Artvoice: Buffalo's #1 Newsweekly
Home Blogs Web Features Calendar Listings Artvoice TV Real Estate Classifieds Contact
Previous story: Dali's Ghost
Next story: Padding the Relief Rolls

Letters to Artvoice

o Captains! our captains!

I would like to thank Mr. Tom Golisano for this Sabres season and for turning a near-bankrupt organization into a great success. The Sabres have had back-to-back seasons where they’ve sold out almost every game. They are selling more Sabres gear (by far) than any other NHL team. They had a great year, only to get beaten by Ottawa, who, like the Sabres, were almost broke and still managed to keep their three superstars together.

So how about us? Buffalo always bitches about being perceived as a second-rate town. With the success on the ice and financially that the Sabres have had, why can’t we keep our superstars? The talk started before the season was half over that “we can’t possibly keep Briere and Drury.” It’s as if the press here in Buffalo expects our teams here to accept second-rate as the status quo. If a cow town like Ottawa can keep Spezza, Heatley and Alfredsson, why can’t we keep both Briere and Drury? If Buffalo wants to be seen as a first-rate sports town, it has to do the things that show they are. I think that the fans have done their part. How about giving this a chance: Keep Briere and Drury in Buffalo, Mr. Golisano!

We’ll love you for it.

Roy LaGreca, Jr.

Rancho Palos Verdes, Ca.

Army corps’ leaky logic

I am writing regarding Buck Quigley’s recent cover story The Long Road Home (v6n20).

We appreciate any journalism about New Orleans and welcome attention to the plight of her citizens, in particular the inadequately engineered levee system that should have held against Katrina.

But I must respond to this statement in your piece, “…independent critics are in agreement with officials from the Army Corps of Engineers when they say that even a smaller hurricane could cause the levee system to fail on its eastern and southern borders this year. A strong Category 2 storm could even do the trick…”

The Army Corps of Engineers is not a levee watchdog! The Army Corps is the sole agency responsible for the design and construction of the city’s levee system.

Furthermore, when Congress federalized the flood protection in 1965, they ordered the Army Corps to protect New Orleans from the worst storm characteristic of the region. Betsy was a Cat 4, yet here we are 42 years later, and the Army Corps is saying even a Category 2 is a major problem.

The Army Corps is primarily and overwhelmingly at fault for the worst engineering disaster in US history—the flooding of New Orleans.

If the Army Corps were a private company, they would have been fired.

Sandy Rosenthal, Founder and Executive Director, Levees.Org

New Orleans, La.

Gone, but not forgotten

On April 9, 2006 I boarded a a flight from Buffalo to Gulfport, Mississippi. I was part of a team from the first Western New York Americacorps Gulf Coast Recovery Team out of West Seneca, from where many more teams would follow. I was prepared for hard work but apprehensive to witness firsthand the anguish that this nasty Katrina had caused. What I was not prepared for was to suffer the loss of a noble and hardworking fellow team member some forty-five days later.

The relationship of our team in the beginning was that of seven strangers living and working together. By the end, though, we were six friends, each with different memories about our accomplishments and our good friend, Dan Kivel, a 34-year-old native of Detroit.

We all had the same goal—to help hurricane victims in whatever way possible for a ninety day stretch. During that time we constructed a playground with the help of Home Depot, gutted or re-roofed houses and hung drywall, among many other duties in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Other duties included preparing meals for the weekly volunteers that would arrive to help, usually for three to ten days each. At times we would feed eighty people at a meal. Most importantly, we would listen to residents’ stories of despair and hope.

It was all very hard work, but the longer I stayed the luckier I felt to be helping these people. Accounts of the victims’ experiences were unbelievably heartbreaking.

Our days were full and hard. Rising at 6am, we ate breakfast at 7am and set out on a job soon after, a process we repeated six days a week. At the end of the day we would return tired and dirty from the day. Sometimes at night while showering under the stars (the showers were outside) I would think about my day and how rewarding it was to be thanked by a resident who was so grateful that we were helping rebuild their community. It all felt good!

That changed on May 28, 2006. It was a Sunday evening and I was told by a member of another team that there was a problem with Dan at the beach and that the police were involved. Dan was one of the seven members from the West Seneca team. I had become good friends with him, working by his side each day and because of our close quarters, sleeping just a few feet away from him each night.

All I could think of while I drove to the beach was “What kind of trouble did he get himself in”? As I approached the beach and saw the police cars and fire trucks I also noticed a female police officer standing guard by a pile of gunbelts. I saw no Dan! I realized this was not Dan versus the authorities but something much more serious.

It all kicked in. He was missing and they were looking for him in the water. It was getting dark and the Coast Guard helicopter was called in. They searched until 11:30pm, when the search was called off for the evening. Our team went back to base and made a cross. We grabbed our pillows, sleeping bags and the cross. We returned to the beach and slept there that night.

