From readers.

• Position: Letters

6 Billion People, 45 Billion Farm Animals

Thank you for your insightful observation that antibiotics mixed into the feed of billions of animals raised in factory farms in the United States each year may be just as important a biosecurity issue as "weaponized" anthrax. ("Biosecurity Requires Drug Reform," January/February 2002). This is just one more indication of the insanity of animal-based diets and agriculture at a time of so many environmental threats.

The world is now trying to feed not only about 6 billion people, but about 45 billion farmed animals as well. Raising these animals requires enormous amounts of land, water, fuel, and other scarce agricultural resources, and contributes significantly to global climate change, the destruction of tropical rain forests and other ecosystems, soil erosion and depletion, desertification, pollution of air and water, and other environmental problems.

To make matters worse, livestock agribusiness and international financial groups have been promoting the rapid expansion of the consumption of animal products, especially in countries where many people have recently become affluent, such as China and India. One result is that in 1995, China, with over 20 percent of the world's people, shifted from a grain exporting country to a major grain importer, with great implications for the world's future food security.

RICHARD H. SCHWARTZ

Professor Emeritus, Mathematics, College of Staten Island, New York

Lomborg and the Holocaust Deniers

I thought Richard Bell's excellent essay on Bjorn Lomborg (January/February 2002) deserved a comment.

I was recently touring Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire. In the student textbook area, I saw Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist. Its subtitle's allusion to the State of the World series caught my eye, as I have been reading this excellent series for several years now.

I am reading Lomborg's book now, and I am reminded of another book, Denying the Holocaust, written by Deborah Lipstadt in 1994. In that book, Lipstadt brought to our attention the otherwise unbelievable methodologies being employed by various groups to slowly bring doubt to the historical facts of the Holocaust. Their ultimate goal is to minimize or even deny that it occurred. One of their cynical tools is to prey on the students at college campuses.

Finding Lomborg's book on a college campus reminded me of that methodology. I don't think we can underestimate the human tendency to want to deny...