I had other plans for The Friday Photo today but spent more time than I expected crafting my comments to the EPA about proposed carbon pollution rules for existing power plants and why Plant Washington isn’t an existing source of greenhouse gases. The deadline was today at 5:00 p.m.
My comments included this:
“On a sunshine soaked afternoon in September 2013 while Power4Georgians was announcing its intent to request permit extensions from the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, crews hired by the current land owners were preparing the proposed plant site for planting timber. Growing timber is an investment in time and money, as my family knows from timber management on our family farm. Growing trees requires patience as it takes several years before even a thinning of the growth is necessary, with significant harvesting sometimes requiring 20 years of patient waiting and watching.”
Just like growing timber, fighting Plant Washington has required time and patience, and some watching and waiting. The investment for those of us who steeled ourselves and stood up in our community has been worth the effort. We won’t have to wait decades for the return on our investment.
I posted this photo on January 25, 2012 after Cobb EMC abandoned Plant Washington and resigned itself to a likely $15M loss on the proposed coal plant it had bankrolled with co-op owner/member dollars.
Almost 6.5 years after it was announced as a “done deal,” Power4Georgians has asked for a permit extension for this because P4G chose to delay construction.
Today is the last day to tell the Georgia EPD that Power4Georgians has had plenty of time.
We’re all living on the same small spinning piece of real estate sharing the limited water and air that has to sustain all of us. Every one of us have skin in this game.
April is National Poetry Month. Rural and Progressive is posting favorite poems shared by writers and poets. Today’s was contributed by Raven Waters.
While Traveling to Montana by Train
a family free verse, by Janisse, Raven and Skye
Twelve degrees outside the glass tube
a lot of snow
trees in perfect rows
snow sculpted by the wind
foot tracks of deer, antelope, and other things
north country does not follow me home
pockets of farms close to the border
I toboggan down the stairs
blue shadows of snowdrifts
uninterrupted horizons for the eye
one coyote at dawn
morning light
Raven Waters submitted this family poem. Raven is a student and farmer in south Georgia. His wife is author Janisse Ray, who shares farm duties with Raven and their daughter Skye. Janisse’s work will also included on Thursday, April 24.
April is National Poetry Month. Poet Dan Corrie shared this poem with Rural and Progressive.
Table Grace: For the Good, the True and the Beautiful
Seed of the three is
the True – world itself’s
soon-entangling particulars,
like the fence-line lost
in thickets of blackberries
favored by a phoebe.
From that first, seeds buried
in the mind might
root deeper, branch higher –
single-double direction
of the Good, of the Beautiful –
of the merely here
harvested by my noticing.
Plum’s restorative taste
rounding around seed
might guide us to be
a health of seeds
opening, rising,
branching into falling
to seeds to deeds to seeds –
from felt meaninglessness
to meaning’s feeling.
Let each of our choices
root and rise, like the giving
of pears for the table
and mulberries for the waxwings.
Let our living
be ownerless fields
grown thick with our thanks.
–by Daniel Corrie, originally published in the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review
Dan Corrie birding at the coast
This poem emerged from my wife’s and my adventures in exploring relocalization in rural South Georgia.
Six years ago, we moved from living in Midtown Atlanta to settle on my wife’s inherited family farm in Tift County, an hour and a half north of Florida. One of our key concerns about the move was whether we’d be able to eat as we’d grown accustomed with all the choices available in Atlanta, including buying from local farms we had toured where we’d met and even become friends with some of the farmers and knew they didn’t use pesticides.
A key persuasive factor was that a member of the board of Georgia Organics lived in Tifton. We telephoned her, and she told us of her local volunteer efforts devoted to nurturing a true farmers market, as opposed to what so many such markets have been: a cross between a flea market and an outlet for venders to resell produce grown nowhere near and with no assurance of how it was grown.
After we moved down to the farm, we enjoyed joining our new friend in devoting time to the farmers market. In that process, the three of us also organized the first South Georgia Growing Local and Sustainable conference, which attracted about 60 people to the Tifton event. The conference has gone on to be held in various parts of South Georgia, organized by other friends who care about healthy, locally raised food, with the events attracting from one to two hundred participants. And Tifton’s farmers market has grown, with other friends in the community emerging to run it and to shape it and improve what our group has incorporated as the Wiregrass Farmers Market. The market has come to be headquartered at the beautiful Georgia Museum of Agriculture in partnership with the University of Georgia. The market has come to be a place where people come not only to buy food but to run into friends and enjoy visiting with each other.
Around our inherited house, my wife planted a garden, as well as sixty-some edible trees and bushes. Some of our Tifton friends began a slow food club, in which different couples or individuals will host a pot-luck at their home and everyone attending puts together dishes with local ingredients. They might grow some of the ingredients themselves, buy from the farmers market, or buy or trade or simply be given ingredients from other friends and neighbors.
