Since I was in the midst of reading Bill McKibben's Eaarth, I immediately turned to Ray Ring's article on Tom Bell in your Aug. 30 issue. You included quotes from the "Doomsday Chorus," including Eaarth. Yes, the first two parts of McKibben's book are pretty grim, according to his own analysis. He explains very clearly why "going green" cannot happen overnight and strongly encourages "a self-reliant community to seek to increase control over its own economy as far as practicable." We need to "carve workable 'small towns' out of cities and suburbs." He includes many stories about people who are doing just that -- a restaurant owner whose ingredients are all obtained locally, lots of examples proving that small-scale organic farming can feed a lot of people at reasonable prices, a guy who set up an Internet neighborhood forum compiling the five or six messages he received every day and sending them out in a single e-mail to 90 percent of the neighborhood. That resulted in Cottage Living including the area in its list of the 10 best neighborhoods in the country. I have not read the other books quoted, but Eaarth at least provides ideas to make the impending big change much more livable. Let's go there.

Joy Jamison
Lakewood, Colorado