Water Whipping Sir: Your perfectly TIMEd water cover [Oct. 1] should lead to grass-roots recognition of our nation's staggering water problem. A thorough whipping is needed, and whip us you did. Your editor punched hard—the message came through raw and unembellished—but even more starkly effective was Robert Vickrey's cover.
MAC UMSTATTD General Counsel Lower Colorado River Authority Austin, Tex.
Sir: You showed in graphic form the preponderance of ground water resources but did not pursue this in your text. Reuse, desalinization, pollution control, dams and pipelines are all important. But none is so important as public understanding of the availability of ground water in most areas where masses of people live, of its low cost, and of the necessity to use and conserve it.
DURWARD HUMES Committee for Private Water Resource Protection Chicago
Preserving Natural Beauty Sir: In your story on natural beauty [Sept. 17], you mention the junked car problem but fail to mention that a solution has been found. The metal fragmentizer reduces cars to chunks. In Philadelphia, where a fragmentizer will soon become operational, the prediction is that the junked-car problem will be solved within six months.
J. LEONARD LICHTENFELD Philadelphia
Sir: As a scientist, I disagree that the solution to the problem of our deteriorating environment must come from science. Science can help in areas like air and water pollution and waste disposal. But an expanding population needs houses, and houses occupy land formerly devoted to other uses. Though reduction in grazing and food-producing acreage can be partially offset by technological advances, decrease in open spaces cannot. Even our national and state parks cannot remain wilderness areas, for the impact of visitors is changing the character of these areas.
The only solution is population control. We would do well to embark on such a program before we are overwhelmed by numbers.
DONALD F. ANTHROP Berkeley, Calif.
On War
Sir: Many of your readers are grateful for and enriched by your Essays. But in "On War as a Permanent Condition" [Sept. 24], you have reached the nadir of human diplomacy and endeavor.
At all costs, we are to put national interests first, and, hopefully and incidentally, moral interests as well. Do you not, by such conclusions regarding the "moral purpose" of limited war, lay bare the hypocrisy by which we justify our action in time of war? The depth of the evil about us is not a call to retribution but to greatness. Are we not to be called atheists when we believe and act upon the belief that there are gulfs between "right" men and "wrong" men so great that no bridge can be thrown across them? Must we accept war as the price of human dignity and freedom?