The New York Times reports that the National Park Service has thwarted efforts to establish a wind farm off Nantucket Sound by making Nantucket Sound eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The request was made by two Massachusetts Indian tribes, who said the 130 proposed wind turbines would interfere with their spiritual ritual of greeting the sunrise and disturb ancestral burial grounds.
10 January 2010
10 January 2010
Dennis Taylor has been elected to the board of directors of Covenant House of West Virginia. Covenant House is dedicated to working for justice by offering direct services for people in need while creating social change through advocacy and education. Among other things, Covenant House operates a drop-in center for the homeless, provides people with housing-related assistance, and runs a clothing closet and food pantry.
9 January 2010
I can’t believe I live in a world where the following comment card provided by a passenger to a stewardess would lead to a plane bound for Hawaii turning around and being escorted back to Oregon by two fighter jets and the passenger being charged with the federal crime of interference with the performance and duties of a flight crew member or attendant:
I thought I was going to die, we were so high up. I thought to myself: I hope we don’t crash and burn or worse yet landing in the ocean, living through it, only to be eaten by sharks, or worse yet, end up on some place like Gilligan’s Island, stranded, or worse yet, be eaten by a tribe of headhunters, speaking of headhunters, why do they just eat outsiders, and not the family members? Strange … and what if the plane ripped apart in mid-flight and we plumited (sic) to earth, landed on Gilligan’s Island and then lived through it, and the only woman there was Mrs. Thurston Howell III? No Mary Anne (my favorite) no Ginger, just Lovey! If it were just her, I think I’d opt for the sharks, maybe the headhunters.
8 January 2010
Richard Florida’s book The Rise of the Creative Class was the standard tome for economic and community revitalization for most of the past decade. In it Dr. Florida taught us that all we needed to do was focus on three “T’s” – technology, talent, and tolerance – to transform our communities into the equivalent of Silicon Valleys. Despite his simple recipe for creative success, few communities made the transformation that Dr. Florida envisioned.
Now, I am sad to report, Dr. Florida has concluded that we should just give up on community development. Instead of supporting communities, explains The American Prospect in an article aptly titled “The Ruse of the Creative Class,” we should start supporting people. His words from a May 2009 blog post: “People – not industries or even places – should be our biggest concern. We can best help those who are hardest-hit by the [economic] crisis, by providing a generous social safety [net], investing in their skills, and when necessary helping them become mobile and move where the opportunities are.”
Had we known back then how easy it was to (re)create West Virginia, we could have saved a lot of time and money by buying everyone suitcases and renting them Ryder trucks so they could move to more stylish bergs like Austin, Texas; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Boulder, Colorado.
Was Dr. Florida correct then or is he correct now? Stay tuned.
7 January 2010
Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some final resolution, some clear meaning which it perhaps never finds.
- Robert Anderson, I Never Sang for My Father
It’s been more than 20 years since I last uttered those lines from Robert Anderson’s play, which also appear in a slightly different form in Tuesdays with Morrie, but they came racing back to me today. I understand their meaning so much better now.