Now Really Is the Time to Embrace Green Design

How crazy-making to read Dan Neil’s column “Feels Like End Times” (800 Words, June 12), noting Elizabeth Kolbert’s excellent and frightening series in the New Yorker on climate change, the Bush administration’s dismantling of environmental regulations and the “Collapse?” exhibit at the Natural History Museum, juxtaposed with the piece about “visionary Venice designer” Jennifer Siegal, who wants to build environmentally friendly prefab houses (“Unsustainable?” by Eryn Brown, June 12).

The problem is a government that puts roadblocks in front of Siegal and her buyers with regulations that have no flexibility for environmental innovation. People have put their heads in the sand about a dire problem that is here now. The environment is gasping to sustain itself. Wake up, people! Turn off lights, install solar power, write letters, grow your own food and drive a hybrid car. We don’t own the world, we simply borrow it from our children.

Catherine Moyers

Los Angeles

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I lived in a manufactured home during college and found it affordable, space-efficient and energy-efficient. However, like the doors of the building pictured on the front cover, it had one bewildering problem: The front door had hinges on the outside. Gaining access to the house was as easy as removing the pins from the hinges. I hope modern homes have improved on this commonly overlooked design flaw.

Jina Antosz

Escondido

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Kudos to Dan Neil for having the vision to see the big picture and the honesty to report it, however unsettling it is. He has illuminated how technology is empowering individuals to create works of the highest quality and complexity (“Revenge of the Amateurs,” 800 Words, June 5).

Then he has gone after the bigger quarry of climate change and its portent for the future, which may spell the end of us along with much of the biosphere (“Feels Like End Times,” 800 Words, June 12). The latter piece is even more unexpected because Neil is an automobile writer and might well be assumed to take the other side on this important matter to our survival--a matter that has received so little coverage in the media, where Michael Jackson, the war on terrorism and Iraq cloud our view of real breaking news.

Ivan Dryer

Northridge

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The environmental doomsday column was enlightening. I never realized that Chicken Little had so many acolytes tucked under her wing.

Pat Crawford

Long Beach