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Additional Letters to the Editor
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Snowbowl
misrepresented coalition’s views
Editor’s
note: The following letter was sent to J. R. Murray, general
manager of the Arizona Snowbowl on July 11, as well as to
Flagstaff Tea Party and other local media.
We have become aware that the
Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition was inaccurately represented
in your presentation at the Snowbowl Lodge on … July 10
(concerning) your proposed snow play area at U.S. 180 and
Snowbowl Road. Appearing beneath a diagram showing planned
lighting use for the site was a statement indicating that
the proposed lighting “meets the objectives ... of the
Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition.”
This
is not true. In
fact, the FDSC has not been officially contacted, and though
the observatory representative you spoke with regarding
lighting is also a member of FDSC, he did not evaluate the
proposal from the perspective of FDSC, and did not represent
to you any FDSC position regarding your proposal.
The
objectives of FDSC are “to celebrate, promote, and protect
the Dark Skies of Flagstaff and Northern Arizona.”
Our position concerning this project is that 1) the
lighting, as proposed, is reasonable from the perspective of
recommended lighting practices and the lighting code, but 2)
it is a substantial amount of light in a naturally dark
rural environment, over a perpetually snowy surface that
will reflect a large portion of the light into the night
sky, and therefore it will have substantial negative impact
on the quality of the dark sky resource in Fort Valley.
Our
impression from the meeting is that many of the residents of
Fort Valley, like many throughout our community, highly
value their views of a dark, star-filled sky.
We support their concern, and agree that the proposed
lighting would have a detrimental affect on their night
skies.
In
future we would appreciate that you not presume to represent
our position without consulting with us and receiving our
permission.
John
Grahame,
for the Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition
------------------------------------------------
A Phoenician’s take on Flagstaff
While
visiting Flagstaff this summer, I was pleased to discover
your newspaper. I was able to find similar fare in my
hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, but it is hard to find such
in my current home of Phoenix. I enjoy a wide variety of
reading materials, from the likes of Flagstaff Tea Party to
Barrons.
I
wanted to comment on the articles by Norm Wallen and Lisa
Rayner, which are somewhat related. First, Wallen commented that a property owner would classify the
failure to upzone property from 70 homes developable to
1,000 homes as a taking. This is an exaggeration which
damages the credibility of his point. I have never heard
such a claim and surely no court would find as such.
However, a government action that would effectively downzone
a property from 1,000 homes to 70 would be a taking. The
precedent-setting Supreme Court case concerned ocean-front
home lots in the Carolinas. The Supreme Court found, by an
8-1 vote, that the local authority could not initiate a ban
on ocean front construction without compensating the owners
of the affected lots. An 8-1 vote is not a close call. No
property owner is entitled to upzone property. That is why a
developer will take an option to buy, subject to upzoning,
realizing that it is not a certainty. If it was a given, or
a right, why not just buy the land? Boulder, Colo. has
developed a greenbelt surrounding the city by refusing to
upzone agriculturally zoned land. This policy has withstood
court challenge.
With
respect to growth vs. no growth or slow growth, I agree with
the philosophy of zero population growth and many of the
points made in Rayner's article. However, I do not think
that Flagstaff has a population problem, while Calcutta
does. Zero Population Growth will be achieved as the
developing world becomes more educated and affluent. This is
an ongoing process, and world birthrates are slowly in
decline. In fact, the US and western Europe would have
declining populations were it not for immigration and ever
lengthening lifetimes.
The
Flagstaff area is a very desirable community and will
inevitably continue to grow. If the city were to choke off
development, surrounding areas will develop in a sprawl
manner, completely outside of Flagstaff's control. Inside
the city limits, housing would become more and more
expensive. The community that you seek to maintain would
slowly cease to exist. Affordable housing would eventually
consist of mobile homes within driving distance of town. It
would be much better to shape the manner of development
through design review procedures and objective development
criteria. For example, perhaps a developer can buy density
for a downtown mid-rise, with the proceeds used to fund the
purchase (rather than the taking) of open space around the
city. With center-city density, critical mass is achieved to
create a human-friendly environment, where residents can
walk to work, shopping and entertainment. The continuing
demand for housing is met with supply, preventing the city
from being an exclusive enclave for affluent
environmentalists.
I
hope that you will find these ideas constructive and thought
provoking to your readership.
Happy
Birthday!
Rich
Baxter
Phoenix
---------------------------------------------
Corporations
backed the Nazis
This is regarding Dr. Lawrence
Wilson’s letter to the editor in the July issue of
Flagstaff Tea Party. Wilson wrote, “The free enterprise
system is pretty wonderful, functioning much better than the
socialist systems that Nazi Germany, Communist Russia and a
number of nations are still known for.”
