We’re running out of room

Re “Living large,” Current, Oct. 8

Gregg Easterbrook’s sanguine spin on our rapidly growing population makes me wonder whether he’d like to live in a United States with the population density of China, India or parts of L.A. County. Eventually that’s what we’ll be dealing with if we don’t take steps to control our population by dramatically limiting immigration.

If we fail to do so, ever-greater demand for suburban spaces will make them increasingly less attainable. Do we really want to leave our children a crowded future in which open space is an endangered species and a Yosemite campsite reservation requires a five-year wait? It makes this apartment-renting tree hugger sick.

DEREK SINUTKO

Thousand Oaks

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The problem with Easterbrook’s argument that we have nothing to worry about from resource depletion is that you don’t have to actually run out of stuff to start experiencing real problems in the face of exponential population growth. You just have to start down the other side of the bell curve of available resources, which is exactly what’s happening in other parts of the globe where drought, famine and topsoil and aquifer depletion are already wreaking havoc.

Easterbrook’s wishful thinking is a dangerous argument against sustainability.

BRUCE WOODSIDE

Valley Village, Calif.

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Easterbrook asserts that “sprawl is caused by more people and more affluence,” and then goes on to dare us to try and ban either of these inexorable processes. But this is polemical rather than astute.

More people, more affluence and less sprawl are a plausible future state, and we don’t need to ban anything. We just need to stop subsidizing sprawl and instead begin pricing it for all its adverse social and environmental effects.

People should certainly be free to live in single-family detached houses if they like, and to drive SUVs too. But why should the rest of us have to subsidize their pleasures through property and development regulations, tax write-offs and gross distortions of supply and demand relationships?

ASHWANI VASISHTH

Hollywood