In my poem, I refer to three values highly prized by Plato: the good, the true and the beautiful. While Plato thought in philosophical terms of eternal, perfect forms, my poem reflects my own personal bias for the true in terms of the real, at-hand world where the particulars matter, such as which farmer raised what we eat and how much carbon went into transporting our food during our time of global climate change. When circles of people find fun in working together while paying attention to nature’s ways, the good and the beautiful surely can follow.
This letter was submitted to newspapers sold in the Washington EMC area:
Um, no. Not really
There is a critical error of fact in a press release issued by Power 4 Georgians last week. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has NOT stated that Plant Washington is exempt from any of the proposed carbon, or greenhouse gas (GHG) rules proposed by the agency, for existing or new power plants. In fact, it has become even clearer that, if built, Plant Washington will be subject to carbon pollution standards. The only question is how protective those standards will be.
Plant Washington’s developer Power4Georgians has requested yet another extension from Georgia’s Environmental Protection Agency for his dinosaur-fuel based project. Southern Environmental Law Center attorney John Suttles commented that, “If Power 4 Georgians commenced construction a year ago like they said, they wouldn’t need additional permit extensions.”
Power4Georgians is choosing to delay construction.
With no announced Power Purchase Agreements or billions in required financing announced, of course the project requires extensions. If the project was fully funded and customers were waiting for power, wouldn’t the plant already be under construction?
The arguments against Plant Washington continue to grow larger and stronger with time. More energy producers are switching to renewable fuel sources due to reduced costs. Ratepayers are demanding more power produced by sunshine and wind. Major financiers have abandoned coal projects. A similarly speculative project, the Longview Power Plant in Maidsville, West Virginia, began operations in December 2011 and filed for bankruptcy less than two years later. Meanwhile, ratepayers for power plants like the Prairie State Energy Campus have seen their monthly bills go up by as much as 51 percent due to the soaring costs of coal plants.
We’ve never needed Plant Washington in the first place. If you don’t believe me, drive out to the 10 megawatt solar farm in Davisboro and see where Cobb EMC in Marietta is buying clean, affordable electricity generated right here in our own community.
Katherine Cummings
FACE Executive Director
Washington EMC owner/member
Crop mob– A group of landless and wannabe farmers who come together to build and empower communities by working side by side.
You don’t have to be landless or a wannabe farmer to support farmers who are committed to sustainable farming. You also don’t have to know anything about farming or gardening (that would be me).
You will need a decent pair of work gloves, sturdy outdoor work shoes/boots, a hat, some bottled water, sunscreen, and a willingness to get your hands dirty for a few hours. In exchange you’ll help a small farmer who needs additional help during a critical part of the growing season.
My friend, and organic farmer, Lyle Lansdell, is hosting a Crop Mob at her farm, Forest Grove Farm in Sandersville, Washington County, this Sunday, April 13. Her passion for good health and good food inspired her to dig into (no pun intended) organic farming after retiring from a public health career at Chapel Hill. Lyle has also continued the careful restoration of her family’s 1850s era home, Forest Grove, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Lyle told me when she decided to raise and sell lamb, she committed to making sure she knew exactly how the lambs would be butchered and processed. She chose a processor after walking through the entire facility and talking with the owner. She sells at the newly renamed and relocated Green Market in Milledgeville on Saturdays and the Mulberry Street Market in Macon on Wednesday afternoons. You might also find her at the Sandersville Farmer’s Market on Wednesday mornings in the summer.
If you’ve wanted to show a child where food really comes from, and how much work it takes to grow that food, bring them along to help. You’ll leave with a little dirt under your fingernails and a craving for ripe, red, sun-warmed tomatoes.
Rural and Progressive tends to lean a little, or a lot, to the Left when it comes to politics. Just last weekend I launched a new shiny Facebook page for Rural and Progressive. You can find a link to it and my Tweets on the right side of this post. I’m using both for things that I come across or are sent to me. I hope you’ll join the conversation in either or both places.
For some time now I’ve wondered what the intent is behind putting the words “in memory of” on vehicles.
Did the driver buy the car in honor of the deceased? Are they driving in memory of the deceased?
When you trade the vehicle in, is there any type of decal removal etiquette? Does selling it mean the period of mourning is over?
And what about putting this type of thing other places? When a member of the wellness center I belong to died, a simple note was taped to the door reading, “In Memory of Jane Doe.” What was now “in memory of”? The entire building? Just the door?
What does it say about our culture that we have to put decals about a death on things like cars and doors and tailgates? Who benefits, besides the decal companies?
North Carolina artist Kathy Clark is calling for the tradition of Ash Wednesday to also be Coal Ash Wednesday. She is encouraging people to reduce their use of electricity as much as possible today as a reminder of the damage coal ash continues to do in the Dan River.
Clark is urging people to use a bare minimum or no electricity from 7:00-7:30 tonight. Whether you observe Lent or not, this is an excellent opportunity to consider how you use electricity (and other fuel) and how you can reduce your consumption. It is time to get some religion about energy use in our country.
