Author: Knoxville Progressive

Matt Rothschild over at the Progressive website has another one of those stories that just makes you want to yell – but not too loud, someone might hear and report you:

On September 20, the Secret Service paid a call to Selena Jarvis, a high school social studies teacher in North Carolina, to discuss a poster one of her students had made illustrating the right to dissent.  Details below the fold…

[From the diaries by susanhu. More superb research and disturbing information.] Several weeks ago, I posted a “User’s Guide” to EPA data resources from post-Hurricane Katrina air, water, and soil testing....

In my recent diary on cultural differences in interpreting disasters, I mentioned how the traditional Chinese worldview would interpret a natural disaster as a reflection of an imbalance in society and especially a leadership out of touch with both the balance of nature and the welfare of the people.  With this still in the back of my mind, I ran across Tempers Flare in China, which is the cover story this week in Chemical and Engineering News, the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society.  The article is a good summary of recent political unrest in China over environmental degradation, also reported in the Western press in stories such as this, this, and this.

According to official statistics, there were 74,000 protests in China last year, as compared to 10,000 in 1993.  The most common cause for the current round of protests is environmental degradation and eviction of peasants from their lands for development (factories or construction of dams).

(More below the fold)

Been out of town for business most of this week; just got in.  Sorry for posting late. Miles Davis While the following may seem long and detailed, it is in fact an abridgment of the wealth of information available at the...

Hurricanes.  Earthquakes.  Tsunamis.  Floods.  Droughts.  Volcanoes.  We live on a planet where nature sometimes shows itself in extreme activities.  And trying to make sense of destruction on...