Category Archives: Activism

Lame-duck Lofton cranks the same old scratched wax cylinder

After he gave his goodbye speech, I wished him happiness in Myrtle Beach and thought maybe he’d make a graceful exit. Nope, he’s still cranking the Edison phonograph on the same old scratched wax cylinder. Here he is last week responding to James Wright and dozens of other people in the same thread to which I later posted It’s an opportunity. In Lofton’s case, he’s still fixated on the losing proposition of biomass fuels. -jsq
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2011 08:59:49 -0400

James:


© BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons.
Thanks so much for sharing this and for your continued strong support of our client’s green renewable energy project. In addition to assisting the country in reducing our consumption of middle eastern fuel and improving the environment, this project will provide a much needed economic impact for landowners of every race, and the Industrial Authority will assist in the efforts underway to assist local farmers. Google “benefits of biomass electricity,”

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April LAKE meeting: The owl returns to Valdosta.

We’ve rotated around the north end of Lowndes County; time to rotate down to the west of Valdosta.
Monthly LAKE Meeting
When: 5:30 PM, Tuesday 5 April 2011
Where: Heidi’s Brooklyn Deli
1407 W Hill Ave Ste 1
Valdosta, GA 31601
(229) 241-9944
That’s on Hill Ave just east of St. Augustine Road. They’re open until 9PM, and they’d be happy to push a few tables together for us.
Restaurant review and source of the picture.

Help cover food, water, transportation, incarceration, solar energy, biomass, and regular local government meetings: you never know when news will be made!

If you follow the LAKE blog, On the LAKE Front, which you can also see through the LAKE facebook page, you know what we cover, from protesters to private prisons to gardening, all of which turn out to be related. What else do you want to investigate? You can be LAKE, too! Continue reading →

Private prisons and AZ-style anti-immigrant bills in Georgia

While a private prison is top of the news, you’d probably never know what it has to do with this if you didn’t have the Internet, 8,000 Rally against Georgia Anti-Immigrant Bills, by Gloria Tatum in Georgia Progressive News:
Over 8,000 activists rallied outside the State Capitol on Thursday, March 24, 2011, to show their outrage and disgust over Georgia’s Arizona-type immigration bills.

As previously reported by Atlanta Progressive News, legislation, HB 87, has already passed the State House. A similar bill, SB 40, has also passed the State Senate.

While the vast majority of protesters at the Capitol were Hispanic, opposition to the bills came from a wide spectrum of constituents including immigrants, students, religious groups, peace groups, veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, Asian groups, GLBTQI activists, labor, artists, musicians, business owners, elected officials, and others.

What’s this got to do with private prisons? Continue reading →

Valdostans protest biomass –VSU Spectator

Molly Duet writes in the VSU newspaper today:
Protestors wearing respirator masks held signs reading “Biomass? No!” in front of the Valdosta City Hall building on Thursday. Members of the Wiregrass Activists for Clean Energy, the VSU student organization Students Against Violating the Environment, and other concerned Valdosta citizens showed up to protest the construction of the Wiregrass Power: Biomass Electric Generating Plant.

“We already have solar power resources in place that we could be using and I feel like money should be directed towards that,” Ivey Roubique, vice-president of the Student Geological Society, said. “It wouldn’t be good for the community and even though I’m in college here it still matters.”

The Spectator article quotes from two speakers for whom LAKE happens to have video, linked below. Continue reading →

Why? There’s speculation about money — Stewart Emmett (?) @ VCC 24 March 2011

When public officials ignore objections for long enough, eventually people start speculating as to their motives, in this case about the proposed biomass plant. Here’s the video:


Regular meeting of the Valdosta City Council, 24 February 2011.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

-jsq

Solar and wind: All that is lacking is the political will

Mike Childs wrote in the Guardian on 27 March 2011, Our green energy potential is huge, but gets little support: The crisis at Fukushima calls into question our nuclear power policy
Nuclear power is a gamble we don’t need to take. Studies show that the UK can meet its energy needs and tackle climate change without resorting to nuclear power or burning fossil fuels – all that is lacking is the political will.
Studies like this one for Scotland and this one for the whole world.

And the U.K. is way north of Georgia. Georgia gets a lot more sunlight and has plenty of wind off the coast. All that is lacking here, too, is the political will.

