Environment

Imagine walking out your front door in the morning and not having to drive to work. Imagine knowing you neighbors and having a relationship with the members of your community. Imagine sitting in an office surrounded by plants with the sun providing natural light. These dreams of a simpler life lie at the heart of environmentally sustainable development. With vision and a conscious effort to change the way we live, Columbus could reform itself into a green community.

In order for Columbus to start on the path toward sustainability, the citizens of Columbus must abandon materialistic desires and live respectfully with the natural environment. In Peter Hawken’s book The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, Hawken states, “Society must recognize that ecological principles apply absolutely to human survival, and that if we are to long endure as a world culture, or as a group of local cultures, we will have to incorporate ecological thinking into every aspect of our mores, pattern of living, and most particularly our economic institutions.”

Sometimes when I watch television or browse the shelves at the supermarket, I start to feel like the old man played by Edward G. Robinson in the movie “Soylent Green.” Although the movie takes place in some near distant future when the global environment has been pillaged and abused to the point where even the ocean is barren and the masses of people are left eating green wafers made out of recycled people, the old man, I figured, was born around 1950, which is also my birth year. I shutter to think that this could be the future-my future-our future?

The Central Ohio Greens are running two candidates for Columbus City Council this year — John McGovern and Greg Richey. The two candidates are calling for a review of the city charter to enhance participatory democracy in Columbus city government. The Green Party believes that Mayor Coleman directs the full review of the City departments with a goal of creating efficiencies and a focus on serving neighborhoods, the Council should be reviewing ways that they can better serve and represent the public interest as well.

• Call For a More Representative Council - Add District Based Positions.

• Increase the Size of Council.
• Initiate Special Elections to Fill Vacancies.
• Make Council Positions Full-Time.
• Review Use of Emergency Ordinance Enactment.
• Improved Citizen Participation.

To get involved with the Central Ohio Green Party or to volunteer to help with the City Council campaign, contact:

Hiding behind the rhetoric of free enterprise, major campaign donors to George W. Bush have reaped billions of dollars from the president’s refusal to cap wholesale electricity prices during California’s deregulation crisis. They stand to make billions more at the expense of consumers and the environment if the crisis is used as a pretext to pass upcoming federal legislation promoting fossil and nuclear fuels.

Indeed, based on fears generated by the power crisis in California, energy bills now barreling toward Congress would drill the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, lift environmental regulations on burning fossil fuels, promote new nuclear power plants and hand still more consumer and taxpayer billions to the producers of electricity.

But there’s something dreadfully wrong with this picture.

Namely: the electricity crisis in California has been a contrived, corporate-driven epic that has socked ratepayers and taxpayers with a staggering double-whammy, destabilizing a huge energy delivery system that had functioned reliably for nearly a century.

My dog Champ, a best friend for about 12½ years, died unexpectedly on Sunday (probably just into the ‘wee hours’ of Mon, 3/5), The ‘Little Booger,’ Champ, had kinda dug his stubborn little doggy toes into the Martha Walker Garden Club, the DooDah Parade, The Community Festival, AntiFest, HOT TIMES, and loads of other Community escapades. They will forever be linked to my memories of him.

I was lucky that he was around during the onset of my major depressive swings, mainly in the early Summer of ’97, when I was clueless as to what had hit me. Champ was that little pal, so totally faithful, with that unquestioning love & affection that most dogs, cats & horses have toward their humans (well, assuming that the animal was raised by a humane person). He was always there, sleeping right at my feet, depending on MY love & affection, and always needing to be fed. He was a sentient being. He was there to hang onto when so much else was unclear.

I often wonder how well I’d have hung on without him.

Once, back when I was just a young piglet, I lived with my daddy and mommy in the basement of our house on the near eastside. My dad said good-bye to me every morning before he left for work at the community college. I knew he worked there because he took me to visit a couple of times. One time a little boy there saw me and cried “Look, it’s a plig!” and another time, well, I wasn’t used to elevators so I made a little mess. Anyway, one day after the Big Guy left, I found the back basement door open and ran out into the yard. It wasn’t hard to snout the fence open.

Being the adventurous, impulsive pig that I was, I started to follow my daddy’s trail to school. Needless to say, mommy became hysterical when she saw me high-tailing it down the alley and lured me back with some apples. I shiver to think what would have happened to me if I’d become a statistic that day. Unfortunately lots of other animals think they’re doing the right thing when they leave their house, and become lost.

I also heard of a little pot-bellied pig who was wrapped in a blanket and left in field with a note, “Please take care of me.” Now there’s hope for pets in these situations.

“Anytime you have nine power plants fail in whole or in part in a 24-hour period,” says Gary Groesch, “that’s not bad luck. That’s not even bad maintenance. That’s a maintenance meltdown.”

A veteran New Orleans-based consumer activist, Groesch is talking about Entergy, the huge regional utility based there and in Mississippi. The July 23, 1999 multiple fossil burner failure Groesch describes left half a million people without power, and was sandwiched between unexpected shutdowns at two Entergy-owned commercial reactors, River Bend and Waterford 3. Grand Gulf, another radioactive Entergy property, earned the nickname “Grand Goof” from its massive cost overruns.

Nonetheless, Entergy and AmerGen, a Philadelphia-based multi-national partnership, want to buy as many as they can of the 103 U.S. reactors currently to licensed to operate. They want to string them together in “McNuke” reactor chains and operate them in cut-rate style, with national pools of technical trouble-shooters.

I, Iggy the Pot-Belly, was saddened to read about the mass beaching of whales in the Bahamas recently. My Daddy told me that pigs are related to whales in a pretty direct way – not that all of us aren’t somehow related from that single organism many years ago. I had to think that whales, who are considered very intelligent mammals, would have to have some really good reason to purposely throw their bodies on the beach to die. I’ve heard of it happening before. I thought maybe there was a message they were trying to send to the rest of us on shore.

The scientific name for whales and dolphins is Cetacea. I guess cetaceans are like pigs, who rose out of the water sometime during “evolution” actually became mammals and could breathe air, but instead of becoming elephants or hippos or wild boars, they went back in the ocean to live. I’d like to believe that was a good decision – except for all the pollution humans have dumped into the water.

Dear Iggy,

Greetings! My name is Floyd. I am a Chinese Water Dragon living in mid-central Ohio. I have quickly become a big fan of yours after reading only two articles written by you in the Columbus Free Press. I cannot begin to tell you how refreshing it is to read an animal rights column written by an animal, for the welfare of all animals!

I have an important animal rights issue to tell you about myself. It is an issue I rarely see anything written about, as well as one of great concern to my parents and myself: The care of reptiles being domesticated in these northern regions which normally belong to warner desert or jungle habitats.

The very definition of a “swing” state, Ohio has a record of backing presidential winners. The state’s varied population and economic base reflect a rough approximation of the nation as a whole, and its politics typically reflect national trends. Though every statewide elected office has been held by Republicans for several years, President Clinton still won the state in both of his elections. Ohio’s majority swings from one party to another, depending on the strength of the candidate and the hot issues of the day. This is similar to the split evidenced currently in national politics, where the White House and Congress are held by different parties. In many ways, the fledgling Green movement here reflects national trends, as well.

In the early 1990’s the Greens were a growing force with a strong core organized around opposition to a planned low-level radioactive waste dump backed by then-Governor, now-U.S. Senator George Voinovich. Though the nuclear dump was defeated, the Greens’ momentum for further political or social activism foundered on the rocks of political controversy. The group splintered over the 1996 election and what to do with Candidate Nader.