Wow, this was a very depressing read.

I've lived in California virtually all my life, and have lived in the San Francisco for 31 years; and I remember when I first arrived being able to drive from, let's say, Palo Alto to Berkeley, across the Bay Bridge in less than 45 minutes - this during rush hour! Today? No way.

This needn't have ever been the case. If we had adopted an urban environment which emulated the compactness of New York City - without the manhattanization, of course - instead of the Southern California and/or Los Angeles model, we wouldn't have necessarily had our cake and eaten it too, but life would have been very, very different than it is today.

This not only makes me very sad, but extremely angry too - don't universities like Stanford, et al. teach demography and urban planning? The idea that just because we can put a man on the moon, means jack shit!

The land east of San Ramon is an epic battleground between old and new in the starkest way: wheat farmers and ranchers, on rain-fed land, versus big-box luxury "homes" with immense infrastructure. Thanks for bringing it to life so well. Old-timers in the Bay area have a ringside seat on a microcosm of the whole world's predicament. Around here, thinking locally is a good analogy of thinking globally. It's important to see things from a bicycle or on foot.

I'm a native of San Diego and lived in Van Nuys as a teenager. Now I live on a one-acre lot in Idaho, with water rights from the 1890's. I own a (tiny) piece of Jackson Lake Dam. I have to travel to CA occasionally on business, and to San Diego recently, where I haven't been for over 50 years. In an hour or so my wife and I will head off to a state park 75 miles North of us for a couple of hours of XC skiing. Harriman State Park has 11,000 acres of wilderness and on a Saturday there might be 100 XC skiers (and no evil snowmobilers) sharing it with us. It will take us an hour and fifteen minutes to get there. When I travel to CA and drive on the freeways and travel through the endless sprawl I am horrified. A few weeks ago we drove from LA to San Diego. I was amazed to see a few miles of what passed for country on the final legs of the trip. My business might require me to rent a condo for a year near San Diego, and I am both intrigued and horrified by having to live in CA again, even if only occasionally.

Idaho is what America was, and I can only hope that the fierce winters (which have gotten less fierce recently) keep the riff-raff out. My hopes will no doubt be dashed.

The destruction of our state stems mostly from the increase in population from foreign immigration, legal and illegal. The statistics are well established; from increased traffic to sprawl, the main cause is immigration.

Since humans first gave up the hunting and gathering economy and turned first to pastoralism and then to agriculture, it seemed that increasing the density of the population made life better and safer for everyone. If your community was large it could better defend itself against raiders and invaders. Almost as important, the denser population led to enough surplus food being stored so people could diversify in their trades and professions, so, in addition to farmers, there were potters and scribes and carpenters. As populations grew, new and narrower occupational niches were developed: comic strip writers, endocrinologists, and computer software writers. Everyone seemed to be getting richer and more secure.

Some time in the last couple of hundred years, first a few malcontents and then an ever-growing number of people started to notice that having so many people living so close to you 1)imposed certain inconvenient restrictions on your own behavior and enjoyment of life and 2)was having a destructive impact on the natural world. They also became aware of the fact that, both ecologically and mathematically, population increases cannot continue indefinitely. However, the economic engine of their society dictated that increases continue.

Now we are at a turning point in the history of our species. We have the awareness of and scientific data to document the environmental degradation consequent to "J curve" population increases and know that the natural resources of fossil fuels, metal ores, and fresh water are nearing exhaustion. We increasingly live in technological cocoons with our automobiles, computers, and movies. Few of our children have the experience of "playing in the woods".

At the end of Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" a list of helpful suggestions is offered, yet the most glaringly obvious one is not presented. That one is RESPONSIBLE REPRODUCTION.

Given the situation we are currently in, couples ought in many ways to be discouraged from having more than two children. While such a policy adopted over a century's time would require much economic readjustment, it would go a long way toward relieving the ecological and resource depletion crises with which we are plagued. It would also eventually make it possible for all children to enjoy the singing of the frogs on a Sunday morning.

This article made the issues graphically clear without overly simplifying them. This kind of bike ride can be taken in too many places in our country.

The man who claims to have been concerned about the environment for decades had four (4) children.

The large-acreage homes. The huge SUV's. The wide, clogged boulevards. Acres of hot asphalt. The sounds of trickling streams, frogs croaking and crickets sounding. These are all outcomes on a continuum of possibilities. The fact that the actual outcome is of expultion of nature and the total embrace of indulgence speaks volumes not just about what we are willing to do within the system but also much about the system we put forth to govern our desires - one that essentially whitewashes true reason and restraint and lays open our willingness to fool others and ourselves for the sake of ourselves only.