POLLOCK CONFUSION

Dear Dan,

Regarding your April 13th article, "Drip Paintings," the Pollock-Krasner Foundation is located at 863 Park Avenue in Manhattan, not in Pollock's former home on Springs-Fireplace Road.

You have confused the foundation with the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, which preserves and interprets the property where Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, lived and worked.

The painting you used to illustrate the article is not one of the Matter finds, but Pollock's "Composition with Pouring II," 1943, from the Hirshhorn Museum, which we exhibited at the Pollock-Krasner House last summer. The uncredited photograph of Pollock is by Hans Namuth. Both images are copyrighted, and were reproduced without permission.

I should be grateful if you would print these corrections.

All best,
Helen A. Harrison, Director
Pollock-Krasner House
and Study Center
East Hampton
Via e-mail

Done. - DR

THE DANGER OF ENVIRONMENTALISM

Dear Dan,

To save mankind requires the wholesale rejection of environmentalism as hatred of science, technology, progress and human life.

Earth Day approaches, and with it a grave danger faces mankind. The danger is not from acid rain, global warming, smog, or the logging of rain forests, as environmentalists would have us believe. The danger to mankind is from environmentalism.

The fundamental goal of environmentalism is not clean air and clean water; rather, it is the demolition of technological and industrial civilization. Environmentalism's goal is not the advancement of human health, human happiness, and human life; rather, it is a subhuman world where "nature" is worshipped like the totem of some primitive religion.

In a nation founded on the pioneer spirit, environmentalists have made "development" an evil word. They inhibit or prohibit the development of Alaskan oil, offshore drilling, nuclear power - and every other practical form of energy. Housing, commerce, and jobs are sacrificed to spotted owls and snail darters. Medical research is sacrificed to the "rights" of mice. Logging is sacrificed to the "rights" of trees. No instance of the progress that brought man out of the cave is safe from the onslaught of those "protecting" the environment from man, whom they consider a rapist and despoiler by his very essence.

Nature, they insist, has "intrinsic value," to be revered for its own sake, irrespective of any benefit to man. As a consequence, man is to be prohibited from using nature for his own ends. Since nature supposedly has value and goodness in itself, any human action that changes the environment is necessarily immoral. Of course, environmentalists invoke the doctrine of intrinsic value not against wolves that eat sheep or beavers that gnaw trees; they invoke it only against man, only when man wants something.

The ideal world of environmentalism is not twenty-first Century Western civilization; it is the Garden of Eden, a world with no human intervention in nature, a world without innovation or change, a world without effort, a world where survival is somehow guaranteed, a world where man has mystically merged with the "environment." Had the environmentalist mentality prevailed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we would have had no Industrial Revolution, a situation that consistent environmentalists would cheer - at least those few who might have managed to survive without the life-saving benefits of modern science and technology.

The expressed goal of environmentalism is to prevent man from changing his environment, from intruding on nature. That is why environmentalism is fundamentally anti-man. Intrusion is necessary for human survival. Only by intrusion can man avoid pestilence and famine. Only by intrusion can man control his life and project long-range goals. Intrusion improves the environment, if by "environment," one means the surroundings of man - the external material conditions of human life. Intrusion is a requirement of human nature. But in the environmentalists' paean to "nature," human nature is omitted. For environmentalism, the "natural" world is a world without man. Man has no legitimate needs, but trees, ponds and bacteria somehow do.

Michael S. Berliner
Ayn Rand Institute
Irvine, California
Via e-mail

The Ayn Rand Institute follows the tenets of the author who wrote Atlas Shurgged. - DR

NONE OF YOUR BUISNESS

Dear Dan,

IT'S ALEC BALDWIN'S PERSONAL BUSINESS

Though I am horrified about Alec Baldwin talking to his 12-year old daughter like that, it is none of my business, or yours! It is his family 'dirty laundry', as someone told me once when I'd gone too far. Yes Kim, you were right!

So, let us respect Alec Baldwin's privacy, his daughter and Kim Basinger. Leave it alone! The recording never should have gone beyond family, whoever was responsible!

Maybe that video too, of the killer, though maybe we need to learn from it, not to make a hero of the killer, maybe compassion, as many others may be out there about to do this. This might be good for them, so that they'll change their minds!

Toby Van Buren
Via e-mail

There are several commentaries in this issue on this.- DR

WHAT ABOUT THE BOARDY?

Dear Dan,

A little while back you wrote a story on the Boardy Barn being sold. Then it fell through. I was wondering if there was any news on The Boardy Barn? Will it stay open? Was it sold again?

Thanks.
Rob C.
Via e-mail

No news that I know. - DR