To the editor:

A postscript to George Gurley’s column on the film “An Inconvenient Truth” is an experience I had when working for the American Friends’ Service Committee’s Peace Education Division in Philadelphia in 1961 when Russian and American nuclear testing was taking place with ever-larger bombs being detonated.

The great mathematician and Nobel Prize winner C.P. Snow was in residency at nearby Haverford College and often visited the committee. He predicted, mathematically, that unless unilateral disarmament was initiated by the United States, the world, given the probability of mechanical and human error, would blow itself into lifelessness with 10 years.

My first child was soon to be born and I looked hopelessly at the future. My father, a professor of literature and history of great ideas, told me a story: In the 11th (or perhaps 12th) century – my memory now unclear – a similar prediction was made. The world now faced the extinction of the human race. Only one generation could survive before the systematic destruction of the human population would be completed. The nature of humanity being as it is, the invention of gunpowder would lead to self-destruction.

Perhaps faith in larger processes beyond our ability to understand or control, so elegantly implied in George Gurley’s analytical column, can be considered again as we contemplate both the moral responsibilities of persons to one another, nature and the future and also the larger processes of creation to which we are subject.

Nancy Yacher,

Lawrence