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Kids show native plants
are the way to go
Kudos to the kids who are helping to restore the Big Sur ecosystem (“Students tend to Big Sur trees,” Page B1, July 2). Chevron even chipped in. This is positive work that deserves the good press.
It should also be an inspiration to homeowners in the Bay Area to do the same thing in their own backyard. Planting natives in your landscape and removing invasive plants conserves water and better supports bird and insect populations.
Given the Supreme Court’s recent action to handcuff the EPA in dealing with climate change, these small actions take on more importance. At the same time encourage your senator and representative to quickly pass the reconciliation bill that includes climate action funding.
We can’t leave it up to the younger generation to solve the problems we created.
Tom Calderwood
Los Gatos
Report consequences for
drivers in fatal crashes
Once again, most recently on July 2 (“Man walking bicycle in lane fatally hit by SUV,” Page B2), I read in The Mercury News of a pedestrian killed by an SUV while in a crosswalk and a bicyclist killed by another SUV while in a bike lane.
These events seem almost a daily occurrence.
What is being done about this slaughter of law-abiding, non-vehicle drivers?
Society says, justifiably, that we need to drive less to protect our climate, but is this the inevitable result?
I would appreciate coverage of prosecutions of what seems to me to be involuntary manslaughter. Are vehicles somehow sacrosanct and therefore negligent fatal use OK? Are there any consequences?
If not, surely the sad situation will continue or even worsen.
Susan Martinez
Santa Cruz
Saratoga overlooks
other sites for housing
Re. “Saratoga council approves Housing Element plan for hundreds of units, SB9 ordinance,” July 7:
This proposal concentrates high-density housing in the northern area of Saratoga using inequitable criteria for site selection. Reasons for excluding south Saratoga sites simply were not applied to north Saratoga parcels. The most ludicrous comment by a council member during this meeting was that mixed retail/housing couldn’t be tolerated at the south Saratoga Argonaut site because the grocery and drug stores might be closed during a portion of the construction. With the current price of gasoline, it would be such a hardship for affluent Saratogans to drive 5-10 minutes more to a neighboring grocery or drug store, even temporarily.
More than 90% of affordable housing units in this proposal are placed outside the boundaries of the Saratoga/Los Gatos School District. By excluding most children living in affordable units in Saratoga from Saratoga schools, Saratoga might as well be flashing a neon sign to its county neighbors, shouting NIMBY, NIMBY.
Joanne Cornbleet
Saratoga
One cannot be
compelled to pray
Letter writer Jay Morrett helped to point out some of the confusion about the Constitutional treatment of religion (“Constitutional right is of, not from, religion,” Page A6, July 6).
The free exercise of religion is, of course, protected by the Constitution, even in public places. As a teacher in a public high school, I used to bring up religion in my physics class: How the Catholic obsession with an Earth-centered universe led to the persecution of Galileo and, in a more positive vein, how Kepler’s undying faith drove him to decipher the orbit of Mars.
Even prayer exists in public schools, most likely before tests or athletic contests. I mean, of course, prayer as Christ intended in Matthew 6:5,6: silent, private and personal.
But the first sentence of the First Amendment guarantees freedom from religion. That’s pretty important now as America seems to be drifting toward a kind of religious autocracy.
Ray Jones
San Jose
Secession talk leads
in deadly direction
Because there are no constitutional provisions for secession – and because the South’s attempt in 1861 spawned a Civil War that killed more than 700,000 Americans – it is reckless for Joe Mathews to argue that California should “prepare to secede.” (“California needs to prepare to secede from the nation,” Page A6, July 1)
Mathews also errs seriously by invoking “democracy” to fault the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. Even if California’s protections for abortion are supported here by majorities of “every political party, region and demographic group,” the reversal merely permits states to restrict abortion; it doesn’t limit what we can do to facilitate abortion in our state. Contra Mathews’ alarmism, California’s “preferences” regarding abortion (along with “contraception and same-sex marriage”) can be channeled by our elected officials and our courts, so why invoke rash responses such as secession?
Mathews proceeds soundly, however, in emphasizing that the Court’s recent gun-control decision negated a democratically enacted state law.
Peter Minowitz
Palo Alto
Source: www.mercurynews.com