For a Brighter Future
To the editor:
I highly recommend the new movie David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet (Netflix). It is at once full of beauty, achingly sad, and encouraging about a brighter future for our species and planet.
To me, the key questions going forward include:
Can capitalism find technical solutions and at the same time be reined in to reduce greed and towards more equality of resources and wealth?
Can poverty be reduced substantially (and at the same time not cause additional climate damage), women and girls educated more widely, and family planning improved as the most reliable ways to reduce population growth?
Will we insist on dramatic public policy changes (decarbonize widely, green building, green technologies, and green jobs) through voting and activism?
Will we protect enough of our undeveloped land to help bring our planet back into balance?
Will we make needed lifestyle changes regarding renewable energy, energy efficiency, transportation, and food?
While these questions are daunting, individual action will always matter. In addition to what you may already be doing, consider doing one new thing, taking one additional action, to counter climate change:
Join or form a climate action network in your town or region.
Get a free energy audit from the Cape Light Compact and follow up on its recommendations.
Buy an electric vehicle and solar panels.
Donate to climate action organizations.
Replace oil and propane use with air-source technologies (heat pumps or mini-splits).
Reduce driving — walk and bicycle more. Try going meatless for a week (or more). Reduce single-use and throw-away products.
Buy locally.
All of us must expand our thinking, planning, and action beyond “business as usual.” This means taking risks, experimenting, and collaborating, at times, well out of our normal comfort zone. We have it within our power to create a new and sustainable Cape for all.
David Mead-Fox
Wellfleet
The I-Me Abomination
To the editor:
Last week’s letter from the editor (“Concerning That Word”) was about one of my pet language peeves. What has me screaming at the television most often is when a supposedly educated English speaker says something like “Send your comments to John and I.”
I despair over locutions that are clumsy or muddle clarity. There was a time, for instance, when lend and loan meant different things. One asked a bank for a loan and the bank would lend you money. (Those were different times.) Today loan is both a noun and a verb.
Or the confusion over lie and lay. It used to be that you would lie down but lay something else down. No more. Today almost everybody just lays down — often on the job.
And then there’s myself as a substitute for me. It isn’t. Myself is a reflexive pronoun — I do something to myself. Not “Lots of people agree, myself included.” It should be “me included.”
Who knows what horrors await our beautiful language after tweets and texting and email shortcuts? But that kind of thing happens in a living language. Dammit!
Still, we need concerted action to stop the I-me abomination. You hear it everywhere. This is not just changing the meaning of words or inventing new ones. This destroys the logic of the language. There is a difference between subject and object, so the pronoun of the person doing the action and the pronoun of the person to whom the action is being done must be different if the logic of the language is to be maintained.
When people say I instead of me, shout them down. If you see it on television or on the web, bombard them with corrections. I don’t know if it will help, but we must try. Screaming at my television isn’t doing any good.
Michael Spielman
Bronx, N.Y. and Wellfleet
Feeling Connected
To the editor:
It is midmorning and I am sitting on a very long line of folks waiting to vote in Millbrook, N.Y. Democracy at work, says I.
I have just read your letter from the editor about newspapers and democracy [Oct. 22, page A2]. Then I continued through the paper, reading every damn article and enjoying every illustration and photo. You are doing this journalism stuff brilliantly!
I actually want to send subscriptions to friends who love the Outer Cape but can’t get there, just so that they continue to feel connected. Carry on.
Thom Schwarz
Pleasant Valley, N.Y. and Wellfleet
