Sherry Chandler

Brooks Carver sends us this e-mail postcard from his farm in Illinois.

Things are more gray and muddy here in Kentucky, not nearly as picturesque.

Brooks sends news that he’s collaborating on a non-fiction book:

A friend, who is a statistics nut and an account, and I are writing a book on the history of Canton basketball and it’s absolutely chock full of old photos. It goes all the way back to 1904. The book will only be of local interest, but it’s turning out to be a lot of fun with all the interviews of old players and going through old scrapbooks. These are priceless.

from the Courier-Journal via WHAS

FRANKFORT, Ky. – Three state legislators are trying to overturn a nearly-quarter-century ban on nuclear power in Kentucky, as the nuclear industry vies for a comeback.

Two companion bills — one in the Senate, the other in the House — would remove a requirement stipulating that before any nuclear plant is built, there must be a permanent disposal facility to handle its radioactive waste.

Are we that desperate? Or is this just some cashing in on a crisis, a form of patrioteering?

This from War and Piece is also ominous:

Miriam Pemberton writes, that she has released a new study showing “that the U.S. government is spending $88 on military security for every $1 it spends to stabilize the climate. In FY 2008, as well as during the previous four years, we have allocated to climate change one percent of what we spend on the military. The report also finds that even the modest $7 billion in the federal climate change budget is badly targeted toward what ought to be low priorities, while major climate priorities get short shrift.”

Remember this old poster?

Well, it isn’t healthy for the environment either. Consider, when you consider the imbalance in spending, what all those bombing runs are doing to the air.

You can get a copy of that poster at The Peace Company.

By the way, Avedon Carol says Dennis Kucinich needs a little help financing his run for his seat in Congress, primary next week.

Afterthought: Rebecca, as she so frequently does, asks some hard questions about the pattern to which we cut our ecological conscience or what it means to be pukka sahib as an environmentalist:

What disturbs me is the distinction Ms. Bolgiano draws between her “careless” neighbors, who do manual labor, and her college buddies, people she thought were just like her. I’m reminded of Captain Brierly in Lord Jim, who is shaken to the core by the cowardly actions of an officer whom he knew as “one of us.” His first mate says of Brierly, “Neither you nor I, sir, had ever thought so much of ourselves.”

Perhaps she intends her readers to have mixed reactions to her essay, or perhaps my perspective is to blame. The social dynamics of the Blue Ridge are different from those here on the Allegheny Front. The Blue Ridge is more hard pressed by development, more regulated by land-use ordinances and more heavily-populated. In both places, though, people who consider themselves “environmentalists” condemn people who behave differently from them. Here, a neighbor’s well-maintained trailer is the ski chalet owner’s eyesore, but that trailer (bought second-hand and placed where the family’s old house used to be) is less wasteful of resources than the trophy-house. The loggers I know are intensely concerned with forest preservation because it is their livelihood, their home, and their recreation.

I wish Ms. Bolgiano were more friendly with her logging neighbors–she’s already had indifferent success in preaching to the choir of college-educated environmentalist believers. I wish environmentalism were just plain common sense rather than religion–it’s too easy to set religion aside when it becomes inconvenient. And I wish she hadn’t started me trying to visualize an “ecological footprint that casts a shadow even at high noon on a clear day.”

Rebecca is responding to this guest post at Via Negativa.