Unfettered Letters

Pick up the pace on dealing with deer

Shawnee Mission Park has a deer population of almost 200 per square mile, eight times greater than biologists suggest is healthy (12/29, A-1, “Hordes of deer threaten park”). This would have occurred over many years while the deer were finding less and less to eat. That was inhuman.

Now the Park Board has a 10-person committee reviewing the problem with a report that could take six months.

That appears to be dangerously slow on top of being years late as well.

I may be stupid, but enlighten me. Quick!

Marilyn Frenzel
Overland Park

Rising Hispanic population

Matt Campbell’s article (8/11, Local, “Area Hispanic population rises; Demographic estimates by the Census Bureau show 5 percent increase”) provided the reader with recent demographic estimates from the Census Bureau. The estimates reflected a trend that has been apparent for several years, and the trend is a disproportionate Hispanic population growth in the six-county metropolitan area compared with the other major population groups.

The root cause for this rapid Hispanic growth was not specified in the article. Could it be because of overwhelming illegal immigration? I think it is conceivable that, probably sooner than later, Hispanics will continue to advance their power base and be in a strategic position to unfairly alter our political landscape.

Since children born of illegal immigrants here in the U.S. are automatically granted citizenship at birth, that bizarre privilege alone is enough to contribute to a formidable Hispanic voting bloc. Circa the mid ’80s, approximately three million illegal Hispanics were granted residence status. Granting them amnesty did absolutely nothing to stem the tide of illegal immigrants entering the country.

When is it going to stop? Unless our Congress gets its arms around the immigration debacle, our country’s sovereignty will continue to be dismantled before our eyes.

Jack Kochanski
Independence

Population growth unsustainable

The story that the human global population will hit 7 billion by 2012 (6/20, A-1) only hints at the predicament we are in. The population has mushroomed since the start of the industrial revolution, when humans began consuming fossil fuels at a furious rate.

Humans in 2008 are super-sized in comparison with their pre-industrial ancestors. Annual human energy consumption has been estimated to be about 13 trillion watts. Divide by a world population of 6.7 billion, and you come up with an average human energy diet of about 2,000 watts-per-person annually. Since a 2,000-calorie-per-day human would use 100 watts of energy annually, each one of us is the equivalent of 20 hunter-gatherers. This suggests that if humans were energy-equivalent over time, the current global population is actually 130 billion.

Human reliance on dead organisms that lived millions of years ago (fossil fuels) is an example of a detritus ecosystem. There are many other examples of detritus ecosystems in nature, and they exhibit a cycle of bloom-and-crash. Like algae in a pond, which flourishes in the spring on the organic remains from the previous fall, humans can probably expect a crash after the current population bloom.

Gordon Risk
Kansas City

Population concerns

Frank Grimaldi (4/25, Letters) seems to think the Bible gives us license to destroy the Earth. He states that Genesis gives man “dominion over this creation,” and therefore we can do with it what we will.

It’s true that we seem to have dominion over the plants and animals. But we don’t have control over the laws of nature — one law being the law of gravitation, which means we are more or less stuck here on this planet.

If we don’t find a way to limit population growth, Earth will become a barren sewer and our descendants will end up killing each other over food and water.

Maybe that is the fate of humanity, but you can’t blame some optimists for thinking that we are intelligent enough to live in harmony with nature.

Jim Meyer
Lenexa

Population growth

I second Michael Fopeano’s letter (4/16) concerning the dangers of population growth. The open frontier is gone. We now have a heavily populated finite world, greatly damaged by human efforts to overproduce and overconsume. Even now we struggle to find energy sources that will not aggravate global warming, and every additional person increases that burden. Moreover, there are biological limits to the amount of potable water and food that can be produced.

Unless we keep human population constrained within these limits, we are all threatened. Already, oceans are dangerously overfished, and we see emerging food and water shortages in Asia and Africa. Furthermore, in the final, frantic struggle for food, energy and other necessities, we may well poison our environment beyond any recovery: War is very destructive.

Whether “green,” “pro-life,” Democrat, Republican or independent, we must unite. Survival requires that we initiate a worldwide program to prevent human reproduction from destroying this fragile planet on which our lives and all our hopes depend. Write your senator. And vote.

Margaret A. Hogan
Kansas City

I am glad to see I am not the only one who realizes that the world’s problems are caused by man. It only stands to reason, for example, that our fresh water supplies are dwindling. After all, the human body is approximately two-thirds water, and that water has to come from somewhere. If the population goes up, the water supply goes down.

As the population grows and requires more land to live on, there is less land to grow food. The more trees that are cut down to make room for farms, the fewer trees there are to clean the air and, therefore, more greenhouse gases accumulate, resulting in global warming and climate change. This deforestation also causes soil erosion and increased desert area, which makes for less farmable and livable land and less animal and plant habitat. And this doesn’t cover the pollution we constantly pump into the environment, causing more problems.

No, Mr. Fopeano, you are not the only one “terrified by these figures.”

Michele Green
Independence

The “threat of overpopulation” message is not new. The writer says we should stop “uncontrolled breeding” in order to save the “other plant and animal species” of planet Earth.

Good for him his parents didn’t get this advice before he was born.

The save-the-planet themes do raise some questions. Save it for whom? Which plants and what animals are going to inherit the Earth?

