Dear Editor: I was astonished to see William McKenzie assert in his editorial that 'Abortion, same-sex marriage, torture and the environment matter, but they're not driving many Americans.'

Fellow citizens of the Earth, let's play the game 'One of these things is not like the other ones.' The first three items on McKenzie's list are issues of social concern. Don't get me wrong: they're important issues that affect many people. But McKenzie has fallen prey to a common misconception. Concern about 'the environment' has come to mean a love of nature and a desire to save the spotted owl.
What McKenzie fails to recognize is that the 'environment' is not a social issue that Americans can choose to support or ignore. The problems facing all of us include the depletion of natural resources, pollution of oceans, soil, air and irreversible warming of the Earth, to name just a few. Politicians and corporations don't want to face the difficult economic and behavioral decisions we need to make in order to stop destroying the place where we live. They have packaged these complex problems in a benign little word: 'the environment.' But the problems aren't benign or little. Everyone's health and survival is at stake.

Wendy Rawlings