||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
THE WORLD WAR II HOME FRONT: A LESSON IN MASS CONSERVATION
MIKE DAVIS, SIERRA MAGAZINE - The World War II home front was the most
important and broadly participatory green experiment in U.S. history.
Lessing Rosenwald, the chief of the Bureau of Industrial Conservation,
called on Americans "to change from an economy of waste -- and this
country has been notorious for waste -- to an economy of conservation."
A majority of civilians, some reluctantly but many others
enthusiastically, answered the call.
The most famous symbol of this wartime conservation ethos was the
victory garden. Originally promoted by the Wilson administration to
combat the food shortages of World War I, household and communal kitchen
gardens had been revived by the early New Deal as a subsistence strategy
for the unemployed. After Pearl Harbor, a groundswell of popular
enthusiasm swept aside the skepticism of some Department of Agriculture
officials and made the victory garden the centerpiece of the national
"Food Fights for Freedom" campaign.
By 1943, beans and carrots were growing on the former White House lawn,
and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and nearly 20 million other victory
gardeners were producing 30 to 40 percent of the nation's vegetables --
freeing the nation's farmers, in turn, to help feed Britain and Russia.
. .
In The Garden Is Political, a 1942 volume of popular verse, poet John
Malcolm Brinnin acclaimed these "acres of internationalism" taking root
in U.S. cities. Although suburban and rural gardens were larger and
usually more productive, some of the most dedicated gardeners were
inner-city children.
With the participation of the Boy Scouts, trade unions, and settlement
houses, thousands of ugly, trash-strewn vacant lots in major industrial
cities were turned into neighborhood gardens that gave tenement kids the
pride of being self-sufficient urban farmers. In Chicago, 400,000
schoolchildren enlisted in the "Clean Up for Victory" campaign, which
salvaged scrap for industry and cleared lots for gardens.
Victory gardening transcended the need to supplement the wartime food
supply and grew into a spontaneous vision of urban greenness (even if
that concept didn't yet exist) and self-reliance. In Los Angeles,
flowers ("a builder of citizen morale") were included in the
"Clean-Paint-Plant" program to transform the city's vacant spaces, and
the Brooklyn Botanic Garden taught the principles of "garden culture" to
local schoolteachers and thousands of their enthusiastic students.
The war also temporarily dethroned the automobile as the icon of the
American standard of living. . . While overcrowded defense hubs like
Detroit, San Diego, and Washington, D.C., never achieved the national
goal of 3.5 riders per car, they did double their average occupancy
through extensive networks of neighborhood, factory, and office
carpools.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/55925/
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
BRITISH ACTIVISTS HALTING AIRPORT EXPANSION
IAN HERBERT, INDEPENDENT, UK - A dramatic grassroots fight back is
under way against the massive expansion plans of Britain's airports
which, despite grave concerns about effects on the environment, are
aiming to treble flights and vastly increase passenger numbers within 20
years.
In an unexpected triumph for campaigners, Manchester airport's plans to
expand on to green belt land which it owns in Cheshire were rejected by
a government planning inspector, who supported the objections of
Macclesfield Borough Council. The decision follows a similar triumph for
Warwick District Council, whose opposition to ambitious development
plans at Coventry airport have halted plans to double passenger numbers.
Britain's largest protest against the vast airport expansion plans,
which seem to be out of kilter with the Government's pledges on carbon
emissions, will take place at Heathrow next month when Camp for Climate
Action, an annual gathering of hundreds of environmental campaigners,
will spend eight days camped there. The airport's operator is preparing
to submit planning proposals for a third runway.
The tide of opposition, based on a mixture of local environmental
concerns and concern over carbon emissions, is dissuading some airports
from expansion plans. Luton announced four days ago that it was dropping
plans for a new runway and Birmingham has shelved indefinitely its plans
for a second runway. Analysts believe the anticipated local opposition
is now a significant factor in the thinking of airport owners. These
grassroots efforts and others are the latest manifestation of the
emerging British force of people power which, in recent months, has
pursued causes as diverse as reducing bank charges and fighting carbon
emissions.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/transport/article2750502.ece
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
WATER CRISIS CLOSING DOWN IRRIGATION WELLS
JERD SMITH, ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS - Nearly half the powerful irrigation
wells that watered farmlands in the South Platte River Basin are now
idle, silenced by drought, strict new water laws and a fierce battle for
water now entering its fifth year. Since the drought struck in 2002,
4,000 of 9,000 wells have stopped pumping on this stretch of the eastern
plains, leaving barren thousands of acres of corn and sugar beet fields.
Morgan County assessor Bob Wooldridge estimates his corner of farm
country has lost about $32 million in annual cash flow. Property values
- on land that can no longer be irrigated - have dropped 12.5 percent
and are likely to go much lower as more land loses its irrigated
classification. . .
Similar scenarios are playing out in other Western states, including
Idaho, where population growth and rising water use are forcing strict
river management and better integration of underground and surface
supplies. Along the South Platte, fast-growing cities have spent
millions of dollars in court to force farmers to comply with new laws. .
.
The crisis has been brewing since the 1960s, when new studies began
showing the irrigation wells in this rich farm region pull water from
the same aquifer supplying the river. In the 1930s and 1940s, the state
actually encouraged drilling the wells to "drought-proof" the South
Platte Basin - a policy that resulted in the largest farm economy in the
state, spanning more than 1 million acres. . .
