Wetland banking programs could have more withdrawals 0) than deposits
Not everything that sounds good for the Chesapeake Bay actually is. Wetland banking, a program whereby developers restore wetlands in one area to make up for wetlands they have destroyed elsewhere ("Cashing in on wetland restoration," June 23), is such a program.
In Virginia, we have learned that it sometimes can be a useful tool to stem the flood of wetland destruction, but it also can lead to further abuses.
Wetlands are essential parts of the bay's ecosystem. They provide a nursery for most bay animals, serve as natural filters for pollutants entering the bay and protect property from storm damage. Wetlands are complex and diverse in the benefits they create.
Their composition, size and location are essential to their function.
The values wetlands provide are inextricably tied to their location within a watershed, such as their juxtaposition to one another and to adjacent waters.
Any program that allows the destruction of wetlands must guarantee that the full suite of values provided by a lost wetland are replaced. Mitigation banking, as evidenced by real examples in Virginia, often does not meet that basic premise for a number of reasons.
Wetland bank proposals in Virginia have allowed the replacement of wetlands outside the watershed where the damage or loss occurred.
Since 1995, an existing private bank in the Chowan River watershed (in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina) outside the bay watershed has been used to mitigate more than 50 acres of wetlands lost within the bay watershed. This trend of replacing wetlands outside the bay watershed will escalate as an additional four banks, totaling thousands of acres, are slated for development in the Chowan River watershed.
Simply put, moving wetlands around the landscape and especially outside the bay watershed will guarantee a continued net loss of wetlands and downward spiral of the health of the Chesapeake Bay.
Banks often incorporate preservation of existing wetlands, even though they are already protected by state and federal programs. Unfortunately, the math just doesn't work with this approach -- you lose an acre here and mitigate by preserving an existing wetland acre there, leaving you with one acre, rather than the two you started with.
Given that we have already lost 50 percent of the wetlands in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, any plan that allows for further net loss of wetlands cannot be good for restoration of the bay.
Mitigation banking may on the surface appear to be a win-win so- lution for developers and the environment.
On closer examination, banking often poses more problems than it solves. Maryland should consider what's currently happening in Virginia and proceed with caution.
0&Ann; Jennings Richmond William Street
Annapolis
The writers are, respectively, Virginia staff scientist and Maryland staff scientist for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
Citizens must change nation's drug policies
According to the article "Drugs: the city-suburban connection" (June 21), increasing numbers of addicts are going into the city to obtain heroin and cocaine. The larger numbers and cheaper drug prices are but another example of a nationwide trend. Yet more money is being spent each year on law enforcement and prisons.
The war on drugs has failed, but politicians promise more results with escalating punishments and interdictions while painting their opponents as being soft on the war on drugs. For instance, the House Republicans, while disparaging the present administration efforts to end illicit drug use, have pledged support for the Speaker's Task Force for a Drug Free America and want to achieve a drug-free America by 2002. No politician has the courage to say that the emperor has no clothes.
Obviously, the drug policy must be changed, but concerned citizens instead of politicians must initiate the change. As a guide to the best approach, we should study the voluminous literature on drugs that includes government-commissioned major studies. The stakes are too great to allow ideology, misconceptions and cynical politicians to determine our drug policy.
Kevin Fansler
Havre de Grace
If you were to dry up the demand for drugs, the pushers would become ineffective.
I was therefore delighted to see this idea has already been implemented by the police, who have made several stings, including the one where suburban residents were arrested. These people will be humiliated in front of relatives and friends and possibly lose their jobs. There wouldn't be 55,000 drug addicts if they were arrested in the first place.
Those suburban buyers raised in good neighborhoods often in affluent circumstances should be made to do community service among the less privileged and see how lucky they are.
A user is a loser.
Miriam Topel
Baltimore
Teen-age smoking will survive Joe Camel
The Senate's killing of the proposed tobacco bill has everyone whining and wringing their hands. The real war is not teen-age use of tobacco but teen-age use of illegal drugs.
The scourge is on the rise in even the smallest hamlets in this country. Nobody seems to know what to do because there is no industry to hold hostage for "feel good" money concerning drug use in the name of the children.
The tobacco industry, on the other hand, will be extorted for billions of dollars. After the lawyers get their cut, what little is left will go to wasteful and useless government programs.
And after the industry has killed off Joe Camel, if teen-age smoking continues to rise (and it will), we can extort more money. Anyone who believes this will help stop smoking should look at where we are now with teen drinking. After killing off Spuds McKenzie, are we better off?
