Category: Environment

On tearing down mountains and other barriers

Even parts of mountains show effects of Pangea(First published in the Gettysburg Times, 6/7/2013)

A college sociology professor told me the length of human experience is about 50 years. Any longer than that is “the way it’s always been.”

One might argue human experience has been shortening in recent years; we can hear that concept illustrated on the evening news nearly every night, as the latest storm or political catastrophe is declared the worst since time began. Consider that four Americans died in an attack on Benghazi, making it “one of the worst incidents that I can recall,” according former Vice President Dick Cheney. Continue reading On tearing down mountains and other barriers

Spring: time for passion and birth

(First published in the Gettysburg Times, 4/26/2013)

Outside my studio window stands Mary Lou, a dogwood tree now in bloom, given my wife by her fellow nurses when her mom departed the planet. A colorful variety of feathered creatures bath in the stream, then fly up to preen themselves dry in Mary Lou’s outstretched arms.

At least one of the shrubs surrounding our house has become, or soon will, a nesting place for a robin family. I think it already has because when I approach a robin on any other side of the house, it flies away. But on the one side, it merely hops a few feet, in a more or less straight line, it’s back pointed to the evergreenery where I suspect it has taken up housekeeping. I take that behavior as an invitation to follow, knowing full well I’m being led away from the future baby bed. Continue reading Spring: time for passion and birth

Happy Birthday to the Mighty Lincoln Highway

New Oxford train station just west of the square on U.S. 30“It was 3,000 miles of rockin’ rollin’ highway, a million memories long and two lanes wide” – From the lyrics of “Old 30,” by C.W. McCall.

The Lincoln Highway turns 100 this year. Actually, it is about 3,400 miles, New York to San Francisco, and 28 of those miles are in Adams County, Pa., passing through Gettysburg, less than a mile from my home.

Former Adams County Commissioner Harry Stokes once told me the name reflected Gettysburg, and its downtown Wills House, in which the 16th president spent the night before delivering those few words the “world shall little note nor long remember.” Continue reading Happy Birthday to the Mighty Lincoln Highway

SGI-DCNR land swap: good idea or bad?

SGI min seen from Blue Ridge Summit(First published in the Gettysburg Times, 4/12/2013)

There is a commercial on television that makes me chuckle every time I see it.

A guy comes on to tell us his doctor had long recommended taking a vitamin supplement every day. Not just any supplement, either. A particular brand.

Then along comes a survey that verifies the doctor’s recommendation. It shows that a vitamin supplement really helps maintain good health. Not just any supplement, either. A particular brand. The one made by the company that ran the survey. And the fellow on TV says that’s proof his doctor was right.

One cannot realistically expect a business to say someone else’s product is more beneficial to humans and other residents of the planet, so excuse me if I’m reserving judgment on what a local company says about it’s need to expand, and how the planned addition to its operation will not be harmful to flora, fauna and water down stream. It’s not that I don’t believe the company; just that I’d like to see some information from an independent expert or two.

Continue reading SGI-DCNR land swap: good idea or bad?

Atomic States of America; a review

March 28, 2013 marked the 34th anniversary of the TMI meltdown.

Nuclear power is clean, government-regulated, and safe – until something goes wrong. In a 92-minute documentary titled “Atomic States of America,” co-directors Don Argot and Sheena M. Joyce trace the development of nuclear power – and what have turned out to be some of its attendant risks.

“The risk/reward is so different in nuclear power that one bad day at one facility can wipe out decades of good days at dozens of other facilities,” says David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and Senior Member of Union of Concerned Scientists.

“The hundred tons that’s in the typical core can generate power for millions of homes for two years,” he said. “It is a very enticing technology.” Continue reading on Rock The Capital …

Spooning, exploring graveyards, and other spring pastimes

McClellan Cemetery, Black Horse Tavern Rd(Originally published in Gettysburg Times, March 29, 2013)

Spring is coming. The ice is out on my favorite canoeing pond, though some mornings I wake expecting it to be back. Grady the Golden and I are ready to go exploring.

At a recent Sunday morning breakfast with friends, someone mentioned going fishing, and catching “sunnies” to bury under the corn seeds. I recall similar days, sitting on a big rock I’d waded to from the shore in front of my home, dangling my feet in the water and having clouds of Bluegill Sunfish – sunnies – nibble my toes and eat my worms.

Mother declined including the fish in the evening repast. Too many bones, she said. I think most critters, including us and fish, have about the same number of bones, but those had a paucity of flesh surrounding them.

I’d read in a book that Indians used the fish for fertilizer. Continue reading Spooning, exploring graveyards, and other spring pastimes

If we knew what we’re eating …

Contains Potassium Benzoate, Acelsulfame Potassium, Phenylketoneurics and other more pronounceable chemicals(Originally published in Gettysburg Times, March 22, 2013)

Have you ever wondered what’s next in the soft drink line? A television commercial the other night had the answer.

Pepsi NEXT. With 60 percent less sugar – though less sugar than what, it didn’t say. Pepsi LAST, maybe?

I like carbonated water. I rarely drink sodas because a) I’m diabetic and b) I’m not sure what they use to replace sugar is better for me than the sugar it replaces. Your mileage may vary; I’m not preaching here. Still, it would be nice to now exactly what is in the stuff we eat and drink. We have gone a long time surviving on jokes such as, “I don’t eat anything I can’t pronounce,” but that’s not true, either. Trying to read the list of ingredients in, say, a loaf of bread can cause one’s eyes to tangle.

Continue reading If we knew what we’re eating …

India is not that far

Author's pen seeks to expose government secrecy

When I was considerably younger, I would swim out in the middle of the lake at midnight or thereabouts, lie on my back in the water, and float there, nearly weightless, looking up at light from so far away some of it had been reflected from stars that had not existed for longer than humans have walked on this planet.

Stars are interesting. Our sun is a star. They are responsible for all the elements that comprise everything else, including us. Continue reading India is not that far

Do we wait for the river to die to call it ill?

Two men fishing below the Harrisburg bridges.The Susquehanna River Basin Commission reports its data collection funding has been cut, while more than 2,000 miles of waterways still suffering from mine drainage from coal mines abandoned nearly a century ago. And increasing numbers of smallmouth bass are being found cancerous and dying in the 100 miles of river below Sunbury, PA (near the Shamokin Dam).

Meanwhile, PA DEP Secretary Mike Krancer and PA Fish and Boat Commission head John Arway continue to spar over whether the river should be declared “impaired,” a declaration that would make the river eligible for federal funding to research the dying fish.

 Continue reading on Rock The Capital …

Future holds promise for electric commuter cars

Electric vehicles can fill commuting niche.A recent story in Reuters posited electric cars are “headed toward another dead end.” The outcome was illustrated at the Pennsylvania Auto Show last month in Harrisburg, where there was plenty of emphasis on gasoline and precious little on electric – though hybrids were well represented.

But while Reuters was pronouncing Last Rites for all-electric automobiles, other’s were painting a slightly rosier picture. I submit the demise of the electric car is greatly exaggerated in a storyline carefully engineered by the oil industry.

 Continue reading on Rock The Capital …

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

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.

 Continue reading on Rock The Capital …

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

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.

 Continue reading on Rock The Capital …

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.

 Continue reading on Rock The Capital …

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.

 Continue reading on Rock The Capital …

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, …

 Continue reading on Rock The Capital …

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.

Continue reading on Rock The Capital …

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.

 Continue reading on Rock The Capital …