LIKE Catherine Bergamini (Letters, October 20), I have been taking part in Glasgow City Council-organised walks for 17 years and I am just short of completing 600 outings.

Glasgow Life has informed me that all walks will cease by December.

Walks are not cheap - in the last walking booklet they are listed at £24.15 for the full day and £11 for a half-day. Glasgow Life cites the cost of leaders (who have had no pay rise for four years), fuel and minibus costs as being unsustainable.

There are walks on everyday of the week, so the coffers of Glasgow Life must be in a very healthy state if they can forego the cash input from hundreds of active walkers.

Glasgow Life asks us to join other clubs or, unbelievably, offers support for us to form our own club.

Let us hope this unfortunate decision will be reversed and the legacy of the Commonwealth Games upheld.

Eric Gribbon,

3 Milton Hill, Dumbarton.

IN BBC2's Human Universe series, which airs on Tuesdays, Brian Cox asks if we are alone in the universe. Although there are probably billions of habitable planets in our galaxy, it could well be the case that advanced life has only ever emerged on one of them, the Earth.

His argument is sound. The beginning of advanced life occurred when two cells from simple organisms merged to form the first ever union of eukaryotic cells, that is, multicellular life. This was an event many millions of years ago. So difficult is it for evolu­tion to get through this biological pinch point that even though there have been a trillion trillion opportunities for life to advance from single to multi-cellular life, it has only happened once: 10 billion habitable planets are not enough.

The silence of the universe is not then the result of its vastness. As Professor Cox argued, it would only take a civilisation 10 million years to colonise the galaxy, a blink of an eye in cosmic terms. The silence of the universe is due to the absence of life.

What does this mean for life on Earth? It means we should stop using the planet's resources to power machines that carry our bodies around and it means we should walk and cycle. The preciousness of life means that we should no longer sacrifice people to the gods of greed and speed as we currently do by disregarding one million violent road deaths every year. It means we should stop wrecking the precious biosphere by burning fuels.

The current orgy of environmental destruction is driven by the fund­ament­alism of economic growth. It is for the sake of growth and jobs that we must cease walking and cycling and embrace flying and driving. No politician dares to challenge that ideology; they know too well how their lavish life is oiled.

But the answers to the world's problems lie in reducing our dependency on money and work and becoming more self-reliant, in other words we need economic shrinkage.

Instead of working all the hours God sends to buy your kids stuff, work less, spend more time with them. Instead of buying them an Xbox and flying them off for two frenetic weeks of foreign holiday, see them every day and cycle them to your local park to enjoy the wildlife and fresh air. Instead of buying fuel use your muscles. Walking and cycling are not only the solution to the world's problems. They are the way to ensure life continues in the universe.

Norman Armstrong,

47 Braeside Street, Glasgow.