C. D. Wilmer
Baltimore
New interest in hotels refutes need for casino
There was a time when one could, with a modicum of reasonableness, be ambivalent about casino gambling in Cambridge.
Casino also meant a hotel, and Dorchester County was in sore need of additional accommodations. There was a rationalizing in the minds of many that in order to get the hotel, we would have to accept the bad effects of casinos.
With the serious offers now being made by Hyatt Regency and Holiday Express, it becomes apparent that we do not have to become a gambling destination for one-track-minded tourists.
There is no need to desperately seek a casino.
Mary A. Prahl
Cambridge
Wyndham out of scale with its community
Protesters at the largely ceremonial, public relations-inspired ground-breaking ceremony for the Wyndham Hotel want the project reduced to the original 18-story height designed for that area ("Hotel tax break fought," June 24).
Inner Harbor East was meant to be a transition area from downtown to Little Italy, Fells Point and East Baltimore -- low rise, mainly rowhouse residential neighborhoods, not an extension of the central business district.
At 31 stories and 750 rooms, the Wyndham tower is totally out of scale and out of character with East Baltimore.
Financing for a project of this magnitude would not have been possible at this out-of-the-way location but for loopholes that Congress is now closing in the real estate investment trust law. With city tax-abatements, loans and site improvements, this hotel is a gold mine of a deal for everyone in it.
This project would not have been possible but for the political bragging rights the hotel gives the mayor to pump up the so-far disastrous enterprise zone employment numbers.
I hope the courts will still yet right a wrong that is about to be imposed on the citizens of Baltimore by an unholy alliance of business greed and political vanity.
Harvey Schwartz
Baltimore
Heston can't convince people guns don't kill
Over the years, tens of thousands of members of the the
National Rifle Association evidently could not tolerate the lies, distortions and hypocrisy they were expected to passively and obediently accept and resigned from the association.
The resignations triggered a dilemma within the NRA hierarchy. And the decision of whom to hire or whom to fire became paramount. Lo and behold, there was someone waiting in the wings who could target those individuals and groups in our society whose loyalty could never be questioned.
Into the arms of the NRA came the biggest gun of them all, Charlton Heston, prepared to muzzle any citizen who dared attack the NRA.
The NRA has high hopes that the actor can perform the greatest act of his career by convincing our citizens that "guns don't kill people," and that "A well regulated militia," so clearly stated in the Second Amendment of our Constitution will forever be ignored.
But no amount of acting or dramatics will ever convince our citizens, many who have lost loved ones, that guns do not kill.
And no amount of acting or dramatics can obscure the glaring fact that the major police organizations in the nation whose members defend us around the clock and confront death daily vehemently oppose the agenda of the NRA.
Leon Peace Ried
Baltimore
Longstreet's delays costly to Confederacy
I enjoyed reading the article on Lt. Gen. James Longstreet ("Longstreet at last is cast as a hero," June 26). The Sun's reporting on the Civil War has been commendable.
While there is no doubt that Longstreet was a great general and is certainly deserving of a statue at an appropriate location, there was legitimate criticism of his actions at Gettysburg, which I believe were ignored.
General Longstreet was in disagreement with Gen. Robert E. Lee's tactics during the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, and let his feelings be known to General Lee. Rather than fully executing his commanding officer's aggressive battle plan, however, he sulked and delayed.
The result of his delay was manifested in the Confederate army not being able to occupy Little Round Top on the second day and hence losing critical high ground. On the third day, he delayed the execution of Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett's charge until early afternoon, despite General Lee's order to get moving at the crack of dawn.
In the morning, while he should have been overseeing preparations, he took a nap. During the charge, when more than 200 brave soldiers breached the stone wall, General Longstreet failed to send the reserves to push through. Many of those men recounted their feeling as they looked back, saw no support and surrendered.
Many historians believe the outcome of that battle, and of the Civil War, would have been different had General Longstreet executed General Lee's orders. These conclusions are based upon the actual events at the battle in question, not General Longstreet's support for Reconstruction after the war.
Daniel J. Earnshaw
Havre de Grace
Outcomes show need for training teachers
Willis D. Hawley, dean of the college of education at University of Maryland, College Park states in his Opinion Commentary arti- cle ("Course requirement for reading teachers are not the answer," June 17) that performance-based teacher education is based on outcomes, not on educational processes.
If that is so, all Dr. Hawley has to do is look at the outcomes to know that teacher education for reading teachers is a crushing failure. Too many kids can't read.
