Air Date: Week of September 28, 2007

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

Transcript

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GELLERMAN: Time now to hear from you, our listeners.

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GELLERMAN: We got an earful about our recent commentary from Gernot Wagner who made the case that energy independence for the United States is not only unachievable, but undesirable.

Wes Tator, who listens to LOE on New Hampshire Public Radio, emailed to say, ‘I thought your speaker was right on.’

But Cat Givens from Portage Lakes, Ohio sent us ‘a resounding yes’ to energy independence. She tunes in to WKSU and writes: ‘The war on terror would be a thing of the past if we close down our dependence on oil and use the energy resources already available to us—like…ethanol, solar, wind, and battery-powered cars. There are green alternatives we can utilize right now.’

Then we got this phone call:

CRANE: What about the long forgotten word ‘conservation’?

GELLERMAN: Diane Crane listens to us in Western Massachusetts.

CRANE: This country is very spoiled and very wasteful. I mean, you know, I see it on the road with gasoline, for instance. People aren’t going 65 miles an hour down the highway. They’re going 75, 85, and, I wager, some are even going 90 miles an hour. Why aren’t they going 55?

GELLERMAN: Maybe people in a hurry just don’t give a hoot. Our story about barn owls as road kill prompted Leslie from Hatboro, PA to write that she’s noticed something odd lately: ‘Hawks sit in trees near the highways,’ she says, ‘It dawned on me these birds are waiting to grab fresh road kill. How ingenious. Did individual birds invent a new way of hunting, all on their own or is this a species wide change in behavior?’

We got another question, this one from Julie Marie Ford in response to our story by our Washington correspondent, Jeff Young, in which he compared his use of water to that of a woman in rural India.

Ms. Ford asks, ‘Has anyone thought to market a bottled water where all of the proceeds go directly to programs to fund water stations in third world countries? This would have a direct effect on helping other people and change the world.’

What do you think? Let us know your thoughts about what you hear on Living on Earth. Our email address is comments@loe.org. Once again that’s comments at L-O-E dot O-R-G. Or put a stamp on it and send it to 20 Holland Street, Somerville, Massachusetts, 02144. And there’s always our listener line at 800-2-1-8-9-9-8-8. That's 800-2-1-8-99-88.

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