We must turn anger into action to save the planet
Thank you for highlighting the truly dire situation in the Amazon (30 August). Sadly, the same thing is also happening to the rainforests, the indigenous peoples and the wildlife of central Africa and Borneo. Our precious earth’s creatures are at great risk of extinction if we do not change course very soon.
The only way to stop the climate crisis is to have a concerted global people-power campaign to remove the megalomaniac nationalist leaders Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and others who are the foremost proponents of the plunder of the natural world.
The survival of the planet and its inhabitants depends on us acting quickly together to reverse this awful state of affairs and renew the earth before we get to an irreversible tipping point. Let’s turn our despair, sadness and anger into hope and action to make a real difference.
Steven Katsineris
Hurstbridge, Victoria, Australia
• The article summarising a new UN report describes how we humans degrade the earth, threatening the world food supply by forest destruction, implicitly blaming “rising global population and consumption” in Malthusian tonalities (16 August). The article does not mention the patenting of seeds, the land grabs and monopolies by transnational corporations. There is also the vast deforestation for biofuel plantations to feed cars, not people; the speculation on food prices in futures markets; and the dumping of food products, which undermines small farmers. Exacerbating the dire impact of climate change is the lethal agriculture system, with culpable people at the helm.
Judith Deutsch
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Your analysis of Putin omits some key points
Angus Roxburgh’s article on Vladimir Putin (16 August) omits two points. In 1990s Russia, democracy brought many political parties, but also economic shock therapy that was all shock and no therapy. Dodgy privatisations created a few multibillionaires and left the vast majority impoverished, with an epidemic of violent crime.
Entrepreneurs did well, workers went unpaid or earned too little to survive. In popular parlance, demokratiya soon became dermokratiya (shitocracy). Older Russians remember a time of fear and insecurity; Putin restored order. Their view of democracy is, understandably, different from ours.
The Chechen separatists were Islamist fighters who called for jihad. In any other context they would be called terrorists; naturally Russia views them as such.
Christine Barnard
London, UK
The collapse of linguistic standards is distressing
With reference to 23 August’s Lingua fracas!!: Guardian writer David Shariatmadari picks out renowned authors, such as John Updike and William Golding, to refute the value of George Orwell’s statement that language will become decadent and share in the general collapse of civilisation. There will always be exceptions, tall poppies who buck the trend.
I submit there is a general decline. Even look at the subsequent page subhead in the Weekly: “This summer’s World Cup made Megan Rapinoe a outspoken global superstar”. “An” used to be the correct preposition.
It all adds to the decline – the Guardian, and media in general, can help slow the decline.
Stephen Banks
Birmingham, UK
• I stand duly chastised by David Shariatmadari in his admonition to accept changes in English usage. Of course, language gradually evolves but when changes in usage derive simply from utter carelessness or an “I don’t give a damn” attitude, there must surely be lines that cannot be crossed. I hope that even the author will accept that “I should of went” is one of my lines.
John Gittins
Toronto, Canada
Greenland has other options besides Trump
Greenland has more options than Denmark, independence or Donald Trump (23 August). It’s just a day’s kayaking from Ellesmere Island, Canada. The peoples of Greenland and Nunavut are ethnically similar, and until the 1940s they visited back and forth by boat and sled.
Douglas Porteous
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Thank you for such profound insights
Thank you for publishing the extraordinary thoughts of Noel Gallagher on global warming and the nuclear threat: “fuck the grandkids, they might be cunts” (16 August, Bigmouth strikes again). I don’t remember reading things so profound since Plato, Spinoza or Hegel.
Marc Jachym
Les Ulis, France