Dr. Hawley speaks in generalities about differing "learning needs and abilities of prospective teachers," of "varying faculty expertise" and of how the "best practice continually changes."
Every profession experiences these problems, but I wouldn't want a performance-based surgeon opening my heart based just on how well he or she had figured out how to open a chest. Every profession has a core of knowledge as its base regardless of who's teaching and who's learning.
Most reading teachers have never had a phonics course and don't know a closed syllable from an apple. I never had until I
took an Orton-Gillingham course that was not given by a college or university. I learned then why I had trouble teaching students in my class who were having difficulty reading. I could have helped more students with spelling as well.
I agree with Dr. Hawley that more reading courses might not help. What is really needed is at least one intensive phonics course, based on Orton-Gillingham. Louisiana and California have mandated this.
It's time we cut through the "eduspeak" in Maryland and did the same. Then most children would be reading by nine.
anet Williams
Baltimore
The writer is an associate of the Academy of Orton-Gillingham.
The world could use an international court
The Sun discussed an issue of great importance in its editorial "Is world ready for rule of law?" June 25. The essay concerned the United Nations conference to develop a statute for an international court to deal with individuals accused of genocide and other crimes against humanity.
The editorial stated that "almost every member of the United Nations favors creation of the court in principle" and summarized considerations bearing on the authority that should be granted to the court.
The editorial suggested that because the war-crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda are slow and have failed so far to justify their existence, "the proposed international criminal court . . . cannot work." I take issue with that statement.
The function of these two ad hoc courts has been impaired because they were established months after the alleged crimes, when the trails and availability for arraignment of the perpetrators were diminished.
But agents of the proposed court would be designated before crimes are committed and hence available to follow fresher trails of the criminals.
Further, the likelihood of prosecution by agents of an existing international court may well dissuade from their activities some potential perpetrators of genocide and other crimes against humanity.
Palmer H. Futcher
Cockeysville
Teflon White House escapes press ridicule
The White House introduced a pilot who flew in the Berlin Airlift as a woman. The vice president introduced Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls as Michael Jackson. How many bold headlines would the public have seen accusing President Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle of being out of touch?
Chuck Lippens
Baltimore
Minimizing Palestinian suffering
Recently, The Sun published an article of mine in which I urged an acknowledgment of wrongs done to Palestinians in 1948 and since -- massacres and ethnic cleansing of civilians by Israeli forces.
Robert O. Freedman's response incredibly tells Palestinians to stop living in the past ("This land is mine," June 14). Had Jews taken his advice, there would be no Israel and no Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the same time, Mr. Freedman denies the past, claiming that Israel bears no responsibility for Palestinian suffering and displacement.
He, in effect, denies the personal experiences of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians as well as historical record documented by Palestinian and more recently, Israeli historians.
Even if one buys into Mr. Freedman's bogus history, Israel certainly did not (and does not) have any justification for preventing the return of Palestinian refugees, as called for by the United Nations shortly after the creation of Israel.
Mr. Freedman also engages in apologetics for the massacre at Deir Yassin, which the Israeli mainstream has condemned for years. For good measure, he even offers a wildly inaccurate smear of the Muslim prophet Mohammed.
When it comes to the Nazi Holocaust, there is a name for people who minimize the suffering of people by falsifying history. Such twisted individuals usually do not get published in respectable newspapers. When it comes to the Palestinians, blaming the victims seems just fine.
Sam Husseini
Washington
There is no defense for Netanyahu's moves
There are times when it is necessary for the sake of integrity to refrain from disingenuous apologetics. Some recent letters from well-meaning pro-Israel sympathizers try to defend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's efforts to manipulate and expand Jerusalem's municipal boundaries as not undermining the peace process.
I am also a committed defender of Israel's right to live under a secure and just peace, but I refuse to justify moves of provocation that are clearly intended to frustrate the attainment of an agreement in which land is conceded for verifiable gestures of peace-making.
Mr. Netanyahu has been constantly violating the spirit of the Oslo peace accords, and many of us who are staunch advocates of Israel feel that he is not only leading it to serious short-term trouble but that he is also endangering its long-term survival.
Those of us who feel this way are grateful that President Clinton, who is quite clearly as good a friend to Israel as any American President has ever been, is trying to nudge both sides toward a continuation of the peace process.
Rather than criticize him, we should be thanking Mr. Clinton for trying to prevent Mr. Netanyahu from exacerbating a troubled situation, something he seems to be doing with sad regularity.
Rabbi Mark G. Loeb
Baltimore
Pub Date: 7/04/98