Two
corrections:
1.
After the “Night of the Long Knives” the
controlling element in the German Nazi party had moved away
from National “socialism” to control by Germany’s
largest corporations, such as I.G. Farben (Hitler’s major
backer), Krupp, Flick, Faber, Thysen & Mengele, most of
whom were recently exposed as still having illegal financial
control of the Conservative Kohl government.
2.
Socialism and capitalism have worked successfully and
in harmony in North European countries such as the
Netherlands, one of the world’s wealthiest, most modern
countries, where care for one’s fellow man still co-exists
with highly successful (originally Dutch, now multinational)
corporations, such as Phillips, KLM, Uni-Lever, A-Hold,
Shell Oil, etc.). Did you know that the Netherlands,
together with the Japanese and the U.K., own/control more
real estate in the U.S.A. than any other foreign countries?
Tony van
Renterghem
Flagstaff
--------------------------
There are no limits
In her July article,
Lisa Rayner made reference to the Club of Rome and the
findings of their computer model which predicted the
eventual collapse of our society in the 1972 book, 7he
Limits to Growth.
We should not be so
naive as to put our faith in a computer model made in 1970
— 30 years later and we still don't have any computer
models sophisticated enough to tell us with any certainty
what next month's stock prices are going to do, much less
prognosticate something as complicated as the long-term
economic fate of human society. The computer model used by
the Club of Rome was exceedingly simplistic, as even the
authors of Limits to Growth admitted at the time;
“We use the model
(World3) to simulate the world system as it might evolve if
there were no structural changes, no extraordinary efforts
to see ahead, to improve signals, or to solve problems
before they become critical. The results of those
simulations is not only overshoot, but collapse. Fortunately
there is evidence that the real human world is more
competent than the simplified model world of (World3)."
(Limits, p. 8)
Indeed. Their
computer model predicted that metals such as gold, mercury,
tin, zinc, copper and lead would all become increasingly
scarce, and more expensive towards the end of the 20th
century. In fact, the real prices of all of these resources
have dropped, due to increased abundance. The programmers of
the World3 model seem to have used algorithms designed to
study animal populations, but unlike animals, humans do not
just consume resources, they are capable of producing them
as well.
As for population
growth — the cornerstone of the Club of Rome's Malthusian
pessimism — they were spectacularly wrong as well. At the
time the book was written, the world population was
estimated at 3.6 billion. Their computer model predicted a
world population of 7 billion by 2000 — in fact, most
experts believe we have only just passed the 6 billion mark.
In only 30 years, they were off by one billion — one sixth
of the world's population!
As any computer
scientist will tell you, "garbage in, garbage
out." The Club of Rome's computer model was fatally
flawed because many of its key assumptions had no bearing on
the real world. Their neoMalthusian view of humanity
assumed that we would grow like yeast — the more abundant
the food supply, the higher the rate of population growth.
This has been proven to be dead wrong. In fact, the areas of
the globe with the highest per capita food production show
the least population growth — exactly the opposite of
their prediction.
Population growth in
the most advanced industrialised nations (the United States
included) has been slowing, and in some cases Oike Germany)
actually going into reverse. As developing societies mature
and become more Westernized, this trend is expected to
continue; many population experts now believe that the world
population will stabilize toward the middle of this century
at about 9 billion.
Computer models of
complex systems like the Earth's climate or the economic
fate of human civilization cannot possibly be accurate until
we understand those systems completely. We should all be
very skeptical of those who attempt to use computer models
of doomsday scenarios to bully us into making policy
decisions. More often than not, such computer models are
based more on ideology than science. Time and time again,
the predictions of the doomsayers (backed of course by the
latest "scientific" data) come to naught. Remember
the global cooling scares of the 1970's? Until our knowledge
of the world is more complete, computer models predicting
our planet's future will be unreliable if not downright
misleading - as it stands now, you're probably better off
with "Mistress Cleo. "
But having said that,
the authors of The Limits to Growth did make one prediction
that has stood the test of time remarkably well:
"We shall
emphasize ... that none of these computer outputs is a
prediction. We would not expect the real world to behave
like the world model in any of the graphs we have shown,
especially in the collapse modes." (Limits, p. 142)
Michael Lacy
Flagstaff
Tea Party Publisher
Lisa Rayner replies:
Both the Limits to
Growth and Beyond the Limits, involved dozens of computer
simulations with wide ranges of inputs like the rate of
population growth, consumption levels, pollution levels and
technological efficiency. The results were quite varied. The
authors did not endorse any of the simulations as the
“right” one.
