To the editor:

The Saturday Column of June 25 had the right title: “Reinvented Kansas might be better prepared for future.” Unfortunately, its game of Twenty Rhetorical Questions proposes only a strip mall vision: narrow and more of the same.

Rather than a “blue-ribbon group of true leaders, lawmakers, judges and politicians,” let’s have a group of ecologists, energy experts, ag economists and artists “take a hard look” at where we stand.

It is emphatically not on “a piece of dirt 400 miles by 200 miles.” Any vision springing from such a perspective is bound to falter, as we are seeing. The writer asks, “Why can’t a state take a look at itself and have the vision and courage to investigate the possibility of updating its operation?”

It does take courage to look at Kansas drying up and emptying out, to see agribusiness tearing up the whole state, and to realize that the operations for which we must update will face expensive fuel, scarce water and even fewer people on the land.

Reinventing Kansas will take far more imagination than we are showing. For starters, an awareness of the land will help grant the resiliency we will need.

Jake Vail,

Lawrence