Environment versus jobs a false choice

It is only a lack of imagination and ingenuity that perceives jobs and the environment as competing with each other or mutually exclusive. The challenges of overpopulation can be met with new technologies and different ways of thinking.

We also need to start having serious dialogue around curbing our population. When people see the environment as competing with jobs, they have bought into corporations’ attempts to get us to do what they need us to do so they don’t have to change.

Corporations need to change in order to meet the current environmental challenges. It is our responsibility to see to it that businesses make those changes, change or be left behind. The current environmental challenges that we are experiencing are nothing more than an opportunity to change our technologies, create tons of new jobs, bring our jobs back to America and change the way we do business in the world.

It will mean rethinking the problem and coming up with new solutions. It will mean change for all of us and those resisting change will just become part of the problem.

Jules Cooper, Corvallis

Ease loneliness of distance walkers

I decided a year ago to walk to and from work. It is not far — about 20 minutes, between 18th Street and Oregon State University. But it is lonely. Cars stream past with their single occupants.

I would love to have more company, to greet people at the start of the day, to recognize faces. I think walking enhances community, not to mention the figure. Please join me. Your car does nothing except wreck the air and your pocketbook. Your body will thank you, and so will I.

Sarah Williams, Corvallis

Seavy Avenue error attests to disrespect

In the June 17 article, “Council OKs units on Seavey Meadows,” the story about approval of Seavey Meadows development, the Gazette-Times listed “Seavey Avenue” as a local address. That is incorrect.

For at least the 40 years I have lived alongside it, the street name has been spelled “Seavy,” different from the street in Eugene and the name of the development.

Seavy Avenue has had most of its length renamed, losing out first to Circle during the widening when Hewlett-Packard Co. came in, and then to a developer’s name when a connection was made to Conifer Boulevard. Please give Seavy Avenue and its residents the dignity of at least spelling its name right.

And, I wonder why the current developer chose “Seavey.” Did they not pay any attention to the details of the neighborhood they were seeking to enter? What further unwelcome changes will we see resulting from their apparent inattention to our local situation?

Donald B. Zobel, Corvallis