Readers Write (Feb. 2): Sustainable home decor, child well-being, clergy sex abuse, the arc of liberty, rebranding Minnesota

The Jan. 25 article about this year's interior design trends ("Should they stay or should they go") suggested that natural materials like coral will be popular. I would like to point out that coral is highly endangered for a number of reasons. Climate change is the worst culprit. Harvesting is next. I sort of equate it to killing elephants for their ivory. And if we indiscriminately harvest coral, which is a very fragile and slow-growing organism, we disturb a marine habitat for dozens of marine creatures, including another endangered one — the beautiful sea turtle.

I hope this letter inspires designers to take coral off their lists of decorative items. More information is available from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at http://tinyurl.com/kuqrqwl.

Children dying while child protection watches, child protection funding slashed — the reports are staggering. In a rugged-individualist, gun-toting, keep-government-out-of-my-life, overworked-and-underpaid, stressed-out society, how do we stop the abuse of children? It turns out there are several effective strategies to prevent abuse and to help those at risk. We just need to decide as a society that we value all our children enough to fund and grow these efforts. Several community child-serving agencies stand ready to make it happen.

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As the recent commentary by Sue Abderholden of the National Alliance on Mental Illness noted (Short Takes, Jan. 29), our state has an incredible unmet need for mental health services. One of the best places to start working at this urgent issue is early in life. A 2010 survey of community child care providers showed that their top training need and interest was around mental health and healthy social-emotional development of young children. The Legislature should invest in partnerships that bring together community child care providers and mental health experts. Fraser, one of the state's largest children's mental health agencies (and where I am a policy analyst), has collaborated with schools, child care centers and Head Start programs for more than 10 years to provide this type of consultation to preschool classrooms. The results have been fantastic: Fewer children are expelled from preschool because their behaviors are in control; parents are taught strategies for nurturing their child's social-emotional growth, and teachers are given more tools to support all of the learners in their classroom.

In a recent Star Tribune story, a University of St. Thomas professor said "the biggest help to Catholic schools would be for the priest sexual abuse problem to be solved as soon as possible" ("Bankruptcy case brings financial fears for Catholic schools," Jan. 26).

With all due respect, Twin Cities Catholics need not be passive. They can help "solve" the ongoing clergy sex abuse and coverup crisis. The steps are simple but require courage.

Parishioners often feel powerless. But in fact, they have many opportunities to make the church, and our society, safer. They need not sit back and hope that someone else will fix this crisis.

The writer is director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

Reading President Obama's national proposals for the remainder of his term, along with Gov. Mark Dayton's recent pronouncements, I am reminded that historical context matters. In 1887, a University of Edinburgh history professor noted the following about the fall of the Athenian Republic 2,000 years earlier: From bondage to spiritual faith; from faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependence back into bondage. Without abrupt change in thinking, our direction is predictable.

Trade deals may have been about trade in the past, but the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a different animal entirely. The reason Tea Partiers and progressives have united against the TPP is because it ensures that democracy won't interfere with corporate profits.

Under the deal, a corporation can sue a nation for passing a law that interferes with its profits and be compensated for forfeited profits by the nation's taxpayers.

If the TPP is a good deal for Americans, why is its text classified on national security grounds, an unprecedented move that shields its provisions from public scrutiny?

The far right distrusts government. The far left distrusts corporate power. We should all be thankful that this new alliance has insisted on full disclosure of the TPP's text and a full and robust congressional debate.

It seems we Minnesotans continue to operate in an unobtrusive manner as we search to update our state's image as "north."

Why not be bold and brazen like Ohio State University and pre-emptively put the word "The" in our label, so we can stake claim to the term "The North" for our great state? This would be an unconventional Minnesota action to change our national image and dissociate ourselves from the blah label Midwest/Upper Midwest.