Brought back from the brink once before, a Great Lake again faces biological collapse
What would it mean to lose one of our Great Lakes? The environmental and economic calamity could devastate the region’s tourism, sport fishing industry, drinking water supply, and wildlife, and could also take a toll on human health. And there would be plenty of blame to go around, from changing agricultural methods to inattentive politicians to weaknesses in our nation’s bedrock environmental protections — many of which can partially trace their existence to concern over Lake Erie in the first place.
Erie is the most fertile of the Great Lakes: It contains only 2 percent of their water but 50 percent of their fish. Its biological abundance, and its location in a densely settled corner of the Midwest, make the prospect of collapse all the more frightening. If conditions grow worse, imploding native fish populations could decimate Lake Erie’s recreational fishing industry. (Fishing generates $7 billion a year throughout the Great Lakes.) The water supply for 11 million people could become undrinkable without expensive treatment. And blue-green algae, linked to liver cancer in China and fatal poisonings in Brazil, could pose a grave threat to people here, too, particularly if ingested.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…
This TED Talk of Naomi Klein reminds me that I need to right a wrong. I never gave her work a fair look. Perhaps it was because she focused on some of the same narratives that I did and I held those around my circle in much higher esteem. I need to change that and finally read her book the “Shock Doctrine.”
Regardless, this is a great talk that proportions the right mix of critique in this tragedy: Risk Assessments, The Precautionary Principle (Thanks Carolyn Raffensperger), Hubris, and Feminism.
It reveals the humanity that is at risk in our debates on education. In East Chicago the “bean counters”, the “economic development gurus”, the “industry” continually invoke the utility of an education but never its Humanity. As a result they have created toxic assets of our commons. The land we use, the air we breathe, and the water we drink are the among the most contaminated investments this world has ever attracted.
Perhaps our ”bean counters”, our “economic development gurus”, and our “industrialist” need an education. This series has a great reading list for them (and for me as well).
Each day for a year, starting on September 1, 2007, Superfund365 visited one toxic site in the Superfund program run by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We began the journey in the New York City area and worked our way across the country, ending the year in Hawaii.
Today the archive consists of 365 visualizations of some of the worst toxic sites in the U.S., roughly a quarter of the total number on the Superfund’s National Priorities List (NPL).
via [ Chicago Tribune ] “An inside look at an outsider - Self-taught artist gets exposure for better or worse through filmmakers, gallery” By Joel Hood
Trains rumble in the distance, cars and trucks rush by on the highway, but inside the house on Hemlock Street the everyday world seems a very distant place.
The stink of mildew hangs in the air as one gingerly steps around empty cardboard boxes, piles of trash, soiled carpet scraps and bits of broken furniture. The walls are cluttered with religious relics, faded newspaper clippings, poetry and quotes from the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mark Twain.
The home’s windows were long ago boarded up with plywood, the only light now emanating from two teetering bulbs and a gaping hole in the roof where a violent storm once blew through.
This is the ramshackle existence of Peter Anton, 79, a retired, lifelong East Chicago, Ind., resident whose peculiar story and unusual art are creating a buzz in Chicago’s growing “outsider art” community.
A showcase of Anton’s vivid paintings of obscure people, places and things is on display at Intuit, Chicago’s Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, in the River West neighborhood, through December. A documentary about his decades as a children’s art teacher and street artist, as well as his complicated private life, could be completed next year. A book may even be in the works. Read more…
Ingredients; One layer of determined activist over a layer of obediently angry army men, and a layer of camera people (to give it that worldly flavor) with a bulldozer on-top!
Emily Henochowicz is the American artist/activist, who lost her eye during clashes with Israeli troops at the Kalandia checkpoint between the West Bank city of Ramallah and Jerusalem yesterday, Monday, May 31, 2010.
“Activism as a Genre of Art” is a nice idea but difficult to follow to its logical end when the opposition is willing to exert it’s interests with overwhelming violent means.
Are you willing to give your eye, your hand, your hearing, or your voice to your cause?
Justice is one of the most popular courses in Harvard’s history. Nearly one thousand students pack Harvard’s historic Sanders Theatre to hear Professor Sandel talk about justice, equality, democracy, and citizenship. Now it’s your turn to take the same journey in moral reflection that has captivated more than 14,000 students, as Harvard opens its classroom to the world.
