Letters: True costs | Save wetlands | Going backward

Mercury News Letters to the Editor for July 28, 2024

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Artificial turf’s true
costs are staggering

Re: “Artificial turf fields to remain at high schools” (Page B1, July 19).

The Fremont Union High School District board members should ask themselves if the $31.6 million bill to update turf fields is the full cost. I suggest they look at the long-term costs to the health of students who play on these fields and inevitably ingest fine dust microplastics and forever chemicals. We’ve known the health impacts of these chemicals for years, which are even more detrimental to young people. Studies have shown links to increased risk of cancer and negative impacts to the immune and reproductive systems.

How do we calculate the cost to students playing on fields that are 20-40 degrees hotter than natural grass? What too is the cost to the environment when rain and water used to clean the fields carry microplastics and PFAS into our sewers, oceans and drinking water? What is the cost of the field replacement every 8-10 years?

Let’s consider the real costs of these decisions.

Kathy Battat
Hillsborough

Palo Alto should save
marshlands, bird life

The Palo Alto Baylands constitute an important international flyway. Flocks of migrating birds use our salt marshlands, inundated with nutrients twice a day, to feed themselves and to rest on their way north. Many breed here. Green-winged teal, killdeer, ruddy ducks, long-billed curlews and more feed behind the historic saltwater bath — also known as the Duck Pond, a historic Palo Alto landmark.

To cement the Duck Pond and the marshlands to expand the airport, endangering birds so the super-rich can fly in and out of Palo Alto at an already misplaced airport, makes no sense.

Aren’t enhancing the quality of life, protecting our environment and considering we the people important anymore to Palo Alto?

Stop, look and listen to the sounds of birds. Stop destroying our wetlands, Palo Alto, or you irrevocably destroy the future of not just the diversity of our birds, but the ecology of the Earth.

Alice Schaffer Smith
Palo Alto

Conservatives intent
on going backward

Re: “Religious conservatives’ war on divorce” (Page A7, July 24)

Religious conservatives want us to go backward. Decades past one claimed mental cruelty or adultery to end a marriage. Even then divorce might not be granted.

Men could trap women. Women were “groomed” to accept physical, emotional and sexual abuse, and spousal rape — some still are.

While most people enter marriage planning to be together forever, it doesn’t always work that way. No-fault divorce means two people have decided to end their marriage. In California the dissolution, as divorce is called, is based on irreconcilable differences — no need to say more, your reasons are your own.

A couple divorcing needs a cooperative not adversarial relationship for all the people in their lives, especially for young children. The couple stops being married, nothing else should change. We want to continue to like and interact with the people we liked before the divorce, and should never be asked to choose sides.

Jane Power
San Jose