Author: John Messeder

Judge’s decision could have broad consequences for public Right to Know

Author's pen seeks to expose government secrecyA Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, judge may soon have a say in whether citizens have a right to know what decisions are made when their elected officials gather to make them. Currently, some gatherings of elected officials are claiming to be protected from the state’s Right to Know Law. A decision either way could affect other agencies, from school boards to economic development corporations.

Last July, a Bloomsburg-based author asked the PA State Association of Township Supervisors for information about its lobbying efforts as the legislature formulated a law to, purportedly, regulate the controversial Marcellus Shale industry. Continue reading Judge’s decision could have broad consequences for public Right to Know

Judge’s finger on sunshine switch

A juge will decide whether Right To Know applies to government-based lobbyists.A Bloomsburg author’s challenge to a township agency’s claim of immunity to the state Right To Know law is in the hands of a Cumberland County judge. After about an hour of discussion, Judge Kevin A. Hess said he would “take it under advisement,” without specifying a possible time for a ruling. Continue reading Judge’s finger on sunshine switch

What makes a young man so willing to kill

Twenty children and six adults were killed in a Connecticut elementary school, 10 days short of Christmas; one wonders what will convince us to stop killing our kids.

Almost before the shooter, 20-year-old Andy Lanza, had stopped pulling the triggers on his two pistols, knees across the nation began to jerk. “Get rid of the guns,” cried those on one side of the divide. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” replied NRA CEO and Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre, recommending teachers be armed. Continue reading What makes a young man so willing to kill

Promised Land: The popcorn was great.

Another pipeline path cuts across Loyalsock State ForestThe hype made it out to be a movie about frackers coming to a small Pennsylvania town, population 880, and buying up leases from unsuspecting farmers. And then …

The “and then” was a little unclear, even in the trailers, but there was considerable implication there would be conflict of some sort. Alas …

As the story begins,

Continue reading Promised Land: The popcorn was great.

White Christmas: Planet Earth’s Reset button

The moon shines indirect glow across a charcoal sketched tree limbs.Well, the weather outside is … two inches and still coming down as I write this. The son showed up with his two-year-old. I picked up some snow and threw it at the little guy. He handed Dad his piece of pizza, and started firing snowballs back at me. A ferocious battle ensued, which I lost, I believe because my antagonist was closer to the ground and therefore better able to quickly grab, pack and fire his snowy spheres.

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“Wall to wall, throughout the day”

A congresswoman in Arizona, movie-goers in Colorado, Sikhs in Wisconsin, mall shoppers in California and Washington. Unfortunately, I could go on. Sons and daughters in Afghanistan.

“These were BABIES. There’s just no comparison,” a friend said of last Friday’s mass shooting in a Newport, CT, school. Continue reading “Wall to wall, throughout the day”

Continental Divide: Wildlife, People, and the Border Wall

Continental Divide: Wildlife, People, and the Border Wall“In early spring 2008, two young bison bulls jumped a sagging three-string barbed wire fence separating Chihuahua, Mexico, from New Mexico in the United States. On both sides of the international line lay an unbroken grassland valley scoured almost bare by a prolonged drought, which announced itself meanly on the dusty hides stretched taught [sic] over bison bones. … Here is a landscape that has seen the birth of jaguars, the death of Spanish missionaries, the budding of Saguaro cactus, the persecution and dogged endurance of native peoples, and the footsteps of a million migrants recorded in the smoldering sands of the Devil’s Road.”

One of the principles I have offered my children and grandchildren has been that books have the power to take us places we might otherwise never visit. One such book is Krista Schlyer’s new one titled “Continental Divide.” In words and pictures gathered over several years, Schlyer, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental photographer and writer, takes us to this nation’s border with Mexico and the fence intended to block illegal humans, but instead blocks the necessary migration of the area’s wildlife. Continue reading Continental Divide: Wildlife, People, and the Border Wall

Warm winter could be a job killer for snow sports industry

Mid December on a rained-on fogbound ski slopeA report published jointly this week by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Protect Our Winters notes global warming is making winters warmer, and snowfall lighter – especially at lower elevations. That, the report’s authors say, will cost jobs and cash in the nation’s snow sports industry.

“Snow is currency in the 28 states that benefit from (winter sports),” said Elizabeth Burakowski, researcher at University of New Hampshire and co-author of the report titled “Climate Impacts on the Winter Tourism Economy in the United States.”

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A beachfront cottage in Gettysburg, you say? Could be.

An ice island twice the size of Manhattan, NYC, visible exiting Nares Strait, broke off Greenland's Peterman Glacier in July 2012, then began fragmenting to become sea waterA lot of young hardbodies are going to be very happy in, say, 200 or so years. Several bits of information crossed my desk in the past few days, among them a new scientific report saying ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, melting faster than was projected just 5 years ago, contain enough ice to raise sea levels 25 feet in a couple centuries – enough to move beach front property inland as much as 50 miles.

The good news is I will be able, on a calm moonlit night, to paddle the family canoe to the Rusty Scupper, a really nice restaurant on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, where, at a table near the piano, I proposed to my wife.

 Continue reading on Rock The Capital …

At what point does education become spying?

Cameras watch for speeders, red light runners, illegal drug sellers, and now children studying (or not) at homeOur children are getting entirely too used to living in a police state.

I remember when Officer Friendly graced children’s book. He often was a bit portly in his double-breasted overcoat with the shiny brass buttons. He carried a shillelagh, often in both hands, behind his back. He smiled at children, joked with them, and helped them out of minor childhood troubles while encouraging them to avoid more serious transgressions.

What brought that to mind was an article in TechNews Daily about a new program that will allow teachers to look over their students’ shoulders – even when they’re not in school.

