A Republican with a brain. “Ten years ago, in 1994, Republicans won control of both houses of Congress,” Senator John McCain told a Washington, D.C., forum on May 18 (ndol.org). “For one brief shining moment, we employed true fiscal restraint and eventually managed to balance the budget and even attain that which had seemed unattainable–a surplus! Now, at a time of national crisis, we have thrown caution to the wind and continue to spend, and spend, and spend–all the while cutting taxes…. Thousands of miles from here young men and women are putting everything on the line so we can be free. And what have we sacrificed? Seriously, think about it carefully. Name one thing that Congress has told the special interests and their fat-cat lobbyists to do without since this war began?”
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Who knew the Chicago River could be a wildlife refuge? “The lake mussels have been extirpated since the 1990’s by competition from the exotic zebra mussel,” write Roger Klocek of the Shedd Aquarium and Kelli Krueger of Friends of the Chicago River in Chicago Wilderness Journal (March). “Now the river serves as a refuge for the last remnant of the genetic heritage of lake mussels. With sound management, the river may stay free of the explosive growth of zebra mussels that the lake has endured.”
The dwindling list of activities considered “sustainable.” Writing in Conscious Choice (May) about the difficulties of finding a diamond whose mining didn’t involve exploiting workers or polluting the environment, Mandy Burrell suggests as a model suburban Leber Jeweler, which purchases diamonds exclusively from Canada–and then she quotes Kevin O’Reilly of the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, for whom that isn’t good enough. “It still involves digging holes in the ground. And digging holes in the ground in and of itself is not a sustainable venture.”
