Our threats to the planet
While I agree with much of Stephen Emmott’s article Population is greater threat than global warming (11 December), I must raise the same objection as I do to George Monbiot’s thesis that intensive feedstock farming is the main problem (27 November). Such polarisation of a multi-faceted issue ill serves the objective, which for many of us, including Monbiot and Emmott, is to reduce our collective carbon footprint. As for saving the planet, I agree that Gaia herself is probably fairly secure, for a few billion years anyway, apart from the chance of destruction by a wayward asteroid.
The more immediate danger to humanity lies in our evident inhumanity. As a whole we are more focused on our immediate progress up the economic ladder than on sharing with the less fortunate what we already enjoy. Pope Francis is a surprising ally on this front, though the seemingly intransigent attitude of his church to implementing effective birth control measures gainsays any other advances in achieving his professed goals. You simply can’t have one without the other.
I hope the Weekly will continue this vital discussion, though with a more balanced perspective.
Noel Bird
Boreen Point, Queensland, Australia
• Tim Flannery’s article on ways to deal with global warming (27 November) was most optimistic. One can only hope some of these potential solutions will work.
I would like to recommend, however, that the Guardian Weekly stop using the term fossil fuels. It plays into the petroleum companies’ strategy. As part of your Keep it in the Ground campaign, you should rebrand this carbon as fossil carbon.
It is only because we had the conditions on this planet to fossilise carbon over millennia that Earth became habitable, and not another Venus. This carbon is not meant to be a fuel. Keep it in the Ground – Keep the Carbon Fossilised.
Peter Norman
Warrington, Pennsylvania, US
• George Monbiot writes about the need to become vegetarian, but it’s not that simple (27 November). Our Pyrenean neighbour makes cheese. He pastures some of his sheep on our rocky fields, and keeps them in our barn during the winter, where they eat dried hay. In summer they are driven up to the higher meadows – while the dung from the barn is spread out on the fields to fertilise the soil. The result in spring is a carpet of wildflowers – dog-toothed violets, wild orchids, eyebright, crocus, viper’s bugloss. Without the dung, the soil would be impoverished, and the grass would be thin.
The French forestry commission helps large landowners to reforest the hillsides that were cleared 300 years ago to graze sheep. It is only thanks to subsidies from the Common Agricultural Policy that a few Pyrenean farmers can go on like this, for a while. Many of the old stone barns have fallen in, and within their foundations trees have sprung up, giving cover to deer, foxes, badgers and voles. I’d be sorry to see an end to this way of life.
Linda Agerbak
Arlington, Massachusetts, US
• Thank you, Matthew R Foster (Reply, 4 December) for pointing out a core anomaly in the otherwise gallant attempt to clean up the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”: that the mega-tonnes of salvaged plastic will be recycled into yet more consumer goods, which will then recontaminate the water, soil, air. Until we grasp as a first principle the editorial heading in the same issue – There is no planet B – and recalibrate every aspect of our lives in the light of that truth, then we’re living an ecocidal lie.
I’ve spent much of my life looking for the right questions to ask. One such was posed by architect William McDonough, who asked, “How do we love all the children of all species for all time?” Part of the answer must include the simple concept: harmful substances may not be used. Alleluia.
Annie March
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Labour offers real change
Jonathan Freedland’s depressing analysis of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party (4 December) was deeply patronising. Labelling the leadership as “dinosaurs” carrying the “baggage of ancient left struggles” is to dismiss the energy of a revitalised opposition, one that offers real alternatives, rather than watered-down establishment dogma.
Freedland allies himself with the cautious, conservative Labour parliamentary party that is terrified of change and that believes that, if Labour does not adopt mainstream views, then it is doomed.
For decades, we have had political parties that offer no more than cosmetic differences to each other. Being offered choice again will revitalise social debate about our future.
Trevor Rigg
Edinburgh, UK
• Jonathan Freedland’s article, Corbyn is helping the Tory cause, makes the remarkable thesis that Jeremy Corbyn’s popularity is dooming Labour to the electoral wilderness.
I don’t think that Corbyn is responsible for the very poor showing of Labour at the last general election. On the contrary, it was the very conservative and war-hungry politics of the previous Labour government, and their reluctance to deviate from the agenda they shared with the Tories, that condemned them.
I can understand the trepidation that MPs must feel at what the rise of an openly progressive outsider like Corbyn represents. What will Rupert Murdoch think? What will the arms industry think?
Part of that fear lies in the volatility of first-past-the-post voting that so effectively excludes independent candidates. The other problem is voluntary voting, which enables interested and disinterested groups alike an undue influence on results. Relax - in Australia we have compulsory proportional representation and we still get conservative governments of both Tory and Labour flavours.
The fact that Corbyn has motivated so many people to join the party and, presumably, vote in elections reveals that what he is saying resonates with people in a way that the previous Labour leadership did not. He does this by talking about issues that otherwise get ignored in the spirit of bipartisanship.
People are sick of the parliamentary game as it is currently played where important issues (Trident, tax evasion, inequality) are not addressed. Yes, Corbyn will be mocked by the Tories, but he will invigorate a whole new generation who have seen little difference between the conservatives and Labour up until now, not to mention all the people who once felt that Labour represented something worthwhile.
Peter Sobey
Valla, NSW, Australia
Briefly
• Thank you for the article by Jurgen Todenhöfer (Western bombs will fill Isis with joy, 4 December). Everything he says is not only obvious but sane. He asks how can it be that nothing has been learned since 9/11. How does retaliating with bombs, killing untold numbers of civilians, do any good to anyone?
Kay Nicholson
Sheffield, UK
• Emma Brockes’s article (Passports are more than just documents, 27 November) describes UK immigration officers as “power-mad clerks”. This seemed to be in evidence a few years ago at Heathrow airport when I took the same line as my EU passport-carrying wife, despite myself having a Canadian passport.
“Wrong line,” the official said. My response of having been born in England was greeted with a silent glower, the passport was stamped and entry allowed. His revenge was the stamp: “Not allowed to work for six months”.
Anthony Walter
Surrey, British Columbia, Canada
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