One of the candidates for election to the City Council has criticized PLAN Boulder County for being too focused on the single issue of growth. How does the candidate's view match up with the problems that need to be solved?

There is no problem more significant or critical to the human race than growth. This is true in the United States, in Colorado, in Boulder County, and in the City of Boulder. Population growth is the main cause of global warming, yet experts and groups who seem to be addressing the problems of global warming willfully ignore the obvious. If any fraction of the observed global warming can be attributed to the actions of humans, then this by itself is positive proof that the human population has exceeded the carrying capacity of the earth; i.e. the earth is overpopulated. So it is an inconvenient truth that all efforts to slow global warming that fail to focus on stopping population growth are intellectual frauds. Stopping population growth is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for achieving sustainability and for making meaningful progress toward stopping global warming.

So what's going on in Boulder? The City Council is to be commended for initiating courageous pioneering programs to reduce consumption of resources and to protect the environment, all in the name of sustainability. Yet everywhere we go in Boulder, we see numerous new constructions which are designed to accommodate more and more people. This continued population growth is not sustainable; it is anti-sustainable. Boulder's on a bus. The driver says that we're headed north, yet you look out the window and it's clear that we're moving south.

Smart growth is the mantra of prominent local and national politicians who say that we can have our population growth, protect the environment and be sustainable. When we hear the eloquence of these "experts," we tend to forget that the environment is like a beef animal. If you're dumb, you throw it into a grinder and get hamburger. If you're smart you give it to a chef and get a wonderful meal. But in either case, you have destroyed the animal. Smart growth is destroying Boulder and its environment in the same way that smart butchery destroys beef animals.

So I urge readers to support the City Council candidates endorsed by PLAN Boulder County. These candidates can see through the promotional smokescreens, advanced with fast talk and fueled with big bucks, that keep the people in city hall from understanding the full meaning of sustainability.

ALBERT A. BARTLETT