“Chicago has, and is, an environment,” insists city Department of Environment commissioner Henry Henderson in Urban Naturalist (January-February). “It may look and feel different from unpopulated wilderness, which is usually associated with ‘ecology,’ but our Urban Environment is morally, ethically and in every other way an environment, and is due no less care, respect and stewardship than a redwood forest.”
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“Utility lobbyists are drooling at the possibility that the Citizens Utility Board (CUB), long a pesky thorn in their sides, will be considerably weakened” in the Republican-dominated state legislature this year, reports Rich Miller in Illinois Politics (December). “I asked several such lobbyists what they thought of CUB’s prospects in the new, potentially hostile legislative environment, and the responses were nearly identical: mischievous laughter.” One less partisan reason, according to Miller, is that CUB doesn’t do business as usual: “Legislators…prefer to let interest groups hammer out the deals on intricate subjects–that way, everyone gets something, and they don’t have to worry about one group or another targeting them for defeat. But until fairly recently, CUB all but refused to engage in the art of compromise, which meant legislators often had to stick their necks out one way or another–not their favorite pastimes.”
“We are taught not to see the interrelationships between ideas, tasks, goals, struggles, history, and peoples,” writes Michael Warr of the Guild Complex in New Art Examiner (January). “I ran up against this at the first literary event I organized at the former Guild Books, over six years ago. It was a celebration of Black History Month, and in addition to inviting African-American poets to recite their work as part of the tribute, we also included poets of Jewish, Mexican, and Puerto Rican descent. There was confusion. The African-American poets wanted to know why white poets were reading during an African-American history celebration, and the white poets wanted to know what they were doing there. Our point was that African-American history cannot really be separated from American History, in fact, the role of the African American has been and remains central to the economic, social, political, and psychological makeup of the United States.”
