Unwise reduction
Our world is terribly sick, perhaps mortally so (Only protect... Ecosystems, NI 378). For those who are listening, some days all we can hear are cries of pain. However, for many reasons, those who are able often look away and I can only be grateful to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the NI for reminding us of the ecological reality which underlies our existence.

But what a dearth of imagination, to propose only a 'wiser use of natural assets'. The wisest peoples have long known better than to reduce nature to so many resources for human benefit. It is this kind of thinking, the dislocation of homo sapiens from the intricate web of life, which got us here in the first place.

These precarious times call for radical changes. We must find the courage to refigure our spiritual universe and relinquish the privileged position that we have awarded ourselves. Other beings do not exist for 'the richness [they] provide to our lives' (measurable or otherwise).

Life matters, full stop

Pippa Wilde Pahiatua, New Zealand/Aotearoa

On the lookout
I write this in search of a small number of dedicated charismatic individuals willing to found a mass environmental movement with international potentiality.

It has now become plain that the extreme and widespread misuse of planetary life and resources is leading to ecological disaster and the undoing of a half billion years' evolutionary progress, and that this insidious downward degradation is taking on its own momentum, which the puny countermeasures of the Kyoto agreement, even if universally implemented, would be unable to arrest.

There is an urgent need for a national and worldwide group to campaign and demonstrate for a CO2 emission reduction far more drastic than Kyoto, with a commensurate sharp reduction of other toxic and lethal discharges, and of resource depletion in the developed world.

I ask willing individuals, possibly but by no means exclusively, with a scientific, philosophical or religious background, and with the time, energy and devotion to Nature, to contact me. I would then circularize all respondents, enabling them to form first a seeding group, which could draw from but not eclipse or diminish support for the present valued pioneering environmental groups.

Richard Harvey (tarquinsix@yahoo.com)
Salisbury, England

Hariri’s loss
Reem Haddad's column is the first I read when my NI arrives, so when Rafic Hariri was murdered I was gripped with concern about Reem. She feels like a sister to me. As I read her column (Letter from Lebanon, NI 378), a lump came to my throat. I grieve with my sister, and also feel her loss of a good leader.

May his memory live forever, and his legacy spread throughout the world, not just in Reem's homeland of Lebanon.

Grace Gorman Melbourne, Australia

Slowly, slowly…
I have read your excellent magazine for 25 years. But your cover strapline always irks me. To 'fight for global justice' implies the discredited approach of warriordom.

What weapons shall we 'fight' with? Words? If they're ineffective shall we throw stones? And if we're really passionately committed, fire-bombs? Or nuclear weapons? You will say it's only metaphorical. So will Ike Oguine regarding 'battles... to fight and win' (View from the South, NI 378).

I say language shapes psychology. Your strapline implies dichotomous thinking. It leads to demonization of those who disagree with us. 'We' are right. 'They' are wrong. It implies a world of goodies and baddies, of friends and enemies. All we need do is bond together, win the fight, and kill off the enemy. Then global justice and peace will emerge.

That is precisely what Messrs Bush, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz want us to believe. It is not so. Global justice can't be won. It will be constructed by slow, painstaking effort. It will come only by slowly persuading multitudes of damaged, half-starved, exploited people that fighting is not the way forward.

Global justice will be built through better communication, by teaching understanding, by supporting compromise, by laborious programmes of reconciliation. Fighting gets us nowhere.

Bill McNicholas Wellington, England

Not to blame
Sue Hensley (Letters, NI 378) states that the massacres in West Papua are really carried out by multinational companies and foreign powers. But she then goes on to say that we are all responsible for the murders.

It is essential to distinguish between big corporations and governments on the one hand, and ordinary people on the other. It is the rich and powerful who profit from such events and who are truly behind them. Workers in the developed world do not benefit from them and can in no way be held to blame.

Paul Bennett Manchester, England

Safe distance
Street children (NI 377) led me to a fantasy. Suppose some altruistic people-smuggler delivered hundreds of street children from around the world to a remote part of the New Zealand/Aotearoa coast and then slipped away. What would happen when they were discovered? Would we find homes for them or send them off, anywhere? It would be nice to believe the first but we know it would be the second. To assuage our guilt we would talk about the danger of establishing a precedent, of being flooded by emotionally damaged children. This would be totally rational but also shows how compassion readily sinks below pragmatism when the wealthy countries and the world's poor come face to face. Comfortable democracies elect their politicians to keep them safe and affluent. Perhaps the day will come when we will ask politicians about their global conscience, but not before we all have one.

Ian McKissack Raglan, New Zealand/Aotearoa

Basta!
After reading Street children, I am disgusted that so many other supposed 'human beings' can terrorize, beat and use street children for their own gratification. I am sickened and amazed at the harm human beings can inflict on each other and, most upsettingly, upon children. I would like someone to name one country in the world, wealthy or poverty-stricken, whose government is not corrupt or dishonest in some way.

Aside from political buck-passing and corporate capitalism, the biggest threat to our very existence is overpopulation. I cringed when reading that 'Ricardo' from Montevideo who has been raped, lives on the street, smokes marijuana to escape reality and has robbed a lady, wants in the future to have 15 or 20 children.

I think that it is cruel to have children if you cannot provide a reasonably safe, healthy environment. I realize people will say: 'These people cannot help their situation', however, they do have a choice on whether or not to keep having children.

My husband and I decided only to have one child as we felt that even Australia is well and truly bursting at its environmental seams. Financially it was easier for us to manage the ongoing costs of raising one child.

So many charities have their hands and resources full in such places as Rwanda, where even the refugees misplaced by war continue to bring children into the world that have no future. Over the last 30 years in Africa, even with all the money donated and food handed out, there is always a new hungry mouth to feed. Too many people are relying on charity to keep their heads above water rather than asking themselves, 'Can I sustain another human being?' People should never have children just because they can!

Kim Armstrong Mossvale, Australia

Citizen woman
Re: ‘Motherland’ (Letter from Lebanon, NI 377).

My mother was British. My father was Polish and came to Britain during Second World War to join the Allied forces. As soon as the War ended my parents married. Not long afterwards a police officer came to the door. My mother had to go to the police station to register as an alien. By marrying my non-British father my mother had lost her citizenship. Eventually the law was changed and she recovered her status as a British citizen.

Here's another example of British inequality. Although I live in Canada, I was born in England. Had I been a man I could extend British citizenship to my children at any time. As a woman, I cannot. Again, not the same rights.

Maria Corinthios Montreal, Canada

Shock therapy
Thank you, New Internationalist, for your great efforts at making crucial news information - most of which is being suppressed by the 'popular' media of today's world - available to your readers.

The 'state of fear' which you featured in NI 376 is, I believe, partly due to the awareness in many people, that 'things' are going very wrong for most of us, but we are being deliberately and constantly given the wrong messages.

George W Bush, carefully 'protected' by self-interested media, is determined to achieve his New World Order which will create a world dominated by the insatiable corporations and big business.

The necessary 'shock therapy' already being applied by the US administration will bring fundamental changes to the task through increased tax reform and deregulation, free capital flows, lowered tariffs, significantly reduced public services, increased privatization and utter disregard for ordinary people's needs.

There are clear signs that the US economy is close to meltdown, even with cheap energy, low interest rates and $450 billion in borrowed revenue pumped into the system each year.

The Iraq conflagration has contributed to current US problems and, dismissive about rising fuel prices at the pumps, the media has thoroughly suppressed the fact that the Iraqi insurgent strategy of destroying oil pipelines has been spectacularly successful.

And remember the old adage: 'When America sneezes, the whole world catches cold.'

George Sanders Burnie, Australia