environmental studies

David and I flew to Iowa just over a week ago to see our son Tom, who has just started college there. To my surprise and pleasure, he has decided to get involved with the campus garden, and says he has blistered hands today from digging over some of the beds. I imagine that college gardens are all organic, but farming in Iowa is not. We spent a wonderful afternoon while we were there at the Living History Farms, walking through the woodland grove where an Indian encampment, and gardens, [...]

My daughter's taking a class in environmental management and I've learned two important things from her. First, Richard Nixon's looking better and better: he signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act in 1970. One of the most important demands of this law is that Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) be produced. As Rachel points out, creating these big reports is a lot of work. (Students are very much aware of the work involved writing reports, but I'm sure she doesn't realize the extraordinary resources that go into writing government reports.) [...]

I can't believe I missed this when it came out in October, and that I found it only because the lines were long at the food coop before the holiday weekend (today is Presidents' Day, here in the US, and the radio hosts make terrible jokes about not being able to tell a lie, an ironic measure of a president these days). There is a loose network in the US of liberally minded people who are willing to look beyond the conventions of the left, the Democratic Party, and the [...]