Stories Published in Green Living

For $ale!!! The Grand Canyon

Green Living, May 2019

Across political aisles, Americans support the preservation of our national parks, aligning with the goal that established the National Park Service more than 100 years ago: to ensure that these lands remain in perpetuity as shared national treasures. The parks, though, are threatened as well as our national forests, wildlife refuges, monuments, says author Stephen Nash in his Grand Canyon for Sale: Public Lands versus Private Interests in the Era of Climate Change (University of California Press, 2017). Central to the destruction is human-created climate change. Other assaults are attempts to privatize and commoditize them; overgrazing; mining on sensitive lands near the parks; the growth of gateway towns; and the noise of Grand Canyon overflights by scenic airplanes and helicopters. What do all of us do? Yell in the direction of Washington, D.C.

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The Challenges of Climate Change

Green Living, April 2019

Scientists agree that the earth has warmed during the last century and that human activities are the cause. The past four years (2015–2018), in fact, are the warmest since meteorological records started about 1880. The primary cause, the greenhouse effect, is an imbalance between the Earth’s retaining solar energy and reflecting it. These factors include burning fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Deforestation, the use of aerosols, for example, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), intensify this. Ozone is still another factor. In contrast, long-term climate changes occur across thousands of years as a result of orbital position. Our responsibility: Work together to change climate change. Recall the Kenyan proverb: “The Earth . . . was not given to us by our parents. It was lent to us by our children.”

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Castle Hot Springs Reopens with Green Welcome Mat

Green Living, March 2019

“This spring is a beautiful place, surrounded with fine scenery, and if the water proves possessed of medicinal properties it will certainly be a place of resort in a few years,” wrote pioneer settler Abraham Harlow Peeples, in the Arizona Miner January 30, 1874. Castle Hot Springs did become a resort, opened by another Arizona pioneer, Frank Murphy, in 1896 for the health conscious about 50 miles from Phoenix in the Bradshaw Mountains. From here, his brother, Territorial Governor Nathan Oakes Murphy, made the first Arizona telephone call in 1902. The resort later welcomed, in January 1945, a Massachusetts naval lieutenant, John F. Kennedy, who completed a post-war rehabilitation here. The 220-acre “green-inspired” resort reopened February 1, 2019, with luxury bungalow and cabin accommodations. Come: “Take the waters.”

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Grand Canyon National Park Celebrates Centennial

Green Living, February 2019

“You cannot see the Grand Canyon in one view, as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted, but to see it you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths,” wrote John Wesley Powell in The Exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons. This year, 2019, we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Powell’s milestone 1869 journey through the mouths and labyrinths of the Grand Canyon in what is today Arizona. We also celebrate the 100th anniversary of the creation of Grand Canyon National Park, by President Woodrow Wilson, February 26, 1919. At the same time, we recognize that in celebrating the parks by even visiting them as often and as lovingly as we do, we harm them through wear. Stewarding the Grand Canyon National Park through another 100 years, then, is as challenging today as it was a century ago.

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Love Canal Legacy

Green Living, December 2018

Forty years ago, Love Canal, near Niagara Falls in New York State, was an environmental nightmare that awakened America. Approximately 22,000 tons of chemicals, stored in steel drums, buried and capped in clay from 1942 to 1953, had leaked into the adjacent working-class homes. By 1978, the released diozin, halogenated organics, chlorobenzenes, heavy metals and hazardous waste had begun to produce high incidences of heart disease, cancer, rashes, kidney failure, allergies, immune diseases, epilepsy, asthma, migraines, nephrosis, birth defects, leukemia and miscarriages. Today capped, fenced and closely monitored almost two decades following EPA remediation, the 70-acre site still contains most of the chemicals. Some positive results were Superfund legislation and our state environmental agencies. But the best outcome was the inspiration to prevent similar future events. (Thanks to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation for the Love Canal images.)

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