If foresters love the outdoors so much, why do they continue to foster clear-cutting, a system decried by every ecologically responsible organization? Mr. Hallett writes that the penetration of wilderness areas is a serious problem that must be discussed. That discussion has gone on for fifty years, while we continue to practise both monoculture and clear-cutting. Forest practices don’t need to be “discussed.” Forest practices need to be radically changed—and professional foresters are probably not the ones to do it.
Patrick Lane
Victoria, BC
Lists Of Woe
Marni Jackson misses the main reason lists are so appealing: they give us the false impression of comprehensiveness (“13 Reasons For List Lust,” May). There is too much of everything available these days, all of it changing and growing too quickly for anyone to keep up. A good list, then, becomes a snapshot we all agree to be satisfied with.
There may have been a time, hundreds of years ago, when people could make a truly complete list, for example, of all the books available. Today, that’s so unthinkable that the best we can do is to pick some smaller number—ten, perhaps, or a hundred—and wait until next year to repeat the ritual. Lists such as David Letterman’s Top Ten are smart parodies that don’t even pretend to be comprehensive. The very concept of brainstorming—in the corporate boardroom or with your friends as you try to figure out where to go to eat—derives from a certain inherent fact: we can’t have anything complete, so we make do with a gaggle of partials.
Wayne Jones
Kingston, Ontario
Reason To Leave, Or Leave Of Reason?
As Joan Bryden demonstrates, Catholic marriages can be annulled through questionable applications of Church law (“‘Til Decree Do Us Part,” April). Under Canon 1095, grounds for annulment can include instability, stubbornness, excessive dependence, despotic authoritarianism, exaggerated self-worship, and narcissism. One may also be granted an annulment from a transvestite, the child of alcoholic parents and/or a dysfunctional family, or an explosive personality especially proven to contain some serious psychic irregularity. Lacking these, annulment may be granted on grounds of superficiality, simple naïveté, light-mindedness, lack of common sense, and incompatibility.
Catholic vows between a husband and wife are not so sacred, it seems, as they once were. They are most easily erasable through Canon law, loosely applied. If, as Ms. Bryden suggests, Catholic officials administrating annulments fail to inform respondents of their rights to an advocate, surely they cannot be fulfilling their vows of ordination. Should such officials not be forced from the Church for the same “despotic authoritarianism” they use to justify annulments?
Doris Townsend
Ottawa, Ontario
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