“There are three reasons why bicycles can provide greater relief from auto pollution than almost any other transport option,” according to Mike Erickson in the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation News (June): “(1) they mostly replace short [car] trips which can produce up to three times more pollutants per mile than long trips, (2) their peak usage coincides with the ground level ozone season thereby providing relief when most needed, and (3) by substituting for autos they reduce congestion and improve the performance of other road users. Basically, the bike can remove entire automobiles from the roadway while replacing oil and gas combustion with solar and human power.”
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Words we wish we had written before the Soviet coup. Editor Michael Davis in Perspectives on the Professions (August), published at IIT: “Power did not grow out of the barrel of a gun. The guns were in fact powerless. Those with the guns–and the schools, patronage jobs, television stations, and all the other ‘levers of power’–lost to those who had little more than courage and good reasons. This was a year to remind us that, in the long run at least, we can learn from our mistakes and, having learned, act accordingly. History is not a rolling prison.”
“Hiring at Commonwealth Edison Co. falls short of reflecting Chicago’s minority work force,” writes Ted Pearson in the Chicago Reporter (July/August). “African Americans, by far the largest group of minority workers, are 33.6 percent of the city’s work force, but only 22.7 percent of the workers at Edison’s Chicago facilities. Latinos, who are 13.2 percent of workers throughout Chicago, are 9.4 percent of Edison’s Chicago workers. Other minorities, mostly Asian Americans, make up 3.2 percent of the Chicago work force, and 1.7 percent at Edison.” Similar figures apply for Cook County as a whole, where the work force is one-third minority; nevertheless “Edison’s county work force of 7,435 is 27 percent minority.”
In trying to sell the safety of a final resting place for high-level nuclear waste, the trade magazine Nuclear Industry says, “The first step is to make sure the public understands that there’s no such thing as 100 percent scientific proof. Asking geophysical models to predict the detailed structure and behavior of a site over thousands of years is scientifically unsound.” Hmmm–therefore, the only logical thing is to bury lots of plutonium there and cross our fingers, right?
