Letters: Foothills Park | Save the butterflies

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Palo Alto’s Foothills Park
should be open to all

Regarding the Palo Alto Foothills Park exclusivity issue(“Residents organize effort to keep nonresidents out of Foothills Park,” Dec 7), it’s very clear what the right answer is.

Townships exist to provide shared resources otherwise unavailable to individual property owners. Many resources such as police and fire departments, schools, parks, roads and so on are often shared with neighboring communities as a matter of convenience or practicality. Police and firemen rush to aid other communities when emergencies threaten. And when a city such as San Jose decides to create a park, it does so in the context of a shared resource because that’s what cities do. It doesn’t expect Santa Clara or Milpitas to help fund development. For reasons of practicality and good neighborliness, it doesn’t disallow residents of other cities from using the park.

Foothills Park and Boronda Lake should be open to all, including those of lesser social status, or to none.

Thomas Battle
Los Altos Hills

Climate action needed
to save monarchs

Concerning the Dec. 7, Page B1 article on the declining monarch population (“Few monarch butterflies show up at winter getaway“), monarch butterflies have plenty of natural enemies, including parasitic wasps and fungal diseases. Now humankind is attacking them too. A few years ago, a small Eucalyptus grove nearby in Santa Cruz was teeming with butterflies. Now we rarely see any. We grow milkweed in our yard as a monarch nursery — just a token effort against the climate crisis’s effects on this iconic species.

We must not merely slow the growth of fossil fuels, but we also must embark on a critical mission to rapidly decrease the tons of greenhouse gases added to the Earth’s atmosphere. The new administration must prioritize legislation that puts a price on carbon, such as HR 763, The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. Such action would spur the transition to clean energy alternatives and might be able to stop the decline of the monarch butterfly population.

Stephan Crothers
Santa Cruz

Churches should not be
above coronavirus rules

Noah Feldman  “Houses of worship shouldn’t be treated like bars, gyms” (Dec 6). contrasts the views of secular liberals and religious conservatives as though there is no middle ground. As a religious liberal, I disagree. I am glad that my church suspended in-person services, yet distributes “church-to-go” devotional packets weekly to members of the congregation and records on video the services held in an empty church. This lets us engage in collective worship while remaining safely separated.

All gathering places should be subject to the same rules. Whenever and wherever people are close together and unmasked for more than a few minutes, whether in a bar, a gym, or a church, the risk of virus transmission is high.

Churches provide for many the spiritual comfort we need in times of fear, sickness, and death. Abiding by the rules restricting their in-person operation can help reduce that need.

Marilyn Pifer
Morgan Hill

Congressional inaction
suggests lack of heart

Franklin Roosevelt identified Americans’ Four Freedoms, adding freedom from want and fear to freedom of speech and religion. This was during the Great Depression. But times have gotten worse. In the midst of a pandemic that has caused untold misery, we now see lines at food banks unequaled since the time of FDR. In fact, the USDA has predicted that the next few months will see over 50 million Americans, including 17 million children, food-insecure.