There Simply Is No Good News

Reports from the Gulf of Mexico tell us that the oil-spouting BP well has finally been sealed, and that the devastating impacts of the massive oil spill on beaches, wildlife habitats and marine ecosystem are gradually abating. However, there is a more clear and present danger lurking in the Gulf, yet there are no immediate plans to abate this much larger, deadlier, and continuing spill smothering life in the Gulf.

According to Wikipedia, there is an 8,500-square-mile "dead zone" (roughly three times the size of the BP oil slick) resulting from the Mississippi River dumping into the Gulf of Mexico. Chief contributor is American agriculture, spewing billions of tons of factory-farm animal waste, overloaded with nitrogen and other potentially damaging nutrients from petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, producing vast algal blooms that suck up oxygen from the water, killing all marine life.

We react dramatically to unanticipated threats like the BP oil spill and accidental deaths. Yet we tend to accept and tolerate the much more damaging but routine threats from animal-waste discharges and deaths from killer diseases linked to meat and dairy-laden diets.

Larry Rogawitz

Santa Rosa

OK, Prop. 8 Overturn is Good News

In the latest chapter in the battle over same-sex marriage in California, faced with Judge Vaughn Walker's fact-based and eminently logical decision, opponents continue to froth at the mouth with the same tired catchphrases bandied about since the issue first ignited. Such verbiage as: "thwart the will of the people," "preserve the sanctity of marriage," "protect the children," "will lead to polygamy and incest"—are carefully designed, by using fear or anger, to divert attention from what is truly at the heart of their objection: hate. Defined by Merriam-Webster as "intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger or sense of injury" and "extreme dislike or antipathy," hate is clearly the reason behind the multimillion dollar effort to prevent gay men and women from marrying the ones they love. Protest all they want about being labeled haters, their actions bespeak their true nature.

Although those of us who are the target of such hate are used to it, we are nevertheless sick and tired of it being enshrined in the laws of our country and state. Judge Walker's overturning of Prop. 8 is a triumph for that most cherished of American values: freedom.

Dean M. Harpster

San Jose

Dept. Of irritated farmers

For reasons unclear even to me—and ostensibly I should kind of know—the Boho has lately been all-farm all-the-time. Whether it's the evils of methyl iodide, which Sen. Feinstein has fortunately just asked to be banned, or the strange merits of Big Ag or this week's CSA intern scandal and Grav story and Zazu farmstand blurb, we've been dishing the dirt on the dirt. A lot. One farm in particular has gotten more notice than perhaps—OK, definitely—it wants. To wit: Green String Farm. It's shown up in odd photo placements, has been weirdly sorta half-referenced and has generally been on our minds. In a good way! But for them, not so much. We apologize for misidentifing Green String as an organic outfit, and we promise not to mention the place or print a single byte depicting its verdant fields—at least, you know, until the next time.

The Ed.

yearning for the fjords

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