Letters

Shine on, solar decathletes

As an alumnus who has personally invested a lot of money in my own renewable energy systems, I am happy to see that SCU is continuing the excellent effort to build a sustainable house in the International Solar Decathlon.

One of the things that should be published when showing the house is how much land area is required to provide the necessary energy and water to support both humans and maintain our flora and fauna. For example, where I live, one needs about five acres to get enough water; a wild horse needs about 10 acres to get enough food.

The estimate should carefully note that 100 percent of the land area cannot be devoted for human use; a more reasonable factor is 0.1 percent to 1 percent, so that the rest of nature can flourish. That means if one acre is required to produce enough energy for one human, including all necessary support structures (even if not local), then at least 100 acres should be set aside per person.

One then can estimate what a sustainable human population would be, both as an average and based on the local conditions. I have done enough general estimation to verify that the Earth is severely over-populated, but an academic effort would certainly support the investment in the Team California project.
DAVID SWEETMAN MBA ’85
Dyer, Nev.

Politics and religion

In the Fall 2009 issue of Santa Clara Magazine, I enjoyed the “Politics and religion” article. This collision course gives everyone a lot to think about.

We can all agree that the preservation of life is the number one instinct of humans. A real problem exists for clergy and politicians, as well as our fellow believers, to connect all the moral issues. Abortion is the hot topic and deals with the appreciation of the value of life. To be consistent, the appreciation of the value of life must be all-inclusive. It must be considered in all issues: health care for all, economic recovery, poverty, immigration, the environment, war, racism, and others.

To pick one or the other of these moral issues and make it exclusive, as many do, especially in our two-party system, indicates moral relativism, and this leads to skepticism of all issues involved. This skepticism stifles politicians and the clergy, as well as fellow believers. Thus, discussion ends, and dialogue is nonexistent.
TOM BESMER ’60
Murphys, Calif.

Saving bounty

Elizabeth Svoboda’s article “Saving bounty” (Summer 2009) gives sensible advice about improving safety for industrial food systems, but comes up short when it comes to consumer choices. As Anne Federwisch reports in “A boxable feast” (Mission Matters) in the issue, SCU students Allie Dunn, Beth Tellman, Francesca McKenzie, and others have opted out of the industrial food system by subscribing to a local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm. CSA farms already are totally accountable to their customers, plus simple and transparent in their operations. To CSA members, the call in Svoboda’s article for “all farms to track all food” with RFID chips supports a cruel stratagem by Big Fast Food to enmesh Small Slow Food in their industrial safety problems, and the advice to “stay safe, cook everything” is by turns outrageous, laughable, and unnecessary.
KEN EKLUND ’79
San Jose

Hunger and the market

I was very disappointed with the article “Can we solve hunger in our lifetime?” in the Summer 2009 issue. Drew Starbird clearly states the problem: It is not a problem of production but a problem of poverty. To solve the problem of hunger, we must address the much more complicated problem of poverty. The six suggestions in the article do not address the problem. The producers are supplying the food, but the buyers have inadequate purchasing power.

Why is it that the hungry do not have adequate buying power? In a free market, there is an equation between the wage and the work done.

When I was young (yes, a long time ago) my parents and parents of my friends would say, “Study. You don’t want to be a ditch digger, do you?” Ditch diggers were paid for hard physical work that requires a human’s animal ability but not intellectual ability. In our present economy, machines dig ditches, and they do it faster and cheaper. Now, if you don’t study, even digging ditches is not an option because a machine has the job.

Technology takes away jobs—monotonous jobs— but it challenges us to do what a machine cannot do. The challenge is to be smarter than a machine.

The Kennedy Administration [in the early 1960s] canceled the Bracero Program by which Mexican workers, mostly agricultural, entered the American market on a temporary basis. Food experts fretted, “What will happen to the tomato growers with that cut in the labor force? What will happen to the price of tomatoes?” I remember my colleague Mario Belotti rather critically saying that California agriculture would have to employ the technology it should be capable of creating. It did! Machines began picking tomatoes. One machine took the place of more than 20 braceros. This year, California will produce more than 13 million tons of tomatoes, about twice what was produced under the Bracero Program.

Producers of other crops for which they could not find labor-saving technology had to allow their crop to go overseas to a country with cheaper labor—that is, less productive labor.

The problem of hunger in America is not with the production of food. It is that technology challenges the wage earner to stay ahead of the level of technology. Either the educational system has failed to prepare the hungry to compete at our level of technology or the hungry themselves have not used the educational system to prepare themselves to compete in this labor market.
RICHARD COZ, S.J.
Professor Emeritus of Economics, SCU Los Gatos

What a view: Ken Hansen ’68 over the Grand Canyon
Photo: Courtesy Ken Hansen