Pilot’s View

As a private pilot I have the opportunity to view Southern California on a grand and revealing scale.

What I see disturbs me: mountain tops west of Corona sawed off to make way for housing tracts; the sprawl of the San Fernando Valley rushing to meet the sprawl of the Santa Barbara peninsula; the elbow-to-elbow cities of the Los Angeles Basin, for all their pavement, about as appealing as one great parking lot; smoke and haze so thick near the shore that landmarks as large as Los Angeles International Airport disappear in the morning sun.

When I look down upon our incredibly dense urban landscape, I can only marvel that our ocean is not more polluted, that our sewers don’t overflow more often, that our air is not browner than it is at present.

And I can only conclude that overpopulation and overdevelopment are the roots of much environmental evil in Southern California.

Some will answer that as long as people want to move to our area, they must have homes to live in. But I will retort that we may build as many new homes as we wish, but we may not do so with the expectation that we will ever reduce pollution.

GERARD J. DiCAIRANO

Hermosa Beach