This course aims to help viewers become more critically minded thinkers about the moral decisions we all face in our everyday lives.
In this 12-part series, Sandel challenges us with difficult moral dilemmas and asks our opinion about the right thing to do.
He then asks us to examine our answers in the light of new scenarios. The result is often surprising, revealing that important moral questions are never black and white.
Sorting out these contradictions sharpens our own moral convictions and gives us the moral clarity to better understand the opposing views we confront in a democracy.
On Tuesdays, the kids get out of school early. This week we checked out the new exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry - Science Storm.
<Just saying>
It is a brilliantly organized patterned space of light, color, and waves. As an activist space of semi-permanent large scaled “interactive information installations” it draws upon the full rhythmic and sensual engagement culture of rock concert and night club stage design - A kind of refined Wonka / Rube Goldbery space of gestured science. </Just saying>
Last weekend I visited Vinton County to help my brother in-law run for county commissioner. The trip gave me a little education into this region of the country. - Phone Photos
Spring break and the opening reception for the show “Precious Cargo” just happen to coincide, so we took a road trip along the southern shores of Lake Erie. All photos from my phone.
Armed with market analysis’ and statistics, it is rare for an Urban Planner to reveal how they or their family’s approach and use different spaces. They never appear in the analysis. Is that possible? Just asking.
In the early 1980’s, I took an Asian Art survey course offered by Stephen Addiss at the University of Kansas, called “Art and the Human Spirit.” It was one of the most amazing and influential courses I’d taken. Since then I’ve used the idea of “Art and the Human Spirit” as a kind of binding agent for the seemly different activities I have engaged.
Stephen Addiss is an exemplar artist. He is a composer, musician, poet, painter, and Japanese art historian. he studied with John Cage while attending the New School for Social Research in New York, from 1958 to 1960.
Addiss’ work has been shown in numerous one-person and group exhibitions, including the Queens Museum, St. Louis Museum of Art, the University of Virginia Art Museum, and museums in Korea, China, and Taiwan. Additionally, he is the author of thirty-five books, including How to Look at Japanese Art, The Art of Zen, The Art of Chinese Calligraphy, and 77 Dances: Japanese Calligraphy by Poets, Monks, and Scholars, 1568 - 1868.
I was introduced to Mark Lombardi’s work while I lived in Brooklyn in 1999. During this time I was designing content management systems and user cases for the online Medical Education market. Anyhow, the visio user case scenarios that I was designing were similar in structure to the work of Mark Lombardi and because of this I became instantly fascinated with his work. Unfortunately, he committed suicide in 2000.
I had a brief chance encounter with Theaster Gates today. I found myself sitting in the University of Chicago Booth Business School cafeteria this morning working on the Graphic for the previous post. While working I overheard pieces of a conversation behind me. I thought I heard the gentleman talk about issues he was grappling with between being an Artist and an Urban Planner. Oh, this caught my attention, and I couldn’t help but interrupt his conversation and introduce myself. It turned out to be Theaster Gates. For some reason I couldn’t remember his name, until later when I realized that I was recently looking at his work at the 2010 Whitney Biennial and did a post about the “Newly Revitalized” Whitney Biennial.
I have always been fascinated by a spatial understanding of “who we are” and “what we know.” In my mind there is an innately spatial component to both “Climate” and “Evolution”
The hominin fossil record documents a history of critical evolutionary events that have ultimately shaped and defined what it means to be human, including the origins of bipedalism; the emergence of our genus Homo; the first use of stone tools; increases in brain size; and the emergence of Homo sapiens, tools, and culture. The geological record suggests that some of these evolutionary events were coincident with substantial changes in African and Eurasian climate, raising the intriguing possibility that key junctures in human evolution and behavioral development may have been affected or controlled by the environmental characteristics of the areas where hominins evolved. However, with both a sparse hominin fossil record and an incomplete understanding of past climates, the particular effect of the environment on hominin evolution remains speculative. This presents an opportunity for exciting and fundamental scientific research to improve our understanding of how climate may have helped to shape our species, and thereby to shed light on the evolutionary forces that made us distinctively human
