This is a short paper I wrote for a class. The prompt was to talk about the pros and cons of staying indefinitely in Iraq versus an immediate withdrawal. This teacher doesn't like long introductions or conclusions, so this was an interesting experience for me.
Last night, 60 Minutes aired an investigation that they did on the conviction of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman on charges of bribery. The video can be found here: http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=3870545n.
So I got an email from the Sierra Club mailing list about a new scorecard put out by the League of Conservation Voters for the first session of the 110th Congress. The link for the main site is here: http://lcv.org/scorecard/
In my Sustainability class we were discussing different theories of development and we were assigned a reading called addressing "The Subsistence Perspective." I read it and basically what it was advocating was that we abandon our Western definition of affluence as consuming as much as possible and replace it with the traditional definition of being self-sufficient.
So...what's up with humans and destroying top predators? It sounds like a bad joke, but frankly, it seems like a recurring theme in the relationships humans have with wildlife. Save a deer? Great! Save a wolf? No way!
HEY!! Floridians can rejoice that our new governor is off to a good start.
According to http://www.pewclimate.org/what_s_being_done/in_the_states/news.cfm:
"Florida Governor Signs Three Climate Change Related Executive Orders
I'm always surprised by the things that can on in this country and go by my attention completely unnoticed. I try to keep up on things, I subscribe to email updates from lots of different groups, listen to news podcasts, etc and still things just slip by. Perhaps the biggest example of this in a collective sense, is the problem of mountaintop removal mining, which just happened to be the topic of my ten page paper. The following is probably going to be long, but I'll try to be brief.
Mountaintop Removal (MTR) coal mining is a process of mining that does exactly what the name implies: it removes the tops of mountains to get at coal seams underneath. For a more in-depth explanation, go here: http://www.mountainjusticesummer.org/facts/steps.php
