Progress Redefined

It is precisely the self-aggrandizing philosophy expressed in Ted Brown’s letter of May 20 that has created the environmental crisis that Americans, and most especially Southern Californians, find themselves confronted with today.

Far too many are the inconsistencies and hypocrisies in Mr. Brown’s diatribe, but among the more amusing is his pique at at homeowners who “move somewhere, then decide that no one else has the right to live or open a business there.”

This when it is the so-called “developers” who attract home buyers to these areas with such lures and promises as “secluded,” pristine,” ad nauseam, and then, as soon as the bait is taken and the units are sold, begin systematically to destroy the surroundings in the name of progress, which usually means a right to unbridled rapaciousness and irresponsibility.

Brown declares that the owners of a property should be able to do with it whatever they like. Anyone in a city planning office can tell you what chaos would result if that were the case. I, for instance, could not buy the home next to Mr. Brown and put in a mini-market, dog kennel, high-rise or an assembly plant, no matter how much I would like to.

Because of the environmental disasters of the last decade and a half, progress has been made in determining what must be done: what must change if we are to survive and live lives that are worth living, both as human beings and as a nation.

Wealth is not progress.

Jobs per se are not progress: The goal of the work is significant.

Destruction of the landscape is not progress.

It is not people concerned about these all too real isssues who want to turn back the clock, but it is Mr. Brown and people like him, who insist upon living in the past, with an archaic definition of progress, in a time when resources were thought to be infinite, when open space and water and wildlife were thought to be limitless.

TERRENCE SZOSTEK

Van Nuys