“The retreat brings people together, builds community in the forest, gets participants outside and off their screens, and uses nature sustainably to heal and inspire minds and souls,” stated Great Mountain Forest Executive Director Michael Zafros. Retreat registration closes on July 30.
It is “disappointing” that while there will be some drainage improvements to Great Barrington’s Main Street from the reconstruction project, there aren’t more significant changes. He expressed concern about a large stormwater pipe that releases into the river, near the skateboard park off Bridge Street.
---Landscape designer Craig Okerstrom-Lang
Now, as never before, we have an opportunity to come together as a global society to wage peace in the name of survival…and beyond survival, prosperity. It will take ordinary people like you and me acting each in our own locales.
The environmental health of the Berkshires and what people can do to maintain it will be the emphasis when Canon Stephen Paul Booth discusses if there are any green spaces left in his talk, “Culture, Community, and Conservation in the Housatonic Valley” on Sunday, April 19, 4 p.m. at The Lenox Library.
Can anyone doubt that climate change is real and upon us, already melting the glaciers, acidifying the oceans, and setting off droughts, floods and storms of Biblical proportions? The question is, now that we are aware, what are we to do?
It is time that we as a generation of young people wake up and realize what is in store for us, because there will come a time when we will be called upon to provide answers. People will ask us how we can end suffering and create better lives, we will have to answer.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 specifically exempts oil and gas hydrofracking from the Act under the provisions of the Halliburton Amendment, so-named because Dick Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton, and, in 2005, Chairman of the National Energy Policy Development Group, advocated the amendment. Under its terms, EPA is barred from regulating any activities associated with well construction, fluids injected undergound into the drilling well, and other activities at the wellpad.
Today, wheat feeds billions of people and animals around the world. It has ushered in major social changes and has been a vital part of civilization. A global wheat failure would be a disaster that few nations could survive, even for a year.
"I’m on our Conservation Commission and we all feel strongly that this is going to have a really negative impact on a wonderful little community where people are there because they value the treasures we have here from an environmental point of view."
-- Judy Williams of Plainfield, attending the Kinder Morgan open house at Berkshire Community College
Our present reality is not just that we are on the fast track to climate catastrophe. It is also that we now have an economic and political system that isn’t working too well for most people.
The general public has not been included in the development of energy projects, and in the words of the Conservation Law Foundation, “formulation of and negotiations around [energy] proposals have been conducted almost completely behind closed doors.”
Edge correspondents Victor Feldman, the author of this story, and his Great Barrington Waldorf High School colleague Evan Seitz will be at the People’s Climate March Sunday. They will be filing their observations of the event on our Twitter feed, @BerkEdge, that is displayed on our home page as “This Just In.” On Sunday, for the duration of the demonstration, our Twitter feed will be titled “Climate March.” Please follow their accounts.
