6) on the recent Orange County Annual Survey, you seemed to suggest the problem of smog could be helped by each of us doing a little less polluting by curtailing our dependence on such things as gasoline lawn mowers and barbecue lighting fluid.

I believe any measures can, at most, give only temporary relief. Without setting, and enforcing, some limit to the population of our county, there can be no long-term benefit to its environment. There is no measure that can be taken that will not be overwhelmed by the lethality of the unrestrained growth such as we have suffered in the last generation.

So long as our population increases, our environment will deteriorate. The degradation in our quality of living will only end when the population has become stable.

JOHN FERGUSON

Orange