Letters from the Editor

Dear Reader,

The ethanol debate is not going away.

Politicians use the fuel issue to buy votes by pumping billions of dollars in taxpayer-financed subsidies into growing corn to make the stuff.

Farmers and related businesses love it because they make a decent living again.
Most damagingly of all, though, most people like ethanol because it gives them the illusion that we have found a solution to problems that go much deeper: agriculture, food, greenhouse gases and transportation.

Dear Reader,

Could our present economic slowdown be a good thing? A blessing in disguise?

I think it is. For the past dozen or more years we (and I’m simplifying now, because I know that what I’m about to write does not apply to everyone) have lived like there’s no tomorrow, we’ve borrowed money like we’d never have to pay it back and we’ve spent it like drunken sailors, worshipping at big box stores, driving cars that get worse gas mileage than a Sherman tank, and building MacMansions with an ecological footprint the size of a small country.

Dear Reader,

Is the debate about climate change the wrong debate?

I think it is.

It didn’t start out that way. It started out as scientific hypotheses drawn from a lot of scientific data. And like all scientific hypotheses they were, and still are, open to revision or even abandonment based on new evidence.

This is the basic scientific approach. It is what distinguishes rational scientific inquiry from ideological dogma.

Dear Reader,

An old German saying claims that ‘the dumbest calves choose their own butchers’.
So, how do we rank? Considering whom we send to Washington after each election, I can’t help feeling that we’re right at the head of the line of calves.

Over the past several weeks the federal government, both the Democratic-controlled Congress and the Republican Bush-administration, have engaged in hectic activity in response to the financial crisis.

Dear Reader,

Over the past couple of months we have heard a lot of talk from Washington about businesses that are too big to fail or that our economy depends on.

I have repeatedly pointed out in this column that economic activity is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, namely to satisfy the wants and needs of the market.

Obviously, we are long past that stage, as the present economic situation illustrates (I’m not going to rehash my musings about the perverse workings of the money markets).

Dear Reader,

In the January 2009 issue of the Sustainable Times (please see page 1) I have written an article (or essay, or rant, one of those anyway) about the need to move away from the auto-centric model of urban and suburban planning and design that we have been following for the past half century and replace it with a community- and ecology-based model.
One aspect of such a shift that I haven’t gone into in that article is the need for new means of transportation.