Mail Call: Competing Schools

What Price Water?

In the article "Very Liquid Assets" (Aug. 20/Aug. 27) you explain how water is becoming a threatened resource and state that multimillion-dollar companies are investing in water because pollution is causing a decrease of water reserves. Governments are supporting this because they don't have the money to purify all the water needed for cities, especially in Asia. This is a huge problem because these governments and companies seem more eager to take advantage of the decrease in clean water than concerned about finding a solution to the contamination of rivers and ponds. If this problem is not solved soon, the price of water will be too high for poor people. It could then become an even bigger crisis.
Ismael Gomez Gonzalez
Mexico City, Mexico

Displacements of the NT2 Dam

If the Lao farmers and fishermen displaced by the Nam Theun 2 dam could eat their new houses, Jonathan Kent's article ("A Kinder, Gentler Dam," Aug. 20/Aug. 27) might be easier to stomach. He asserts that Nam Theun 2 is different from the dam disasters of the past, thanks to the World Bank's social and environmental policies. But standards are valuable only if they are followed. In reality, the World Bank and project developers have failed to meet commitments intended to help villagers weather the trauma of resettlement. Many resettlers are spending their second rainy season in dilapidated temporary houses. They will no longer have sufficient land for growing rice or for their buffalo, and there aren't nearby markets for their new cash crops. Kent also fails to mention that more than 120,000 people downstream will lose land, resources and income sources as a result of Nam Theun 2. Plans to compensate these villagers are still murky. It is doubtful whether benefits from the dam will ever trickle down, but the costs to local livelihoods are real.
Shannon Lawrence
LAO Program Director
International Rivers Network
Berkeley, California

The Lessons of Vietnam

Fareed Zakaria rightly concludes that America should move away from its foreign policy of fear and go back to its policy of openness and inclusion and focus on trade, engagement and cooperation ("Beyond Bush," June 11). In Iraq, America made the mistake of trying to export its brand of government. America might have done well to play its money, trade and weapons-exporting game. But George W. Bush pushed the envelope and started the game of regime change by taking unilateral military action against Saddam Hussein. He forgot Vietnam's lessons and laid another country waste, thanks to the invasion and the botched attempt to govern and bring democracy to a people who are more concerned with staying alive. The Democrats and Republican moderates had better see through this sham war and take steps to bring it to an end. There's no victory to be gained, only more deaths and destruction. Americans should realize that the "inalienable right" to happiness applies to everyone on earth—it is not the right of U.S. citizens alone.
S. Mohanakrishnan
Auckland, New Zealand