The only simulations
that avoided collapse were ones in which both population and
consumption were lowered, and technology was made much more
efficient. Doing only one or two of those strategies was
shown to slow down the rate of collapse (with no specific
years implied), but not avoid it completely.
All resources
produced by humans ultimately come from natural resources.
We do not create resources out of thin air.
Global
warming research suggests that if the Earth warms pasts a
certain unknown point, the Gulf Stream could stop
circulating warm equatorial water to the north Atlantic and
northern Europe, causing Europe to rapidly cool down.
Geologic evidence indicates that the Gulf Stream has shut
down prior to every ice age since it first appeared.
--------------------------
Tea
Party disappoints
Not only
did I gladly anticipate the startup of the Flagstaff Tea
Party, but have been a monthly reader since you began
publishing. For years now, I have held a position as a
conscientious objector to media — I don't watch
television, I turn the radio off for news and commercials,
and I rarely to almost never read daily papers (sometimes a
headline in the Daily Sun or the NY Times will catch my
attention), for the simple reason that I don't want to be
fed the BS.
The Tea
Party is about to get dumped into my file of don't reads for
the following reasons:
1.
The necessity that you all seem to have about
slamming the other guys in town — both the Daily Sun and
the Flag Live! Mountain. Living bunch. Didn't you ever hear
about how pathetic it is to cut another down to make
yourselves look bigger? Any intelligent person wishing to
place advertising could do their own compare and contrast
for pricing. Also, how many minors do you have delivering
your paper and/or are on your payroll? I don't appreciate
the bad mouthing, and find it very offensive and immature.
2.
My lifestyle is one that keeps me walking lightly,
respectfully, worshipfully and responsible to our Earth.
However in that, I live well below the poverty level, while
usually working two or three different gigs. Guess what? I
have to think about how I can get the most for my meager
dollars, in the no spare time that I have, and sometimes
that means shopping at Wal-Mart, or Barnes & Noble where
I can get lower prices during times that are convenient for
me (often not the times that our locally owned businesses
are open). The ongoing bashing that you all publish for any
others than those following your party lines reminds me of
the Christian right, and is as much of a turnoff. Which
leads me to #3
3.
The Tea Party has become utterly predictable and
boring in promoting its party line. I do like the articles
you publish written by community members — often folks I
know. This is probably the first time in my life I've ever
written a letter like this, and I considered sending it
anonymously, as I am a community player. However, I'm mad
and offended, and ask that you consider whether your
judgements and opinions are really good journalism.
If
you choose to print this (which I consider highly unlikely),
please do not use my name.
-------------------------------------------------
Stop laying blame, accentuate
the positive
Dear Lisa and Dan and all of
the wonderful FAN activists who are working so hard to
preserve our small town qualities here in Flagstaff:
I
am following the long-urged advice of Mary Sojourner to
break silence. I have held back for way too long now,
mostly, I think, in fear of being misunderstood or
criticized — silly reasons, I know, but there,
nonetheless. I honor your efforts, through Flagstaff Tea
Party to create alternative press in northern Arizona. You
have courage and determination that I have been sitting on.
But it seems to me that you are, please excuse the cliche,
"preaching to the choir." Those of us who read and
agree are not the ones needing to be informed, and the ones
who are in need of expanded vistas may not be continuing
readers. My problem with FTP is that you have an obvious
agenda — and an "us and them" approach to your
vision. I believe it is time to make a leap here — a giant
leap. If we are, indeed, "One Planet, One People"
then I would encourage us all to go beyond our need to be
right, our need to be judge and jury of others, and our need
to underline our seeming separation from each other. I would
like to see us expand our vision of cooperation and
conscious awareness in these dark times that I believe are
taking us into a potentially shiny future. I know I am at
risk of being labeled a "Pollyanna" here, but hey,
I could carry worse labels.
I have been a
Flagstaff resident (minus perhaps 10 scattered years away)
since 1962 — a transplant, like many others now, from
southern California. When I arrived, the population was in
the 20,000s. We had 3 downtown, locally owned markets —
Babbitt’s Thriftway, where Wells Fargo is now, Southside
Market, now Dragon's Plunder, and Foodtown, now Beaver Brew.
The 70s saw the dwindling of local businesses as Switzer's
Hardware closed its doors and Moore's Drugs became McGaughs.
