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DIGGIN' IN THE DIRT
Last week's cover article, "
" [Jan. 31], presented the bad news about childhood these days, about the dangerous and increasingly prevalent fact that nature is absent from children's daily lives and from their school experience.
Northern New Mexico residents might need to be reminded that Santa Fe has been growing a great nature learning environment in its own backyard for 15 years. The Santa Fe Children's Museum "Earthworks" project at 1050 Old Pecos Trail is a community-built, 1-acre interactive environmental classroom. Open to the public, it is a place where children of all ages can explore nature year round, learn about local flora and fauna, grow food and tend animals and play with the "stuff" of nature-sand, water, mud, plants.
Each year, hundreds of preschool and elementary schoolchildren spend time at the museum with their classes, and there are children who come so often with their families that Earthworks becomes their own backyard.
Wouldn't it be incredible if every neighborhood in Santa Fe had a slightly wild and kind of messy place where kids could play in nature the way most adults remember playing when they were young?
Anne Nelson
Cerrillos
CARING FOR CATS
Thanks to all who help with this growing problem [Outtakes, Jan. 31: "
"]. Los Angeles has upwards of 1 million stray cats, and without the help of communities, much more suffering would be occurring. It's a man-made problem with a man-made solution. Now if we could only figure out why they are so maligned…we'd have a better understanding.
Lauren Laster
Vice President
Feral Cat Caretakers Coalition
Los Angeles, Calif.
NOT GROWN UP?
Would someone please explain to me why all your movie reviews are negative? You only write about movies you dislike [Jan. 31: "
"].
Now, I have no doubt that these films are just as bad as you say they are-perhaps even worse. But this raises a few questions.
Are there no good movies being made? Can they ALL be bad? And if not, why do you choose only the bad ones to review? Is it more fun to pan them than to praise them? Or is it just your effort to fit in with the general wise-ass, thumb-your-nose-at-the-world tone that the Reporter has increasingly adopted over recent years, characterized by attempts to be cool at all cost and written as if all your readers are in the throes of adolescent rebellion?
I have stopped reading your reviews because they only warn me of films to avoid, and I never go to one anyway unless I've heard something good about it. I may stop reading the whole paper soon if your writers don't show signs of growing up.
Susannah Lippman
Eldorado
BEARS IN TROUBLE
Thank you for the Jan. 24 feature story, "
." I would like to point out one of the climate change myths not mentioned in the article, although you touch on it by having a polar bear on the front page and a photograph of one included with the article. Some skeptics are arguing that polar bear populations are actually rising and that the recent proposal to list them under the Endangered Species Act is unwarranted.
From all biologists' indications, this is false. The skeptics are pointing to increased numbers of bears around some arctic towns. But this is because the animals have moved off the ice and onto land because they are starving. Second, skeptics say that only two of the 22 polar bear populations are declining, although these are the two most important populations and the other 20 are actually not being monitored at this time.
Ian Sterling, who has been a polar bear biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service for more than 30 years, reports that he is seeing the ice melt three weeks earlier than when he first studied the Hudson Bay polar bear population 25 years ago. He has estimated that for every week earlier that the bears come off the ice, they gain 22 pounds less. Three weeks less on the ice creates a 10 percent weight loss for females, which has impacted the number of cubs born.
The fact is that global warming is causing Arctic ice to melt. Polar bears are being threatened by habitat loss due to climate change. Polar bear birth rates are down 15 percent just in recent years. Scientists are documenting some of the first cases of cannibalism and drowning (since the bears have farther to swim to reach the ice) in Canada and Alaska.
Please urge the US Fish and Wildlife Service to list polar bears as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act, as they proposed in December 2006. Without this protection, polar bears could be extinct in the wild within this century.
Nancy Johnson
Santa Fe
STILL SKEPTICAL
There is no compelling evidence temps are rising more rapidly than ever before, much less that this could be caused by man. Recorded data is only, what, 120 years old and flaky and extremely irregular, showing no statistical pattern of temp increase. Earlier estimates based on various geophysical sampling data are not discrete enough to make confident predictions about how fast or slow temp changes took place.
There is no definitive proof CO2 levels are higher now than before because core samples used for a baseline are notoriously volatile. In fact, the variously referenced historical CO2 levels used by you fanatics to support your case do not coincide with historic warming cycles.
There is absolutely no reason to make prognostics about sea levels. The Antarctic, as you acknowledged, is NOT MELTING since it remains below zero; the Arctic sits in water already, so it wouldn't change the sea level even if it did melt; and Greenland, as you admit, is gaining mass. So what are you claiming, that the edges of Greenland are going to raise sea levels? And if the edges did melt as a result of warming, increased sea surface temps would increase evaporation and well reduce sea levels.
If you want to extrapolate doomsday scenarios to ridiculous conclusions, there are plenty of computer models. If they worked, somebody would have found one to predict the stock market. You should read up on chaos theory. You only need to get beyond a few variables to exhaust our current computing power. Nice try, though. Most global warming fanatics wouldn't even understand what the hell you were talking about, much less try to address the skeptics' scientific arguments.
John Dosta
Miami, Fla.
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