Posts under ‘Letters’

On June 19, 2005, the Poughkeepsie Journal published a column, reproduced below. In response, Mark S. Meritt responded with one of dozen of letters. The Journal published a number of them over several days, including an abridged version of Mark’s letter, reproduced here in full.
The Letter
I was disheartened to see Jonna M. Spilbor’s diatribe against [...]

On April 2, 2004, the Poughkeepsie Journal published a letter to the editor, reproduced below. In response, Mark S. Meritt responded with his own. It turned out to be one of more than two dozen responses, of which the Journal published a handful, including an abridged version of Mark’s letter, reproduced here in full.
The Letter
I [...]

I was recently given a gift subscription to Mother Earth News. I read my first issue (December/January 2004) from cover to cover and found it to be a fantastic publication. I look forward to being a longtime reader.
I have, however, what I feel to be important comments about two of your articles.
In “Growing… Growing… GONE?,” [...]

Cheers to Katharine Milton (”Something to Howl About,” 10/03) for illuminating the importance of two critical facts about population ecology — that “prudent” parasites do not kill their hosts, and that population size fluctuates in response to the availability of food.
Jeers to Marc J. Cohen (”Crop Circles”, 10/03) and Laurence A. Marschall (Review, “Space, the [...]

Your recent special issue on neuroscience (September 2003) shows, unsurprisingly and with few exceptions, a striking uniformtiy of voice and vision about the topic. The cover declares the issue to be about “Better Brains: How Neuroscience Will Enhance You” (emphasis added). The articles adopt your usual tone of inevitability and mostly-desirability, and the culmination is [...]

On the whole, your balanced view of technology (SA Perspectives “Get Real,” 4/03) seems appropriate. However, when you suggest that to stop research is to give up trying to make the world a better place, you tend toward your own dangerous extreme. Far more often than not in our global culture, technology is used to [...]

If a human population’s death rate or a nation’s commercial bankruptcy rate increased 17 times, it would be considered an unparalleled disaster. To consider this extreme-low-end estimate of the increase in the current extinction rate — not to mention larger increases — to be anything less is insanity.
More importantly, the truth about biodiversity ["On the [...]

In addition to the potential problems noted for the idea of using gravitationally slingshot asteroids to shift Earth’s orbit and thereby foster life in the face of the sun’s increasing luminosity (”Save the Earth,” June 2001), Kepler’s third law ensures that the length of Earth’s year will increase along with the distance from Earth to [...]

A well established principle of population ecology is that an increase in food availability generates an increase in population, as surely in a lynx population which finds an abundance of hares as in a human population that purposefully increases food production. This fact is used as the basis for numerous (if not most) discussions of [...]

Tearing down the wall of human exceptionalism, a set of false conceits that inhibits us from genuinely understanding our place in the world, has always strengthened the pursuit of natural truth. In “The Culture of Chimpanzees,” authors Andrew Whiten and Christophe Boesch seem to contribute toward dispelling this arrogance and making real progress in the [...]