Animal crossing idea not so nutty
To the editor:
On Monday, you let your disdain for the state that borders Nevada to the west guide you into a particularly irrational rant (“Animal crossing” editorial) about the merits of creating corridors that allow wildlife to safely cross over or under highways.
Such corridors are either built or in planning stages across the United States, Canada and the far reaches of the world.
As we continue to partition wildlife habitats into ever smaller and more isolated fragments through our ongoing need to build more roads to link our expanding urban centers, wildlife biologists have begun to devise creative methods — including corridors across roads — to retain critical linkages between the fragments.
Here in Southern Nevada, our ongoing development of satellite communities (e.g., Coyote Springs) and urban encroachment now spilling beyond the borders of the valley are rapidly fragmenting habitats and ecosystems, creating hard barriers to the movement of larger animals.
Maintaining a network of sustainable ecosystems across Southern Nevada’s deserts and mountains sufficiently large to ensure the retention of bighorn sheep, mountain lions, coyotes, foxes, and so on will necessitate an expansive vision for development of linkages across landscape fragments bounded by high-speed highways and suburban sprawl.
We continue to transform landscapes in ways that reduce their ability to retain species. A truly progressive community would embrace and learn from experiments such as the corridor construction across Interstate 405 in Southern California, rather than dismiss it outright as a “nutty” waste of money.
Brett R. Riddle
LAS VEGAS
THE WRITER IS UNLV BIOLOGY PROFESSOR.
Bad name
To the editor:
I appreciate your having a spokesman for the libertarian point of view in your paper. I really wish, however, that Vin Suprynowicz was less of a true believer and dogmatist, as his screeds give libertarianism a bad name.
For example, in regard to his comment in his Sunday column on AIDS and HIV: There are dozens of studies that document exactly how HIV takes over cells and causes AIDS. His statement that if HIV caused AIDS it would be spreading wildly among the heterosexual, non-IV-drug using populace, is true. And it is. The current leader of South Africa has adopted the view of Mr. Suprynowicz, and that country is being decimated by the disease. To the best of my knowledge, that country has not suddenly become populated by gays and IV drug users to the exclusion of its neighbors.
It does, on the other hand, take the true believer path of Dr. Peter Duesberg in pretending that HIV does not cause AIDS. Dr. Duesberg offered to infect himself with HIV to prove that it did not cause AIDS, but said that he could not because the National Institutes of Health does not approve of such things. This is, of course, a phony argument. Dr. Barry Marshall, who discovered that many ulcers are caused by an infectious agent, used this method of self-infection to prove his theory. He took the agent then got an ulcer. Then cured himself. I suspect that the NIH did not approve of this action, but real researchers are not deterred by bureaucrats.
Mr. Suprynowicz is also fixated on mercury preservatives in vaccines as the cause of autism. Here I think he is half right. He may very well be correct about the mercury being the cause, but the source is likely mercury from coal-fired power plants. So with China — the “free-market, unregulated China” with which Mr. Suprynowicz is so enamored — building a new coal power plant at the rate of one every three weeks, it is not surprising that the autism rate in this country is going up.
Further, when California took the mercury preservative out of its vaccines, its rate of autism did not go down by more than 5 percent.
I am happy that Mr. Suprynowicz was also able to find a single report discrediting the theory that secondhand smoke can have lethal effects. And I could go back to the 1970s and find numerous “scientific” studies that show that smoking does not cause cancer.
There are even sites that demonstrate that the Earth is flat and that the Holocaust never happened.
So please get Mr. Suprynowicz educated with a set of well-known, easily available facts so he will stop giving libertarians a bad name.
Doug Nusbaum
LAS VEGAS
Bad decisions
To the editor:
If mortgage companies want to help out troubled borrowers, that’s their business. But taxpayers should not be on the hook through a federal bailout for bad decisions made by lenders and borrowers. People who made good decisions, buying what they could truly afford and financing it with well thought-out terms, should not be punished by seeing their tax dollars spent to bail out those who made poor decisions. Let the lenders and borrowers who stood to gain from their decisions work this out however they wish and without government intervention.
RON COURY
LAS VEGAS
