FOCUS/midwest

Some environmental groups and progressive Democrats are denouncing the American Clean Energy and Security Act as a massive subsidy for polluters and a meaningless response to climate change.

A day before the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act by a vote of 219-212, seven liberal and environmental organizations mounted a campaign to defeat the bill. The legislation now moves to the U.S. Senate.

The numerous provisions of the bill “do not add up to the steps needed to avert catastrophic climate disruption. Moreover, the bill’s emissions trading provisions create vested interests that would block future reforms,” Tom Stokes, coordinator of the Climate Crisis Coalition, wrote to the coalition members the day before in urging them to lobby their congressional representatives to vote against the bill. Read the rest of this entry »

“Yesterday, I spent the entire morning reading. Early in the afternoon, for no clearly ascertainable reason, I experienced a sudden desire to read all of the letters sent to me by editors (12,000 rejection slips and four or five letters) in connection with my poetry. I ran across the first letter postmarked Feb. 9, 1962. In these five years, this was the first time I had paid any particular attention to the postmark on that letter. This, in turn, caused me to recollect that my first poem had been written on the spur of the moment, mailed, and that letter received in only four days. My first poem must have been written on the fifth of February 1962. Idle observation? I thought so at the time, but — well, let me not digress.

“Later that evening I was idling in front of my neighbor’s cell, and casually inquired about the titles of some of the paperbacks on his shelf. After rummaging around, he handed me A Gift of Prophecy. I accepted the book and ended up spending the rest of the night reading about the clairvoyant Jeane Dixon. It turns out that she has predicted all types of catastrophe which have later come to pass. Read the rest of this entry »

Ted Wichmann still remembers the brutal Super Bowl of 1984, but not for the pounding the Raiders gave the hapless Redskins.

Instead, what Wichmann recalls is the wicked deep freeze that destroyed dozens of grapevines that he and his business partners had planted high on a hill near the tiny town of Alto Pass, Ill.

All it took was one bitter cold snap, in January 1984, to kill every Chardonnay and Riesling vine, roots and all.

“In one day, they were all gone,” Wichmann says.

So for the next couple decades, Alto Vineyards and every other southern Illinois grower avoided the better-known but cold-sensitive Vitis vinifera grapes, and stuck with more durable, cold-hardy French-American hybrids and native varieties.

Now all that’s changing. Read the rest of this entry »

When Washington University in St. Louis set out to build the “greenest” building in North America, the people involved never expected that the toughest obstacle would be the disappearance of manufacturing from the United States.

“On one level, we’ve all heard about the loss of manufacturing, but when you try to reduce your carbon footprint by eliminating unnecessary shipping, it really brings up that we aren’t making anything anymore,” says Daniel Hellmuth, principal in Hellmuth + Bicknese and architect of the Living Learning Center at Washington University’s Tyson Research Center.

When staff of the Tyson Research Center — the centerpiece for environmental research and education at Washington University — began planning for their new building, called the Living Learning Center, they decided they had to try and meet the most demanding sustainable building code out there. They accepted the Living Building Challenge from the Cascadia Region Green Building Council, the toughest green building standard in North America. No building has met the challenge yet, but the Living Learning Center is in the running to be the first.

Read the rest of this entry »

“The only real alternative to crime and prison may be drastic structural changes in our environment. Unemployment might represent the single most powerful cause of crime. It brings a host of problems, particularly for disadvantaged youths who try to reconcile their marginal role in a society that values material acquisition and status above all.

“Other changes are not so obvious and frequently run counter to public myths. A recent study has shown a perceptible rise in the homicide rate after publicized official executions. Hence an end to the death penalty might prevent some murders.

“The rage and futility of many criminal acts are largely rooted in modern urban, industrial society. The breakdown of values, religious and familial, the exploitation of advertising agencies in particular and business in general, the endorsement of violence by our communications media and government itself, all share in the responsibility for inciting the criminal act. Ultimately, of course, the weak and the hopeless individual who commits the crime is held accountable. Nevertheless, and no matter how unwelcome if not trite the message, the backdrop of society is more often than not involved in the criminal act.” – Margaret Phillips

Excerpted from “Alternatives to prison” in the March-April 1981 edition of FOCUS/Midwest. Today, Phillips serves on the board of Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty.

