This begins a few days of Dad traveling back to Iowa. He leaves on a friday and gets there on a Monday. He manages to write a few postcards on the way. I am off later this week on a short trip to a math conference in Gallup, NM.
Meanwhile, the oil leak has been filling up the news and the Gulf of Mexico. Everyone is busy talking about sueing and money and not about preventing more harm or how it can be cleaned up. I keep thinking back to this world of the 1940S and all the trains and buses we had, so we didn't all need to have cars. How can we change our way of thinking and do more group think instead of individual think.
But the 40's were also the years of widespread coal use--for home heating and railroad locomotives, among other things--that put amazing amounts of soot in the air. Urban air quality, with coal smoke pouring out of thousands of chimneys, was by some accounts worse in the early 20th century. Agriculture, at that time, was also pretty toxic, with mercury-based fungicides and lead-based insecticides the norm. I knew three farmers who had been orchardists in the 40's, and all three died of diseases that were probably related to their exposure to mercury and lead.
ReplyDelete