Earth Summit Leaders’ Blindness

Re “Earth Summit Leaders Admit Lack of Progress,” June 24:

Earth Summit leaders, like Oedipus, are blind to reality. Oedipus was warned that he would eventually kill his father and marry his mother. It was his hubris or arrogance that kept him from believing the prophesy, thus he was doomed to commit the unspeakable acts of patricide and incest.

Earth Summit leaders are propelled by arrogant blindness to the prophesies about our planet’s problems. We blind humans are abusing our Mother Earth, unable to see that when we have raped her for the last time, she will no longer give us an inhabitable home. Human earthlings across the planet will become the global homeless.

We in the United States lead the blind with our gas-guzzling autos, contempt of conservation, ignorance of the environmental costs of our luxuries. We are oxygen addicts with no knowledge that our fix is supplied by rain forests on land and plankton in the seas.

With the more than 5.6 billion humans on the planet doubling in size in approximately 37 years, we have yet to recognize that the resources of our Mother Earth are limited. There will not be twice as much land, or water or oxygen for us in 37 years!

If leaders cannot go beyond tongue-waggling platitudes, and actually produce some workable plans to protect our planet’s necessary resources, then we will truly understand the fate of Oedipus.

ULA PENDLETON

Los Angeles

* In his June 22 commentary, “A ‘Problem’ That’s Not All Bad,” Bernard Weinstein writes that when addressing the problem of global warming, “we should recognize that climate change is not all bad” because a warmer climate will enable us to grow more food to feed the planet’s “burgeoning population.” This absurd and simplistic assessment is like saying a nuclear war would not be all that bad because it would create more robust, genetically superior plant species, rid our cities of vermin and curb population growth.

I suggest Weinstein stick to economics and leave the complex science of global warming and its environmental impacts to those who truly understand and appreciate the immensity of the problem.

JACK. E. WILLIAMS III

Hermosa Beach