Air Date: Week of July 2, 2004

We dip into the Living on Earth mailbag to hear what listeners have to say.

Transcript

[LETTERS THEME]

CURWOOD: Time now for comments from you, our listeners.

[LETTERS THEME UP AND UNDER]

CURWOOD: The image of bears in cages that are hardly big enough to hold them prompted many listeners to write. We interviewed Jill Robinson, founder of the China Bear Rescue Project, about bear farming, which has become common throughout Asia to meet consumer demand for bear bile. Barbara Skapa, in Mt. Vernon, Maine, called to relate this story:

SKAPA: I was in Vietnam several years ago on a mission for the United Nations and came upon a bear cub in a village, caged. And when I asked my interpreter what this was all about he said, “Madam they are taking this bear to a restaurant in Hanoi where he will be caged outside and a straw put into his stomach to extract his bile for the restaurateurs clientele.”

CURWOOD: Our segment “The End of Cheap Oil” also generated a lot of response. Some took us to task for interviewing John Felmy from the American Petroleum Institute.

Roger Blanchard, of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan says that Mr. Felmy’s assertion that we have vast supplies of oil are based on country reserve figures, which Mr. Blanchard claims are notoriously unreliable.

“The problem with (these) figures,” he writes, “is that the energy agencies of individual countries assess and report the reserves. Because there are big incentives for countries to exaggerate them, I consider these figures to be worthless.”

And John Cunningham of Miami, Florida wanted to know “why it is that citizens in Germany and England have docilely submitted to gasoline taxes of three to four dollars per gallon, yet in the United States proposing similar taxes would be political suicide?”

Your comments on our program are always welcome. Call our listener line anytime at 800-218-9988. Or write us at 20 Holland Street, Somerville, Massachusetts, 02144. Our e-mail address is comments at loe dot org. And you can hear our program, and all our previous programs, for that matter, by visiting our web site Living on Earth dot org. That's Living on Earth dot org.