Wafted Away

 

(clicking imbiggens)

My dad worked for a paper mill in the 60s, and they had a slogan painted on the wall:  "The Solution to Pollution is Dilution!"

People really believed that.

(But not my dad.)

Zippy the Pinhead is on the web HERE.

Names and Addresses

 

(Clicking Imbiggens)

"The earth is not dying, it is being killed.  And the people who are killing it have names and addresses."  ~Utah Phillips

Change, Conquer or Exploit

Excerpted from Plain and Simple:  A Woman's Journey to the Amish by Sue Bender, ©1989:

"Why is the Amish land so beautiful?" I asked one evening. "What makes it feel special? I'm a city person, Eli, and I didn't see a cow till I was twelve. I don't know where the sun sets, or how to tell which way the wind blows, or distinguish one crop from another, but I have eyes, and I trust my heart. This land is loved."

"The land is God's," Eli (Yoder) said. "It's my job, and the job of every Amish person to take of it for Him. We mustn't try to change or conquer nature or exploit the land. That would be going against God's way."

When Eli talked about the land, he was happy.

 

"Nobody had ever heard of such a thing…"

I think there was a time when people were much more in tune to the seasons, and adapted their behavior to their environment instead of trying to subdue Mother Nature.

This is an excerpt from Al Smith's autobiography Up To Now, ©1929:

A lost sport to the children of today is sleigh riding.  It is next to impossible now in New York City, except in Central Park, or here and there on the west side of the city.  Prior to 1894, no appropriation was ever made by the city for the removal of snow.  It remained on the streets, just as it does now in the country sections of the state, until the warming suns of spring melted it away.  When Colonel Waring was appointed street-cleaning commissioner by Mayor Strong in 1895, he shocked the whole community by appearing before the Board of Estimate and Apportionment  and asking for two million dollars to remove the snow after a snowstorm.  Nobody had ever heard of such a thing and it created much discussion.  Tobogganing and sleighing on hills was a popular sport.  Dover Street was probably the center of it, because there is a sharp incline from Franklin Square to Walter Street.  I remember one side of Dover Street where there were no buildings and which abutted upon the masonry work of the Brooklyn Bridge, and which, after a night's sleighing, would be left as smooth as glass.  People were not then required by ordinance to remove snow from the sidewalk.