Editor,

I appreciate Linda Ade Ridder’s environmental stewardship advice in her Jan. 2 viewpoint piece, “Please, do one thing for the environment,” although I’m doubtful our biosphere will be saved through feel good symbolic measures.

What all political and social thinking has finally been forced to face is the irreversible degradation of the environment by the unrestrained industrial capitalism: the enormous fact of which science has been trying for 50 years to convince us, while technology provides us ever greater distractions form it. Every benefit industrialism and capitalism have brought us, every wonderful advance of knowledge and health and community and comfort casts the same fateful shadow. All we have, we have taken from Earth, and taking with ever-increasing speed and greed, we now return little what is sterile and poisoned.

Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other, nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone. Yet we can’t stop the process. A capitalist economy, by definition, lives by growth. For capitalism to desist from mindless expansion would be for it to commit social suicide. We have essentially chosen cancer as the model of our social system.

MATT LINDER

Langley