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/
0,1299,DRMN_15_5621155,00.html
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
THE WORLD WAR II HOME FRONT: A LESSON IN MASS CONSERVATION
MIKE DAVIS, SIERRA MAGAZINE - The World War II home front was the most
important and broadly participatory green experiment in U.S. history.
Lessing Rosenwald, the chief of the Bureau of Industrial Conservation,
called on Americans "to change from an economy of waste -- and this
country has been notorious for waste -- to an economy of conservation."
A majority of civilians, some reluctantly but many others
enthusiastically, answered the call.
The most famous symbol of this wartime conservation ethos was the
victory garden. Originally promoted by the Wilson administration to
combat the food shortages of World War I, household and communal kitchen
gardens had been revived by the early New Deal as a subsistence strategy
for the unemployed. After Pearl Harbor, a groundswell of popular
enthusiasm swept aside the skepticism of some Department of Agriculture
officials and made the victory garden the centerpiece of the national
"Food Fights for Freedom" campaign.
By 1943, beans and carrots were growing on the former White House lawn,
and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and nearly 20 million other victory
gardeners were producing 30 to 40 percent of the nation's vegetables --
freeing the nation's farmers, in turn, to help feed Britain and Russia.
. .
In The Garden Is Political, a 1942 volume of popular verse, poet John
Malcolm Brinnin acclaimed these "acres of internationalism" taking root
in U.S. cities. Although suburban and rural gardens were larger and
usually more productive, some of the most dedicated gardeners were
inner-city children.
With the participation of the Boy Scouts, trade unions, and settlement
houses, thousands of ugly, trash-strewn vacant lots in major industrial
cities were turned into neighborhood gardens that gave tenement kids the
pride of being self-sufficient urban farmers. In Chicago, 400,000
schoolchildren enlisted in the "Clean Up for Victory" campaign, which
salvaged scrap for industry and cleared lots for gardens.
Victory gardening transcended the need to supplement the wartime food
supply and grew into a spontaneous vision of urban greenness (even if
that concept didn't yet exist) and self-reliance. In Los Angeles,
flowers ("a builder of citizen morale") were included in the
"Clean-Paint-Plant" program to transform the city's vacant spaces, and
the Brooklyn Botanic Garden taught the principles of "garden culture" to
local schoolteachers and thousands of their enthusiastic students.
The war also temporarily dethroned the automobile as the icon of the
American standard of living. . . While overcrowded defense hubs like
Detroit, San Diego, and Washington, D.C., never achieved the national
goal of 3.5 riders per car, they did double their average occupancy
through extensive networks of neighborhood, factory, and office
carpools.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/55925/
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
BRITISH ACTIVISTS HALTING AIRPORT EXPANSION
IAN HERBERT, INDEPENDENT, UK - A dramatic grassroots fight back is
under way against the massive expansion plans of Britain's airports
which, despite grave concerns about effects on the environment, are
aiming to treble flights and vastly increase passenger numbers within 20
years.
In an unexpected triumph for campaigners, Manchester airport's plans to
expand on to green belt land which it owns in Cheshire were rejected by
a government planning inspector, who supported the objections of
Macclesfield Borough Council. The decision follows a similar triumph for
Warwick District Council, whose opposition to ambitious development
plans at Coventry airport have halted plans to double passenger numbers.
Britain's largest protest against the vast airport expansion plans,
which seem to be out of kilter with the Government's pledges on carbon
emissions, will take place at Heathrow next month when Camp for Climate
Action, an annual gathering of hundreds of environmental campaigners,
will spend eight days camped there. The airport's operator is preparing
to submit planning proposals for a third runway.
The tide of opposition, based on a mixture of local environmental
concerns and concern over carbon emissions, is dissuading some airports
from expansion plans. Luton announced four days ago that it was dropping
plans for a new runway and Birmingham has shelved indefinitely its plans
for a second runway. Analysts believe the anticipated local opposition
is now a significant factor in the thinking of airport owners. These
grassroots efforts and others are the latest manifestation of the
emerging British force of people power which, in recent months, has
pursued causes as diverse as reducing bank charges and fighting carbon
emissions.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/transport/article2750502.ece
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
WATER CRISIS CLOSING DOWN IRRIGATION WELLS
JERD SMITH, ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS - Nearly half the powerful irrigation
wells that watered farmlands in the South Platte River Basin are now
idle, silenced by drought, strict new water laws and a fierce battle for
water now entering its fifth year. Since the drought struck in 2002,
4,000 of 9,000 wells have stopped pumping on this stretch of the eastern
plains, leaving barren thousands of acres of corn and sugar beet fields.
Morgan County assessor Bob Wooldridge estimates his corner of farm
country has lost about $32 million in annual cash flow. Property values
- on land that can no longer be irrigated - have dropped 12.5 percent
and are likely to go much lower as more land loses its irrigated
classification. . .
Similar scenarios are playing out in other Western states, including
Idaho, where population growth and rising water use are forcing strict
river management and better integration of underground and surface
supplies. Along the South Platte, fast-growing cities have spent
millions of dollars in court to force farmers to comply with new laws. .
.
The crisis has been brewing since the 1960s, when new studies began
showing the irrigation wells in this rich farm region pull water from
the same aquifer supplying the river. In the 1930s and 1940s, the state
actually encouraged drilling the wells to "drought-proof" the South
Platte Basin - a policy that resulted in the largest farm economy in the
state, spanning more than 1 million acres. . .
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/
0,1299,DRMN_15_5621155,00.html
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
No comments:
Post a Comment