Wildlife Corridors

Al Martinez’s Aug. 29 column “The Day of the Badger” would have done more for wildlife had it never been written. Habitat linkages, also known as wildlife corridors, are not about “raccoons getting laid.” They are about preserving the evolutionary process in the Santa Monica Mountains. Without the preservation of these habitat linkages, large predators such as cougars and bobcats will become extinct in our mountains. Rodent numbers will increase unchecked, limited only by food supply. The entire vegetative composition of the mountains will change as ground squirrels and gophers eat their way into overpopulation on the seeds of shrubs, the roots of trees and the vegetative parts of endangered herbaceous plants.

Five million dollars for a freeway underpass seems a small price to pay to preserve the small bit of native California we have left in the Los Angeles Basin. Martinez has taken the vital issue of the survival of species and reduced it to terms of sex and money. Perhaps Southern California is Babylon after all.

SUZANNE GOODE

Calabasas