Arizona’s Republican United States Senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, are joining the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and major corporations and calling for Gov Jan Brewer to reject SB 1062, a bill designed to allow discrimination against gay people (and who knows who else) based on the religion of the person who feels a need to discriminate. The uproar and pushback are so strong that four major companies are reconsidering decisions to bring thousands of jobs to the state. Arizona hobbled itself over establishing a Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday years ago, and there is already plenty of talk about moving the 2015 Super Bowl out of the state if Brewer signs the bill.
Arizona’s bad idea is also a bad idea for Georgia, and there are two bills in the General Assembly that would hurt our state by legalizing discrimination based on the “preservation of religious freedom.” The House version of this hate bill masquerading as religious freedom is HB 1023. The Senate’s version is SB 377.
I was stunned to find Rep Mack Jackson’s name on the House version of this bill. Mack, a Democrat who serves District 128 where I live, is the minster of St. James Christian Fellowship in Tennille.
My first questions to him were, “Have you talked to Dr Lowery about this? Would Dr. King support you on this?”
I value religious freedom and the separation of church and state. But there’s a big difference between religious freedom and legalizing discrimination based on one’s personal faith.
What lies at the heart of this bill is legalizing discrimination against gay people. In addition to a business choosing to refuse service to gay people, they could also discriminate against Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, …….. How about overweight and obese people if your faith deplores people who are more than a healthy weight (that could reduce revenues for businesses in the South where we seem to have an epidemic of weight issues)?
It is stunning that in the state where Dr King is buried, and Civil Rights champions Dr Joseph Lowery and Rep John Lewis call home, any state legislator would put their name on a bill like HB 1023/SB 377.
Crossover Day in the General Assembly is Monday, March 3rd. That means you need to act now! You can sign this petition,contact your legislators, or do both.
As this morning has progressed Mack replied to my text message saying he took his name off the bill (it still appears in the online version). A couple of hours later he posted on Facebook that he didn’t sponsor this bill. Now, as I am posting here, he has texted me saying, “My name was on the bill but was taken off in the clerk’s office after it was brought to my attention the effect of this bill. It is never my intention to discriminate against anyone. I did not sponsor the bill.”
Thank you for stepping back Rep Jackson. You and others under the Gold Dome will better serve your constituents if you fully understand the impact legislation will have on individuals, families, businesses, and our state before filing bills. Our job is to hold you accountable.
The Atlantic covers a Brookings Institute report on income inequality in 50 of America’s cities. Atlanta leads the list.
Got water? Centerville resident Bill Ferguson says SB 213, the Flint River bill, isn’t a good idea. He explains why in today’s Macon Telegraph.
Rep Mike Dudgeon’s HB 874, which would have made solar power much more affordable for Georgians, has just about seen the sun set on it. Dave Williams at the Atlanta Business Chronicle covers it.
Freshly sworn in to the Georgia House of Representatives, Rep Sam Moore, R-Macedonia, thinks:
Would it be a good idea to remove coal ash waste from places where there is groundwater and surface water contamination? “You don’t need to be Joe Chemist to figure that out.” says Avner Vengosh at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University.
Remember that little ice event we had in Middle Georgia last week? As bucket trucks streamed into Washington County, preparations were underway to house approximately 25 linemen in the wellness center at Washington County Regional Hospital.
While the storm was making its way east towards us, Lower Oconee Hospital in Glenwood closed its doors. That’s the fourth small hospital to close while Governor Deal has been in office. Fifteen to twenty more are at risk for closure, but much-needed federal dollars are being turned away by Deal and his supporters in the General Assembly.
Beth O’Connor, the Virginia Rural Health Association’s Executive Director wrote in the Roanoke Times yesterday, “Hospitals are not businesses. If someone goes to a hair salon, grocery, clothing store or movie theater, but does not have money, they will not receive service. But federal regulations require hospitals to treat anyone who walks through the Emergency Room door – regardless of ability to pay.”
O’Connor goes on to point out that Virginia’s legislators are turning away $5M per day of federal funding that her state’s small hospitals need. Those federal dollars are tax dollars paid for by hard-working Virginians. But Virginia’s tax dollars are going to other states.
So are ours. Georgia’s tax dollars are also going to other states where leaders know Medicaid Expansion makes sense for the health of small hospitals and the people they serve.
And now there are efforts underway to allow a part-time legislature to have the power to fix Georgia’s already hobbled healthcare system.
Governor Deal could take action right now, today, and direct the tax dollars we’ve already paid, to come back to Georgia. Instead of taking the long view that stretches beyond November’s election, Governor Deal refuses to help small hospitals and the 1 Million rural citizens who count on them every day.
What will happen when Governor Deal hits the campaign trail outside Atlanta and finds it littered with closed hospitals? Will the four counties now without a hospital be campaign stops? Will he be met at campaign rallies in rural Georgia by already angry teachers and recently unemployed hospital healthcare professionals?
customers were waiting for power, wouldn’t the plant already be under construction?
to the 10 megawatt solar farm in Davisboro and see where Cobb EMC in Marietta is buying clean, affordable electricity generated right here in our own community.
Crop mob