My recollection of Genesis is that man was given dominion over this creation, along with the gift to “breed.”

I’m not aware of any knowledge that this rock in all of the universe will last forever.

Frank Grimaldi
Kansas City

The threat of overpopulation

There have been many newspaper stories about the world food and water shortages, destruction of habitat due to reckless paving and building, pollution of our atmosphere and oceans and all the other major global problems.

The writers of these articles always seem to stop short of stating the real problem, which is the cancerous growth of the human population. From the time humans evolved (yes, I said evolved) it took millions of years for the world population to reach one billion in about 1804.

It took only 123 years for it to reach two billion in 1927. In 1960 it reached three billion.

In 1999 it reached six billion and now it’s more than six and a half. Am I the only one who is terrified by these figures?

This little planet Earth is the only home we’ve got, and if we don’t stop eliminating other plant and animal species by our uncontrolled breeding, we and it are doomed.

Michael Fopeano
Parkville

Power plant

A couple of months ago, Kansas Department of Health and Environment Secretary Rod Bremby denied Sunflower Power’s permit to build two large, coal-fired power plants in western Kansas. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius supported him. Both were right.

This power plant is bad for Kansas on many levels. In addition to the obvious pollution concerns, a major consequence that our legislators seem to have missed — but which our coal interests surely have not — is that the excess capacity from this project will effectively kill the budding wind energy business in Kansas by destroying the business case for future clean power alternatives.

And our representatives’ stated reason for supporting this polluting behemoth? It will provide 350 full-time jobs when finished. Guess what? Wind farms also create jobs, and the fuel is free. The real reason for their support is the fossil fuel industry has too much influence in Kansas politics. Citizens need to contact their legislators and hold them accountable.

It’s ironic and moronic that the third best state in the nation for clean, free wind resources not only allows a huge coal-fired power plant to be built, but effectively neuters the clean power interests for the next generation. The coal interests refer to that as a twofer!

Tim Lawler
Overland Park

Family planning funds

Bravo for your Sept. 26 editorial lambasting the Bush administration for not releasing funds to the U.N. Population Fund (“Playing politics with family planning”). The poorest, most vulnerable women in the world are paying the price.

One hundred eighty countries contributed to Population Fund last year, but not the United States of America. For shame.

When Bush first did this in 2002, Lois Abraham and I were so angry that we started asking 34 million of our fellow citizens to take a stand with $1. The group called 34 Million Friends (www.34millionfriends.org) has raised a healthy $3.6 million, much of which has gone for family planning, commodities and training of health-care workers and midwives.

We are sending a nice message to the world from the American people.

Jane Roberts
Redlands, Calif.

Editor’s note: The 34 Million Friends Web site describes it as a “a grass-roots movement that was independently initiated in July 2002 by two American women, Lois Abraham of New Mexico and Jane Roberts of California. Although they had never met, Lois and Jane were both outraged by the United States withdrawal of $34 million approved for UNFPA and they decided to take action.”

Limit population growth

Elizabeth and Michael Stoakes have the courage to propose that we “limit human population growth” in order to “preserve our natural world” (6/30, Letters, “Bird numbers decline”).

I say courage because many equate population control with the destruction of human life, as if all methods of limiting our numbers were the moral equivalent of murder.

The world’s population increases by over 200,000 each day. This is the net gain (births minus deaths). To give that number some perspective, Overland Park and Shawnee have a combined population of around 200,000.

To claim that all our environmental and social problems are the result of population growth would be simplistic, but the stresses on the environment from having to provide food, water, shelter, education, medical care, transportation and employment to an additional 65 million to 75 million every year are enormous.

The pressures are not only environmental. Many of our social and political problems worldwide could be alleviated if we allowed organizations such as International Planned Parenthood help families determine when they want to have children. We have seen that when families have a choice, the tendency is to have fewer children and to provide a better life for them.

Pablo La Rosa
Mission

Life worth protecting

Alan Manker (1/28, Letters) seems concerned about where to put the 50 million children who were aborted.

These aborted children would have attended schools and universities that closed because of a lack of students. They would have created both the supply and demand for many goods and services, creating many jobs.

These aborted children would have built an even better country, with an even better economy and lifestyle than we enjoy.

These aborted children may have included great scientists and doctors with cures for diseases, great inventors and entrepreneurs to improve our lifestyles and efficiency, great teachers to motivate our students and great statesmen to lead our country and the world.

There is plenty of room. Travel by air, and you will see vast areas with room for expansion.

Don’t worry about the Christian right. It is your selfish, liberal friends who look foolish when trying to act informed and educated, while your true agenda is to find reasons to eliminate the elderly, disabled and retarded using the same feeble argument used to eliminate the unborn.

Paul D. Hokanson
Odessa

Alan Manker’s argument that abortion is sometimes a “necessary evil” is based on false premises.

First, he claims it is necessary to stem the tide of overcrowding. While it’s true that some pockets of our world are overcrowded, the vast majority of it is quite underpopulated.

Second, he claims there would not be enough jobs. Unemployment in the United States is at or near record lows.

The fact is, those 50 million aborted babies since Roe v. Wade would have gone along way to shoring up our current Social Security crisis, if they had only been given the chance to be taxpayers.

Shannon Glasford
Liberty