“All of our native plants have their own stories they’re trying to tell,” writes Robert Lonsdorf in Prairie Projections (January 1989), the newsletter of the North Branch Prairie Project. “Some take a few human generations to tell it. This unfinished work of allowing the earth to say ‘prairies’ and ‘savannas’ again is a contract of generations.”
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Another tie-up on the Ryan. “Chicagoan Lauricee Brown…says she had ten years of construction experience before applying to work on the Dan Ryan project,” writes Valerie Denney in Chicago Enterprise (January 1989). “Despite her track record, Brown, like most of the women hired, was assigned to ‘flag’ traffic past the work sites. ‘They just wanted you to stand there and look pretty for the big show,’ she says. ‘The women were told they weren’t smiling enough.’ Brown says she repeatedly asked for more highly skilled work but was told no other positions were available.” The construction companies, on the other hand, claim they can’t meet state and federal quotas because there aren’t enough qualified women.
“Every commercial nuclear power reactor [is now] a potential bomb factory,” writes Dave Kraft in NEIS News (December-January 1988-89), published by the Evanston-based Nuclear Energy Information Service. On November 18 President Reagan signed Executive Order 12656, which allows “the commandeering of uranium, plutonium, and tritium from commercial nuclear power reactors by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in cases of ‘technological’ or ‘other’ emergencies. With one stroke of the pen, the President accomplished what safe-energy activists have been attempting to accomplish for years–demonstrating that the notion of ‘Atoms for Peace’ has been a convenient fiction, and that, in fact, there exists no real distinction between the peaceful and wartime atoms that the government is willing to commit to and respect.”
“The Sox owners have a strong economic incentive to kill off Comiskey Park before its time,” writes John Pastier in Inland Architect (January/February 1989). “By doing so, they can sell their real estate, which has largely been depreciated for tax purposes, to the same tax-paying public that will build them a custom-tailored new park….Furthermore, they can triple the number of luxury suites to a total of 126, arranged in two full tiers at the new park. At a unit rent of $50,000 per season, this represents an added yearly income of more than $4 million.”