Brain drain.

Low income.

Vanishing factory jobs.

Welcome to the Rust Belt.

Hard to believe this was the Greatest Generation’s arsenal of democracy.

Today, the industrial Midwest looks more like the arsenal of despair.
We’re the New Appalachia.

Just run that idea around the brain.

Almost half the states of the old Confederacy report higher income-per-job than a place like Indiana.

Nothing can alter that fact soon.

It could get worse. Read the rest of this entry »

I was born on July 29, 1941 in Amboy, Ill., a small Midwestern town of 2,000 mostly straightforward and happy souls comfortably isolated in the center of the country, oblivious to the rest of the world. War would soon change all that, but I was too young then to realize how.

In fact, my first memory of World War II came near its end. People were gathering in the streets and intersections of Amboy because they’d heard of Japan’s offer to surrender, and my mother took me outside to see. It was the night of Aug. 10, 1945. I vaguely recall that people seemed subdued — adults talked through smiles, children were half asleep. Read the rest of this entry »

In remarks delivered Tuesday, May 12, at the 11th annual Electric Power Conference & Exhibition in Rosemont, Ill., power industry executives staked their claim to federal revenues from emission allowances.

The Obama administration had proposed to auction off licenses to release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere –licenses to pollute — and use some of the proceeds to fund health care reform. Michael Morris, chairman, president, and CEO of Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric Power, was sharply critical of that proposal.

Morris, as well as representatives of Houston-based Dynergy, Chicago-based Exelon Corp., and San Diego-based Sempra Energy, united in demanding that all funds raised in any auction of emission licenses go into the electric power infrastructure, including construction of new transmission lines and the development of technologies to capture carbon dioxide emissions and contain them underground.

Morris said that American Electric Power has retained Susan Eisenhower, daughter of former President Dwight Eisenhower, and George Pataki, former governor of New York, for lobbying and public relations to inject “more realism and integrity into the Obama administration’s energy and environmental plans.” – Peter Downs (pdowns@speakeasy.net)

Co-workers once called Larry Burgan “Lucky Larry,” but that was before anybody knew about the radioactive dust over all their heads.

There were nights in the autumn of 2005 when Larry Burgan says he slept with a loaded AK-47 assault rifle next to his bed. He suspected his phone was tapped; he feared that someone might torch his house. The reason for his wariness: A 12-pound bundle of documents released to him by the Illinois Emergency Management Agency, and the explosive contents therein.

The documents, which Burgan obtained under the state’s freedom of information law, outlined the extent of radioactive contamination at Burgan’s former workplace, Spectrulite Consortium Inc., in Madison, Ill. The plant was one of hundreds of low-priority radioactive sites nationwide identified by the federal government’s Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program in the 1990s. Read the rest of this entry »

In Boston today, employees of the Globe are negotiating to keep their newspaper alive. And in recent weeks, big dailies in Denver and Seattle closed. The parent companies of both Chicago’s dailies are in bankruptcy. So today’s headlines make this worried report on media consolidation, published in 1962, seem almost quaint. The author is James L.C. Ford, professor of journalism at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.

“Nowhere is the changing world of communications more in evidence than in major metropolitan centers. In Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City, therefore, as in other major cities, one finds the epitome of diminishing newspaper competition and the rise of electronic media. The number of one-daily cities increased from 42.2 percent in 1910 to 82 percent in 1954.

“Chicago has witnessed the greatest newspaper decline. Sixty years ago, it had five morning papers — the Times-Herald, the Record, the Tribune, the Inter-Ocean, the Examiner. Of these only the Tribune remains. In the Windy City, there were four afternoon dailies: the Post, the Journal, the American, and the Daily News. Of these, only two — the American and Daily News – are left. It is true that the Sun-Times has appeared, representing the consolidation of two papers under the Marshall Field banner. However, the News also belongs to Field and the American now is owned by the Tribune. So in Chicago, we have only two newspaper ownerships, competing along Lake Michigan and through the hinterland. Read the rest of this entry »