By Harold Henderson
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“For 50 years, planners in this country have been saying that when people ‘come to their senses,’ they’ll realize that sprawl is bad and start using transit instead of the private automobile,” Northwestern University’s David Schulz tells Planning magazine (December). “But people have already decided that the suburbs are where they want to live, and the car is how they want to get there. If we keep waiting for them to come to their senses, we will get even more sprawl. What we could do is universal road pricing. We could equip every vehicle in the U.S. with an electronic transponder.
“Behind each oily talkshow host is a media conglomerate,” Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon remind us in Extra! Update (December)–“Time Warner (Jenny Jones); Rupert Murdoch’s Fox (Gordon Elliott); the Tribune Co. (Geraldo Rivera, Charles Perez); Viacom/Paramount (Montel Williams, Maury Povich); Gannett/Multimedia (Jerry Springer, Sally Jessy Raphael); Sony (Ricki Lake).” So where are the Republican morality crusaders? Not merely silent, but worse. “It’s quite a feat of hypocrisy for a politician like [William “Book of Virtues”] Bennett to target TV talk hosts while his Republican allies in Congress are trying to pass a telecommunications ‘reform’ bill giving unprecedented monopoly powers to the same corporations polluting the airwaves.”
You can’t always get what you want. What’s the best way to reduce people’s exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in Lake Michigan fish? Writing in BioScience (December), five researchers from the University of Wisconsin and the Great Lakes Science Center in Michigan suggest that it might be to stock more rainbow trout and fewer lake trout in the lake. Rainbow trout now average 0.39 milligrams of PCBs per kilogram of body weight; lake trout average 1.74. Unfortunately, lake trout is the native species and rainbow trout is exotic. “In Lake Michigan, two major environmental objectives have been the reestablishment of the native lake trout population and the reduction of human contaminant exposure. Ironically, in this case, two environmental goals do not seem compatible.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Carl Kock.
