The week that was, March 20-26, 2016
Posted on | March 26, 2016 | No Comments
Click on the image to read about this undersea world depicted by General Motors’ “Futurama II” at the New York 1964 World Fair.
Eight “bionauts”, as they called themselves, lived for two years locked inside this crystalline, nuclear bunker. Its huge vaulted structures contained a tropical rain forest, a grassland savannah, a mangrove wetland and salt-water ocean, complete with coral reef — everything one might possibly need to weather the apocalypse. It was described in the press as a “planet in a bottle,” “Eden revisited” and “Greenhouse Ark”… By the time [the bionauts] emerged, the utopia they envisaged had descended into chaos, and the experiment was acknowledged as a failure. Time magazine would call it one of the “50 worst ideas of the 20th century”. — Bohemians, Bauhaus and bionauts: the utopian dreams that became architectural nightmares, The Guardian, 3/25/16 Read more
The week that was, March 13-19, 2016
Posted on | March 20, 2016 | No Comments
The bronze, granite and quartz fountain in front of the National Gallery by sculptor Sidney Waugh was re-started this week after a motionless eight years. Click on the image to learn more about Waugh and the water feature honoring Andrew W. Mellon’s contribution to the gallery. Photo: Cliff1066/Wikipedia
“We asked for it because the National Park Service didn’t want it.” — National Gallery Director “Rusty” Powell, One of DC’s great fountains comes back to life but it shouldn’t have taken so long, Washington Post, 3/17/16
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The week that was, March 6-12, 2016
Posted on | March 13, 2016 | No Comments
Almonds in drought on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. Photo: Emily Green
“We’re not collecting any more money from the ratepayers. All we’re doing is, we’re taking money and saying we are reclassifying it from an account payable to income.” — Westlands Water District general manager Tom Birmingham to his board, California water district fined by SEC over “Enron” accounting, New York Times, 3/11/16
Westlands Water District is broker than it looks from the outside. Without “Enron accounting,” they can barely afford their debt service. — Instead of ‘Supermarket to the World,’ On the Public Record, 3/9/16
“There were six Goliaths in there and all I had was just a little pea stone.” — Nolen Scott Ely, Dimock, PA resident whose well was 
poisoned by fracking by Cabot Oil and Gas Corp, Jury awards families $4.24 million in contaminated water case, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 3/11/2016
Dimock, which was featured in the 2010 fracking documentary “Gasland,” has been called “ground zero” in the fight over fracking. — Family wins case against fracking company after 7 years of polluted drinking water, Think Progress, 3/10/16
The week that was, February 28-March 5, 2016
Posted on | March 6, 2016 | 1 Comment
Berta Cáceres. Source: Goldman Environmental Foundation. Click on the image for an appreciation from Goldman.
“Giving our life … for the protection of rivers is giving our life for the well being of humanity and our planet.” — Berta Cáceres, The Goldman Environmental Foundation, 3/3/16
“…part of a global wave of such attacks.” — Naomi Klein on the murder of anti-dam environmental activist Berta Cáceres, Honduran human rights and environment activist murdered, The Guardian, 3/4/16
… the bullet that killed Tomás Garcia came from an army officer, and was intended for killing the people who oppose construction of the Agua Zarca Dam in Honduras. — International Rivers, 7/19/2013 * Read more
The week that was, February 21-27, 2016
Posted on | February 27, 2016 | No Comments
Calgary’s Utilities and Environmental Protection Public Art Plan “Watershed+” used lights to track the rate of sewage treatment on the side of the city’s Forest Lawn wastewater lift system. Click on the rendering to hear engineers, artists and city planners discuss their desire to spark awareness of normally hidden infrastructure.
Oh, sh*t. — Calgary’s ‘poop palace’ wins wasteful spending award, Calgary Herald, 2/24/16
“We have the artists in the canal visit early on so they can understand the canal, and move with the canal, because the installations on water are technically very challenging.” — Donna Isaac, director of Scottsdale Public Art, A celebration of light, water and art, Arizona Republic, 2/23/16
“I listened very carefully and politely while you misstated the facts,” San Francisco Bay area Democratic congressman Jared Huffman to Tom Birmingham, general manager of the Central Valley’s Westlands Water District, Old tensions boil over once more in House hearings on California water, McClatchyDC, 2/24/16. Read more
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