Conflict Over Environment

David Friedman’s “A Tale of Two Worlds” (Opinion, Oct. 26) does a disservice by caricaturing the environmental community and obscuring the discussion with buzz words. The truth is, climate change is real, overconsumption is real, globalization is real, overpopulation is real, and toxic chemicals now threaten the health of all of us.

Bill Clinton and Al Gore are not in the pockets of ecologists but are the victims of the same high-pressure corporate lobbying that has dominated the last two sessions of Congress. NAFTA was the creation of George Bush. Globalization of the world economy, and its exploitation of labor everywhere, is the main agenda of big business the world over.

It is the environmental community, a healthy mixture of rich, middle-class and poor people, that has tried to stem the tide and stand against those powerful interests that manipulate the political process for the sake of profits and stock dividends. Many of us have opposed fast track and NAFTA. That we have not been successful does not indicate a shortage of good intentions. We are very concerned that the future of the world’s children is at stake. In short, there is no Solaria in real life; we are all in this together.

ALBERT G. COHEN

PETER MOORE-KOCHLACS

Ecology Task Force

So. Calif. Ecumenical Council

Los Angeles

Isaac Asimov envisioned an earthbound human population so disconnected from the planet’s despoiled environment that none ever venture outside their indoor shopping-mall-like cities over the course of their entire lifetimes. Asimov’s protagonist must overcome his societally conditioned agoraphobia before he can lead his people toward their destiny in the stars, abandoning the lifeless, sterile Earth. Humans survive, but all nondomesticated plant and animal species do not.

This analogy is more relevant to our times than the one Friedman has conceived, though he writes great fantasy.

STEVEN L. HELLERMAN

Claremont

The vast majority of us Americans are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, so we should be in favor of immigration, right? Wrong. What was considered good policy 200 years ago is not necessarily an edict chiseled in stone. Two hundred years ago large tracts of what we now know as the U.S. were still unexplored wilderness. Now we are the most overpopulated country on Earth.

How’s that, you ask. Well, overpopulation must be measured by the amount of consumption and pollution. An American consumes and pollutes five or six times as much as the average world citizen. Every immigrant coming from an underdeveloped country immediately skips from being an underconsumer to an overconsumer, from being an underpolluter to an overpolluter.

Therefore, should we keep the door wide open for immigration? Most decidedly not.

NORBERT A. NIZZE

Marina del Rey