Create healthy city for all
Re: “City adds to its environmental budget — Proposal would expand use of solar and EVs, fund climate planning,” Sept. 8 Metro story.
I appreciate Dallas’ commitment to increasing its environmental budget and advancing its environmental goals. We must work together to make Dallas a sustainable and healthy city.
In health care, we have seen the devastating health impacts of climate change due to air pollution, including increased asthma rates, heart conditions such as heart attacks or heart failure, and reproductive diseases like low birth weights or stillbirths.
We also know that vulnerable and marginalized communities are disproportionately more harmed by climate change. Thus, we also need to address the roots of environmental injustices, such as racism and economic inequalities, in these climate initiatives and policies.
Opinion
Overall, however, everyone, regardless of where you live or who you are, is at risk from an unhealthy climate. The transition to cleaner energy — such as wind and solar — is an important investment to protect our health and our planet, especially for the sake of future generations who will inherit our world.
Hopefully we can continue to make strides to create an environmentally just and healthy Dallas for all.
Micah Nishigaki, Dallas
Reduce plastic use
Re: “Easy ways to reduce microplastics,” Aug. 31 Abode story.
Growing up poor in Garland, my family always used plastic materials because they were cheap and easy to obtain. Unbeknownst to us, these products were slowly killing us.
According to assistant professor Un-Jung Kim, plastics are everywhere in modern-day life, from food containers to the air inside our homes. Nanoplastics are small enough to enter the body’s cells and tissues, and microplastics have been detected in human brains, blood, lungs, breast milk, hearts and more, causing significant harm to the human body. Often poor families like mine are most affected by plastic contamination and have no alternative choice but to rely on plastic materials.
This is why I am asking Gov. Greg Abbott to take action: reduce the production and use of plastic in Texas and create a task force to address the human health harms associated with plastic use.
Teeke Otieno Omondi, Forney
Culture war of bullets
The culture war of words is now fully a culture war of bullets after the assassinations of Melissa Hortman, a Democratic Minnesota state representative, and her husband, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a close ally of Donald Trump and conservative activist, a husband and father.
We are at the beginning of the end. Our politicians have failed us. Hate is spreading from both parties. They no longer serve their constituents, only their power brokers.
If we as a nation are to survive, this must stop and it must stop now.
Paul Sokal, Dallas/Forest Hills
Destroying peace process
Israel’s recent public targeting of Qatar is not a diplomatic blunder. It is a strategic demolition of the peacemaking edifice itself. By attacking the one actor with the access and leverage to mediate, Israel reinforces an unequivocal statement: Any pathway to de-escalation will be preemptively destroyed. This is a preplanned and willful move to ensure the conflict remains permanently unsettled and debatable, forever manageable on Israel’s terms alone through the ruthless application of force.
War is Israel’s established protocol, and business is exceptionally booming. It guarantees billions in military aid, unifies a fractured society against a common enemy and provides permanent cover for land theft. Peace would be a market collision. It would collapse the economy of fear and expose the open nature of the national project. So, of course, they bomb the peace process. You don’t negotiate away your most profitable product line.
Israel has mastered a terrible double-think: to forever play the victim while forever acting as the executioner.
Israel further presents the world with a false choice: Side with our version of reality or be branded a terrorist sympathizer. There is no third way, no neutral humanitarian space.
Its assault on Qatar exposes this false dichotomy. Even a nation acting as a pragmatic mediator is forced into the terrorist category for the crime of acknowledging that another perspective exists.
Yumna Zahid Ali, Karachi, Pakistan
Israel must finish job
I applaud Israel for attacking Hamas leaders who perpetrated the Oct. 7 slaughter of civilian families. These leaders have been living in the lap of luxury in Qatar while their people suffer from the mess they created.
Israel, fighting for her life on all sides and even in Jerusalem, must finish the job, as painful as it is. Gaza showed what a two-state solution would look like. Israel is for those who want to live in peace.
Anton Skell, Plano
Contracts have provisions
Re: “Grant is a valid contract,” by Marc Richman, Wednesday Letters.
In his letter to the editor, Richman makes an important point that grants of public money to institutions like Harvard University take place in the structure of contracts.
My advice to Richmond is keep reading! Virtually all of these contracts have non-discrimination provisions so that a grantee will lose the money if they discriminate, harass or tolerate such individuals on the basis of race, creed or national origin.
Sorry, Harvard, but you should not have my tax dollars to discriminate against Jews.
Charles Anderson, Sunnyvale
Name change will be costly
President Donald Trump wants to change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. This will cost the taxpayers many, many millions if not a billion dollars.
This will not make the world more afraid of the U.S. No one will even notice. This money could be used to help FEMA or help to keep scientists looking for cures to keep the world healthy. Our elected politicians, please keep this change from happening.
Don Rose, East Dallas