“The most significant environmental challenge today is not to build ‘consciousness,’” reports the Center for Neighborhood Technology on West North, in an Earth Day report by associate director Stephen Perkins. Over two-thirds of metro-area consumers say they would use reusable grocery bags, water-conserving shower heads, energy-conserving thermostats, and energy-efficient light bulbs. But in the case of the last three items, most of those who say they would don’t. Blacks, Latinos, and those earning under $20,000 a year are least likely to follow through on their good intentions. For instance, 67 percent of Chicagoans told pollsters that they would “pay $15 for a light bulb that lasts six years and saves $5 a year in electricity”–but only 7 percent of them actually do.
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If you hear that Forrest Claypool has “health problems” and is confined to his vacation cottage in Michigan, start worrying. “More than one person interviewed for this story compared the old Park District to the former Soviet Union,” write Maureen Ryan and David Roeder in Chicago Enterprise (May/June), “among them Erma Tranter, executive director of Friends of the Parks. Like the old Soviet system, ‘there was no accountability, no sense of needing to work hard,’ she says.”
“Most of the people I came in contact with [as an African American at the School of the Art Institute in the 1950s] were whites,” recalls Ramon Price in F Newsmagazine (February). “There weren’t a lot of blacks there and most of us there were busy integrating. You didn’t want to appear as if you were segregating yourself. Even when we would get together as a group, we would say, ‘This looks bad so why don’t you go over there.’ Looking back I think that it was most unfortunate….While we were busy trying to prove ourselves as a group of people who were open-minded, it had no effect on those who were fixed in their way of thinking.”
