Archive for October 2010
The gap: Why black men are losing ground to white men
The Midwest has become a cold place for African-Americans.
A new study from the Federal Reserve Bank, St. Louis District, finds that the earnings gap between white and black men in the Midwest has been getting progressively bigger for over a generation.
And the earnings gap keeps growing despite the huge strides that black men made in closing the education and academic performance gaps with white men. Read the rest of this entry »
Reimagining a prairie
… Stalwart plants grasp at our shoelaces, whip at our thighs, and send forth seeds to journey to new destinations upon our clothes as our little tour group continues plodding at an undaunted pace through The Nature Conservancy’s Nachusa Grasslands of north-central Illinois. Here at this nearly 3,000-acre site near Franklin Grove, Illinois, the sky meets the ground unimpeded and the forever vista suggests possibility.
Something from the human past seems to be whispering, “This is good.”
It has been suggested by Harvard biologist and conservationist Edward O. Wilson that humans have an innate tendency “to affiliate with life, to be attracted to it, to like its varieties, to enjoy and prefer certain qualities of it.” He calls this instinctive response “biophilia.” And surely the majority of us have felt the fascination, the sense of well-being and wonder associated with a particular landscape whether hiking through a national park or standing in the midst of a backyard garden in bloom.
Yet, Nachusa belongs as much to our present as it does to our past. Read the rest of this entry »