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Giving thanks, and thinking ahead

Life, like this photographic glimpse, is a bit blurry during the holidaysEach year about this time, I take a few minutes to remind myself of the sorts of things for which I’m thankful. On the simple end are toys such as DVDs and telephones we carry in our pockets that can, if their owners wish, play movies or simply, in the case of my grandkids, affirm connections to friends with whom they have not spoken in four or five minutes.

When I was 12, I had thousands of acres of woods in which to roam, and streams and a big lake in which to swim and slake my thirst. All of it was not ours, but property boundaries were not strictly enforced in those days. The 513-acre pond was home to three pair of loons, a couple beaver families, a family of moose and several species of fish.

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Money and water flow naturally away from their source

A frog finds shade at the foot of an electric waterfallI have an electric stream behind my house. Water flows down the rocks, offering a drinking fountain for the dog, birds and wasps that live here, and soothing sound for me. There is a pump submerged at the bottom of the stream to raise the water back to the top. Even with the pump running, I must regularly add water to replace what the critters and the sun take from the system during the day.

Money, I’ve noticed, is like my backyard stream, in reverse. Money naturally flows uphill.

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Ken Burns Dust Bowl documentary: when profits override the environment

Arthur Rothstein captured this photograph of Art Coble and his sons, south of Boise City, Oklahoma, in April 1936The grass covered Oklahoma prairie was new to most citizens of the recently reunited United States of America in the days following the turn of the 20th Century. Buffalo grass covered the ground, its roots woven through an area a foot below the surface, slaking the grassy thirst and stitching the ground in place during dry spells. But the soil was fertile, and wheat commanded a profitable price.

World War I started, and the federal government wanted the land farmed, and offered generous assistance to farmers willing to till the land. And profits would be even higher if the yield could be increased. Initially, farmers used plows that sliced the soil, leaving most of the grassy cover in place while opening furrows into which they could drop seed. A new kind of plow shredded the soil, turning it over to bury grass and expose the no longer moisture-holding soil.

Soil, everyone thought, was the one resource that could not be exhausted, …

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Planet Earth – our home, if we can keep it

The Big Blue Marble is our home, if we can keep itThe just ended election dealt, in part, with Lincoln’s economic formula. At least environmentally, the question seemed focused on whether “new beginners” were to be given a chance or whether their efforts would be stymied by the efforts of financially successful technologies to protect their treasure.

Somewhere deep inside most of us – 98-percenters and 1-percenters alike – is the understanding that we can’t go on the way we have. The forests once were thought to be too expansive, too fast growing, to ever threaten the nation with wood shortage, and few people were aware of the damage clear-cut mountains could render to rivers and streams.

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Author sues townships organization for access to public information

State legislators need to strengthen the Right to Know law.In spite of publicity in recent years about state agencies being made more transparent, there remain plenty of road blocks to acquiring information which seemingly should be public. Such a situation faced Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania-based author and social issues journalist Walter M. Brasch earlier this year.

“I was needing information for a book I was working on about fracking in the state,” he said.

At issue was Act 13, signed into law in February.

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Of the two ways to vote, one will keep our planet livable

Marking a ballot is the only way most of us participate in the governing process.In high school, my son got in a little hot water with a social studies teacher who had said the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s was about oil. I’m guessing Mitt Romney went to the same class and decided it wasn’t about oil because, he said, Iran is supporting Syria to gain access to the sea.

It makes sense for Iran to want to whup Iraq, since the latter nation stands smack dab in the way between Iran and Syria, the latter which is on the Mediterranean Sea. On the other hand, it would seem cheaper for Iran to simply build a seaport or two on the Persian Gulf (named for Iran when it was called Persia), and the Gulf of Oman – both of which provide Iran with large expanses of ocean front property.

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Arizona threatens secession; it may be a growing trend

The Colorado River took a very long time to carve this ditch in the planet's surface.Come election day, the good citizens of Arizona will decide whether to amend their state constitution, granting themselves sovereignty over the Grand Canyon, allowing themselves to “take it back” from the rest of us. The goal, apparently is to increase mining and other commercial uses in the canyon, and funnel the proceeds into Arizona coffers.

The plan reminds me of the story about a dog walking across a river on a log, carrying a huge fresh bone. About halfway across the river, he looked down and spied another dog carrying a similar bone.

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Exploitation without conservation: a recipe for disaster

What recently was preserved forest has been cleared for access to natural gas.I love traveling. I enjoy meeting people in a variety of places, with different manners of talking and thinking. Though sometimes there aren’t as many differences as one might think.

A friend turned 40 a few years ago, nearly at the top of Engineer Pass, just outside and way above Ouray, CO. I was driving the Jeep that day as we climbed as high as I dared into the San Juan Mountains, part of the Colorado Rockies. One particularly impressive part of the hours-long climb up narrow, rock-strewn switchbacks was looking up at what someone later told me was, as I recall, Steeple Spire. Or something of that ilk.

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Ode to the little house

The outdoor facilities were part of my childhoodI was raised an outdoors kind of guy. Even for that? you ask. Yes, even for that. When I was a lad, the running water was a hand pump about 50 yards in one direction from the kitchen door. It ran faster in winter than summer because if you didn’t hustle in winter it was likely to freeze before you got the pail inside.

The “facilities” were about 100 yards in the other direction, and therein lies the tale.

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Letter to Obama

A natural gas pipeline slashes a mountaintop in Trout Run, PAMy son used to tell untruths. Sometimes he’d even say he hadn’t done a thing I’d just stood there watching him do. But he’s all grown up and haired over – except that place on his head where you could draw a map of Alaska and not mess up any follicles.

OK, maybe a map of Delaware. What’s a little exaggeration between friends? I’m guessing if you and Mitt would get in a private room together, both of you could come up with some things you wished your parents hadn’t found out didn’t happen just the way you said they did.

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