“Black lives matter!” became the rallying cry among activists calling attention to the recent police shootings of black citizens in Ohio and across the country.

Demonstrators against police brutality took advantage of the busiest holiday shopping day of the year by staging a “die-in” at Easton mall on December 20, the Saturday before Christmas. Sixty or so activists gathered in the Easton mall food court, unfurled a banner proclaiming “Black Lives Matter,” and struck death poses on the floor.

That same day, the usual holiday hustle at the Beavercreek Walmart was disrupted as nearly 200 protesters and activists took to the aisles to demand justice for the late John Crawford III, a 22-year old black man shot and killed by the local police department earlier this year, as reported by Reilly C. Dixon on columbusfreepress.com. A dozen protestors were arrested and charged with obstructing official business and criminal trespass.

The powerful global response to the terror attack on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo must now face a terrifying reality: It’s a horrible thing when an organ of free speech is assaulted and journalists die.

It will be an apocalyptic thing when it happens to an atomic reactor and whole continents are irradiated, with children first to suffer, a death toll in the millions and eco-economic impacts beyond calculation.

For decades our global security apparatus and its attendant media mavens have pretended that the radioactive elephant in the room of global terror does not exist. But after Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, 9/11, Charlie Hebdo and so much more, a terrible reality has become all too clear.

We have seen four American-designed reactors explode and three melt at a single Japanese site. A severely escalated thyroid cancer rate has followed, with more health disasters yet to come. Some two dozen sibling GE reactors currently operate in the U.S.

In the wake of the Ohio Republican legislature (with a few Democrats) passing Senate Bill 310 in June of 2014 – a bill that put Ohio’s renewable and energy efficiency programs on hold – American Electric Power and Duke Energy have followed up by petitioning the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) for ratepayer bailouts for their oldest and dirtiest coal plants. FirstEnergy, with its base in Northern Ohio, is petitioning for a bailout for its Davis-Besse atomic reactor on Lake Erie as well as its polluting coal plants. These bailouts, called power purchase agreements, would be a line item on electric bills that no costumer could avoid, even if they’re buying power from a different company than the one that is delivering power to the customer’s home.

AEP and Duke kicked the process off and both have separate cases before the PUCO seeking to secure riders for power purchase agreements for two almost 60-year-old coal plants – Kyger Creek in Ohio and Clifty Creek in Indiana. See the Sierra Club Coal Campaign’s fact sheet on Kyger Creek as an example of how dirty and inefficient these coal plants are.

The Ohio Rights Group (ORG) proudly continues its mission of support for the medical, therapeutic and industrial uses of the cannabis plant in Ohio. The group still enthusiastically supports the Ohio Cannabis Rights Amendment (OCRA), which would codify those uses as patient rights into the Ohio constitution.

Although the number of signatures collected so far was insufficient to make the fall 2014 ballot, the proposed amendment remains viable and is still being circulated to gather the 301,105 signatures of registered Ohio voters now necessary for ballot placement. The total count for signatures was lowered from 385,247 following the recent gubernatorial election in which the turnout used to calculate this requirement was much lower than in 2010. The ORG has so far collected approximately 150,000 signatures for the OCRA, roughly one-third to one half of those required. The law governing ballot initiatives also mandates signatures from 44 counties of Ohio’s 88 counties to exceed 5 percent of that county’s gubernatorial vote. This benchmark has been met for 30 Ohio counties, or almost 70 percent of that requirement.

Central Ohio is relentlessly expanding outward, leaving behind areas of undeveloped and developed land to essentially waste away; and, if no one acts, a future of super sprawl is in the cards.
The critical question is: Will regional planners take the necessary steps to reign in a metropolis once referred to as “Cowtown?”
The American population is trending toward greater numbers of young adults and retirees (Baby Boomers). Experts say this will spur demand for more and more single-occupant dwellings.
Taking this into consideration is the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission or MORPC which predicts Columbus and its seven surrounding counties could expand another 480 square miles by 2050, adding 500,000 residents and 300,000 housing units. For perspective, 150 square miles (95,000 acres) of urbanized land was added from 2000 to 2010.
The numbers are alarming, and so are the consequences: neighborhoods without community, increased dependence on foreign oil, destruction of natural resources, rising taxes to pay for infrastructure and community services, and the stratification of class and race.