Businesses came and went, including my own Enchanted Owl,
living in what is now Alley Cats. Times they truly are a
changin' though as the corporate world slides its tentacles
into our town-wanting-to-become-a-city. And I am wondering
— is there a heart beating anywhere in these big
mega-corporations? They are made up of individuals aren't
they? How do we reach their hearts and minds? Or do we
simply teach by example, wake up ourselves and walk our own
talk? I have come to recognize that the seeds of the 7
generations lie within us now, and that we nurture them by
the way we live our own lives. Are we opening our own hearts
to each other? Listening to each other? Being creative in
our (approach) to problems? Opening to an ever-broadening
vision of how our "reality" can be?
I have for many years
felt that our media, particularly TV news and newspapers,
has promoted a narrow-focused, fear-slanted agenda. I have
often wondered what might happen in the minds of the masses
if they were to see and hear about those who are being
creative, cooperating with each other, expressing acts of
kindness and generosity, and overcoming great obstacles in
their lives. How might we all perceive this world we live in
if we were being inspired by the lives of actively conscious
yet ordinary folks who love their children, listen to the
wisdom of the old ones and offer kindnesses in their daily
lives? I would like to hear more about the positive stuff
going on in my community — about the people who really are
"living simply, that others may simply live." (I
love bumper stickers!) Articles like the one from William
Edelen (July 2001) are wonderful! Revealing much without
laying blame.
I thank you, again,
for your tremendous efforts to offer us an alternative to
the Daily Sun. Your work is needed and appreciated. Perhaps
I can be of service to you, in some way, to see my own
vision of alternative journalism become even more of a
reality here in this community I have called
"home" for some 35 years.
Desdra Dawning
Flagstaff
--------------------
Coffee, Big Boxes and small
town dilemmas
I think Starbucks is overrated
and will continue to enjoy Late for the Train and Macy's and
Jitters when I treat myself to special coffees. I have no
objection to Starbucks opening — we have every ugly fast
food joint and chain motel imaginable. There is not too much
we can do that will hurt the looks of the town unless we
build massive buildings, like Wal-Marts and Home Depots.
However, I have no desire to support chains when I can get
as good or better quality at a local spot. I don't even mind
spending a little bit more for the value of having local
service.
It seems to me the arguments
about business coming into town are not based on the right
ideas. Walmart does a good business on South Milton, so it
obviously fills a need. Who else sells what they sell (e.g.
inexpensive clothing for kids and adults alike, kitchen
appliances, garden supplies etc.)? Only other chains, like
K-mart and Target. If a second Wal-Mart opens, they will do
a good business too — but the South Milton Wal-Mart store
will close and there will stand a huge, ugly, empty
monstrosity. Anybody who does not believe this will happen
is only kidding themselves. Whether K-mart and Target can
both stay in business I cannot venture to guess.
We do not currently keep our
money in town because most of our business is not local.
This is true everywhere. Part of the problem is that local
shops have a very high turnover rate because it is very hard
to make a living as a small business owner and many people
are not terribly business savvy when they start out. Part of
the problem is that a local shop cannot possibly compete
with the huge stores for many reasons, including the price
of goods discounts large stores get for buying in bulk and
the social welfare they get from cities that a small
business could never hope for.
Part of the problem is that
people just think there is nothing in Flagstaff. And, as
with all myths, there is a morsel of truth in that. People
do not go to Phoenix to shop at Wal-Mart. They go to Phoenix
to buy business clothes, or men's shoes, or kitchen gear, or
any of the dozens of other things that either are not for
sale in this town or, if they are, they are well-kept
secrets, or they are just too expensive.
A friend of mine recently
bought a new car in Phoenix — not out of choice, but
because it would cost some thousands of dollars more to buy
the same vehicle here. Some business owners are just plain
greedy and will gouge the customer. They do not deserve our
business, whether they are local or not. We just went to
Phoenix to buy simple supports for a large stained glass
window because we could not find anything here that suits
our needs. It is hard to believe, but if somebody can make
these in Flagstaff, we can't find you! Shopping for some of
the best goods, as rated in Consumer Reports, is an exercise
in futility in this town. We are forced to go elsewhere for
many goods if we want to buy quality.
I think we should do the
following: The city should adopt a very strong building code
that restricts new building based on size. Huge ugly stores
are horrible to work in, they are horrible to shop in, and
they are blights on the landscape. Then, anybody who wants
and can open up shop, should be allowed to. We should vote
and we will vote with our purses. As concerned citizens, it
is up to us to present the negatives of shopping at
non-local stores; however, we realize there often is no
choice.
But at the very least, we as a
community can insist that the business that does come to
town builds or opens in buildings that suit the environment,
and they support us in the manner in which they would like
us to support them — that is, they provide real jobs with
real pay for local people — not part-time, low-wage, no
benefit jobs that will guarantee themselves a poor,
dependent workforce.
Ginger Jervey
Flagstaff
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