The mail.(Letter to the Editor)

"Old and in the Way" (BIRD'S EYE), "Our Weak Friends" (SCAN), "Irritating and Irrelevant," "Europe Loses its Mind"--read some article titles from your December issue. Might you not have overdone it a bit? I understand that you have been provoked by silly anti-American sniping from the other side. It is now time to, take a break.

Europe, after all, is peaceful, free, and, soon, whole. Europeans have to attend to sluggish economic growth, corrupt corporate governance, high taxes, underfunded pension systems, poor public education, and problems with the assimiliation of Muslim immigrants. The United States faces many of these problems too. We should be helping each other on both sides of the Atlantic rather than sneering across it.

A European friend who has lived in the U.S. for 20 years, a staunch Atlanticist and a card-carrying member of America's conservative elite told me recently: "I used to think of Washington as simply our head office, the headquarters of the free world. Suddenly, I'm hearing that as a European I'm not welcome here anymore."

 
Radek Sikorski 
Executive Director, New Atlantic Initiative 
American Enterprise Institute 

Blake Hurst not only fabricated a charge against Environmental Defense, but also neglected to mention the work we are doing to preserve endangered species by working with private land-owners ("Calamity in Klamath," October/ November). Hurst's assertion that the "broken promise" to Klamath basin landowners was "broken in large part because of the efforts" of Environmental Defense is utterly false. We had absolutely nothing to do with the government's decision to curtail water supplies to Klamath basin irrigators, a decision made by the current administration in April 2001 (not the day before President Clinton left office, as Hurst wrongly reported).

While we've had no involvement with either the government or anyone else in the Klamath basin, we are working closely, and successfully, with agricultural and other private property owners in many other communities to solve difficult conflicts between endangered-species conservation and the objectives of individual landowners.

Private landowners are essential for recovery of many endangered species. After all, they ...