If Atlanta won’t lead, why not Valdosta and Lowndes County?

-jsq

The right of students to breathe clean air –Erin Hurley of SAVE @ VCC 24 March 2011

Erin Hurley provided the very model of how to give a speech:
I’m the president of Students Against Violating the Environment at VSU. I’m here representing 200+ members of SAVE, that consists of students, faculty, community members. We are deeply concerned with environmental issues and we are networking together to make this city a more humane and sustainable community for future generations.

As a student, I feel I have the right to be able to breathe clean air at the college I attend. With this biomass plant possibly being built here, the future for generations to come are in jeopardy, and we want to protect our fellow and future students’ health.

Please take into consideration the future health of this university and its community, and don’t sell grey water to the proposed biomass plant.

Here’s the video:


Erin Hurley, President of SAVE, Students Against Violating the Environment, speaking at
Regular meeting of the Valdosta City Council, 24 March 2011,
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia.

Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

She said who she was, who she represented, how many, what they were for, what they wanted, quickly enough that attention didn’t waver, slowly and loudly enough to be heard, and briefly enough to transcribe, with pathos, logic, and politic. Even the mayor looked up at “As a student….”

-jsq

Gigabit Internet in Chattanooga

If we’re going to copy Chattanooga about something, how about this: 133 US cities now have their own broadband networks by Nate Anderson in Ars Technica:
Such publicly owned networks can offer services that incumbents don’t, such as the 1Gbps fiber network in Chattanooga, Tennessee, run by the government-owned electric power board. And they sometimes have more incentive to reach every resident, even in surrounding rural areas, in ways that might not make sense for a profit-focused company.
According to this map of Community Broadband Networks by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, quite a few small cities in south Georgia have municipal cable networks:

All three of Moultrie, Thomasville, and Cairo use CNS, whose brochure for Moultrie says you can get:

DownstreamUpstreamMonthly Cost
5 Mbps1 Mbps$29.95
12 Mbps2 Mbps$35.95
22 Mbps3 Mbps$49.95
Now that’s not 1 Gbps, but it’s a darn sight faster than the allegedly 3Mbps AT&T DSL!

If Moultrie, Thomasville, and Cairo, and yes, Doerun can do this, why can’t Valdosta and Hahira?

And then how about add on a wireless network to reach the rest of us rural folk?

Maybe then we wouldn’t be the Internet backwoods.

-jsq

Thanks to George Rhynes for the district number label idea –Tim Carroll @ VCC 24 March 2011

A small example of following up on citizen suggestions, but who knows? maybe it’s a sign of much more to come. In the comments by council members at the end of the 24 March 2011 Valdosta City Council session, member Tim Carroll thanked George Rhynes for his suggestion to put district numbers on council members’ name plates so citizens could more easily tell which was their council member. Caroll raised his plate up so everyone could see it has a number on it, too, now. Other Council members also commented on various things.


Regular meeting of the Valdosta City Council, 24 March 2011,
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

George suggested the district number labels on 20 January 2011.

-jsq

It’s an opportunity –John S. Quarterman

“Like a burned-over longleaf pine, we can come back from this recession greener than ever, if we choose wisely.”

Here is my response to James R. Wright’s questions about jobs and priorities. -jsq

It’s an opportunity for those of us who are not currently searching for our next meal to help those who need jobs, and thereby to help ourselves, so they don’t turn to crime. Like a burned-over longleaf pine, we can come back from this recession greener than ever, if we choose wisely.

Switchgrass seemed like a good idea five or ten years ago, but there is still no market for it.

Meanwhile, local and organic agriculture is booming, and continued to boom right through the recession.

Not just strictly organic by Georgia’s ridiculously restrictive standards for that, but also less pesticides for healthier foods, pioneered as nearby as Tifton. That’s two markets: one for farmers, stores, and farmers’ markets in growing and distributing healthy food, and one for local banks in financing farmers converting from their overlarge pesticide spraying machinery to plows and cultivators.

Similarly, biomass may have seemed like a good idea years ago, but with Adage backing out of both of its Florida biomass plants just across the state line, having never built any such plant ever, the biomass boom never happened.

Meanwhile, our own Wesley Langdale has demonstrated to the state that

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