I awoke the next morning, my eyes filled with tears, fearing the worst.

We waited for the search to resume. There was great support there from the community. Local volunteers searched that Monday and then the moment came when someone on the beach spotted Dan in the water. The dive recovery team brought his body to shore, where I met them with the police. Everyone was stunned and heartbroken—this couldn’t be happening.

Hours later, we and about 400 people from the community took part in a vigil remembering Dan.

That Sunday last May, Dan’s parents lost a son, Americacorps lost a member and Bay St. Louis lost a great volunteer!

Please don’t forget the Hurricane Katrina victims.

Rick Battaglia

our overloaded earth

Thank you again to Artvoice for spotlighting the problem of global overpopulation. It’s very helpful when a writer of Dr. Niman’s stature addresses the underlying cause of environmental problems such as global warming, urban sprawl, deforestation, ocean degradation, food and water shortages, extinction of species and loss of biodiversity.

I say “thank you again” because I still have several copies of the July 1999 Artvoice issue that featured a wide-eyed baby and the caption “Now we are 6 Billion!” It’s refreshing to have at least one media source talk about the root of our environmental problems instead of laying the standard guilt-trip of hackneyed solutions on us, as if changing your lightbulbs, washing full loads and keeping your tires properly inflated is going to reverse climate change. Niman’s message was simple, clear and to the point: If we don’t get a handle on human population growth, all of our efforts to save the environment and quite possibly the human race, will fail.

I was New York State District Activist for Zero Population Growth for ten years and recently completed a term on the national Sierra Club Global Population and Environment Program Committee and would like to comment on some of the points made by Dr. Niman last week in his excellent article, “Global Warming is just a Symptom (v6n18).”

The terms “population stabilization” and “slowing population growth” are preferable to “population control.” The reader may consider this simply playing with words, however the distinction is important. For example, as recently as May 3, President Bush sent a letter to the new Congress using language that alluded to the heinous one-child policy of China, threatening to veto any bill that included funding for international family planning programs. His letter said, “The standing pattern is that…taxpayer dollars may not be used in coercive or involuntary family planning programs.” Of course, the one-child policy was rescinded two decades ago and is still defunct, as Bush’s own special State Department team told him after a fact-finding trip to China at the very beginning of his administration. Nevertheless, the image of forced abortion and other human rights atrocities is so strong in the American public’s mind that Bush and conservative presidents before him have gotten away with defunding these critical programs based on images of “coercion” and “control.”

Dr. Niman states that the industrialized world is where we need to “actively control population growth,” because of our disproportionately high rate of consumption. I would say to him, “Mission Accomplished!” It’s a fact that industrialized nations have already reached replacement levels of sustainable population growth (some European countries are even experiencing birth rates below replacement levels). Notwithstanding the wasteful consumption patterns of rich countries, the emphasis should now be shifting as the people of developing nations aspire to our consumption patterns and are acquiring them at breakneck speed. The other problem is that the highest rates of population increase are in the poorest areas of the world. People there utilize unsustainable consumption practices such as clearcutting of rain forests and hunting of bushmeat in a desperate struggle to survive.

It was refreshing to also read that lowering childhood mortality is key to slowing population growth, however it’s only one aspect of a triad of strategies we know work. Another is universal access to family planning. Every woman on this planet should be able to control her own fertility, indeed, she has that fundamental human right. Thirdly, we know that a woman who is empowered with an education and a job is far more likely to have a smaller family. As population activists, we avoid “scolding” folks for having or wanting to have more than two kids. It is more important to emphasize options, because we know from numerous studies the universal desire among couples across cultures, religions and nations is a preference to limit their family size to two children.

Population activism has been associated with dreary doomsday scenarios of famine and war ever since Thomas Malthus warned about it over 200 years ago (“I don’t buy into your Malth-o-o-o-o-sian theories,” Rep. John LaFalce once told me). Now we see worldwide cataclysm coming at us from an unexpected source, global warming. There is much good news, however. During the ’90s it was estimated that global population, now 6.6 billion, would reach somewhere between 12 and 15 billion in 2050. Current estimates are now just over 9 billion in 2050, thanks to the implementation of the three strategies: lowered childhood mortality, access to family planning and education and employment and empowerment of women. Thanks to Bush’s policies, we are sitting out most of this. Luckily, the rest of the world has picked up some of the slack.

What can you do to slow global population growth? It’s difficult because Bush has halted all US funding for international family planning programs. However, there are many excellent NGOs (non-governmental organizations) like Engenderhealth and Pathfinder, among others, that run women’s health clinics in the poorest nations, providing necessary health care such as vaccinations, safe birthing practices, family planning, screening for HIV-AIDS and other STIs, infant and child care and much more. These are the people responsible for lowering the forecast from 15 to 9 billion people in ten years. A small donation gets you on their mailing list.

James Hufnagel

Wilson, NY