To:    letters@nytimes.com
Re:    Apollo 13, executive compensation and Spaceship Earth
Date:  Thursday 13 April 06

Dear Sir/Madam,

First letter (143 words):

In today's NYT you remind us that on April 13, 1970, Apollo 13 was crippled on its way to the moon when an oxygen tank burst and seriously damaged that spacecraft's life-support systems.

We should also remember the awe-inspiring photographs, taken by the Apollo astronauts, of our beautiful planet, like a jewel in the inky blackness of space, and consider that it too is a kind of spacecraft (Spaceship Earth), on whose finite resources, life-supporting climate and ecosystems we ALL depend.

However, if we should seriously deplete its resources or disrupt its life-support systems, which we are well on the way to doing, unlike the Apollo astronauts, we have nowhere to get safely back to. Either we create sustainable economies and ways of life (for 7-9 billion! people) on board ship, or we (i.e. our children) will perish.

Second letter (146 words):

In today's editorial on executive compensation ("A Cozy Arrangement"), you say that "To fix something, first you have to understand what went wrong", which bears directly on the problem of achieving sustainability on our finite and vulnerable planet.

To understand the phenomenon of sky-rocketing executive pay, one must recognise that it rests on values, attitudes and aspirations, deeply rooted in man's animal nature, which largely underlies our economy and way of life. In view of what Darwin taught us about human origins, this should hardly surprise us, but questioning a socio-economic order with which we are so familiar and in which we have privileged niches on which we depend, is not easy.

We have a simple choice: either to face up to the fundamental non-sustainability of our economy and way of life or to continue on our course towards disaster and possible extinction.

Links:

Concerning the root causes of non-sustainable human activity

www.spaceship-earth.org