Big cities, big problems.

I found your September/October 2005 cover story "Cities of the Future" informative and well done. I believe, however, that some of the information regarding Jakarta, where I lived for several years in the early 1990s, is dated, and in some cases superficial.

Jakarta had the "three passengers in one car" policy for vehicles traveling into the inner city during business hours when I was there more than 10 years ago, so it is by no means a "new" program. But I seriously doubt it is any more effective now than it was then.

My driver and I would merely pull off the main thruway and for a few rupiahs could hire one of the multitudes of ever-present children to be the "third" in our car. As a traffic or pollution control measure it was nearly useless, although it was some help to the impoverished children.

The "transmigration" projects wherein folks are moved from the overpopulated islands of Jakarta and Bali to the under-populated islands of Kalimantan and Irian Jaya have also been in full swing for more than 10 years. Although this sounds like a good idea, in practice it is a human and environmental tragedy.

Whole villages are transported so that their homes can be turned into golf courses. They are plopped down into the middle of a jungle that has been scraped raw down to the soil and the large piles of debris set on fire. The fires burn literally for months, sometimes years if the underlying peat ignites.

The "transmigrants" are housed in dirt-floored shacks with poor sanitation. They come from malaria-free islands, so they have no immunity to it when they are forced to live in affected regions. They speak a different language and practice a different religion from the surrounding natives. They are kept in place by the Indonesian army. While I was in Jakarta with the U.S. Navy Medical Research Unit, our research doctors were the sole source of medical care in the transmigrant camps.

You had to see the water pollution in Jakarta to believe it. With the first monsoon rains, the drainage systems became clogged, flooding entire neighborhoods with toxic sludge. Friends of mine who had lived in Jakarta for years had their children checked for heavy metals because they noticed a deteriorating level of cognitive ability. The kids had toxic levels of lead in their blood, believed to be caused by the city's leaded gasoline.

If visitors to Indonesia would venture a few blocks from the gilded tourist attractions and ultra-modern environs, they would learn of its heartbreaking human and environmental tragedy. Jakarta was my initiation to the nightmare of third world mega-cities. I shudder to think how much worse it is now than 10 years ago.

Brent E. White

Poulsbo, WA

In "Cities of the Future," I was disappointed to find so little space devoted to what is being done or what should be done to alleviate the myriad problems facing mega-cities. A smog-encrusted, doomsday article is of little value unless it looks to the future and attempts to identify solutions. Pages were devoted to desperate environmental degradation and only a few sad paragraphs were written about small attempts to solve these problems.

Cities can be models of sustainability, as their heightened density allows more efficient distribution of services than disperse rural or suburban areas. The potential for these cities was scarcely mentioned.

As one of the primary voices of the environmental movement, E Magazine would do well to ask, what can be done? Then report on people, organizations and municipalities trying to answer that question. So many wonderful things are happening, moving the world closer to sustainability.

This is essential work, and strides are being made, particularly in urban areas around the world. After reading your article, I was reminded of the proverb, "Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those doing it."

Ariel K. Diamond

Associate, Chicago Center for Green

Technology

Chicago, IL