Plant Washington Resources Pro And Con

We've had a number of responses to our interview with Altamaha Riverkeeper President Deborah Sheppard last weekend concerning the proposed coal burning Plant Washington in Washington County, GA. The local group opposing the plant is called Fall Line Alliance For A Clean Environment (FACE). You can reach them at 478-553-9151. GreenLaw is another Georgia advocacy group who opposes new coal fired plants in Georgia. They can be reached online at green-law.org.

The EMC cooperatives who want to build the plant also make their case for energy efficiency and "cleaner" coal technology and their reasons for building the plant at their advocacy site power4georgians.com. We encourage you to educate yourself from a variety of sources. Sustainable Georgia will continue to follow events concerning Plant Washington going forward.

Altamaha Riverkeeper Opposes Plant Washington, Record Drought Continues, and The Balanescu Quartet This Weekend On Sustainable Georgia

One of the great challenges before us as a civilization is how to come up with a way to fuel our machines in ways that don’t despoil the environment, compromise our immune systems, or bankrupt our economy. That’s a tough nut to crack, and just because the price of gasoline has dropped to under two dollars a gallon does not mean that we can forget about the challenge. For example, if you were designing and building an electricity-generating plant in 2008 would you be building one that burns coal to accomplish that?

On Georgia Earth News this week we feature the return of Pierre Howard to the helm of the Georgia Conservancy, bankrupt developers winning court fights along the coast, and positive changes in green building standards. Isla Earth brings word of sustainable house trailers in Mississippi. We’ll check in with Altamaha Riverkeeper Executive Director Deborah Sheppard about a controversial coal-fired energy plant slated for Washington County and it’s possible effects on the Oconee Watershed, a watershed currently suffering the effects of a drought that has water levels across the state at record lows . In spite of it all, we hope you have much to be thankful this thanksgiving week, and that Sustainable Georgia is one more of those things.

This week’s Sustainable Georgia Shout Out goes to the Center For A Sustainable Coast, whose Executive Director David Kyler took us to task this week in an email, complaining that we're giving short shrift to the potential for wind energy generation off of the Georgia Coast. We’ll take that issue up in a future program. The Center For A Sustainable Coast, based in St. Simons Island, has fought coastal development, and has fought offshore oil drilling off the east coast. This past Spring, Common Cause honored Kyler and the Center as part of their annual Democracy Awards. Like Common Cause, The Center for A Sustainable Coast is dedicated to holding those in power accountable. While their latest battle against the Cumberland Harbour was lost in the courts this week, as we noted in Earth News, the Center For A Sustainable Coast will continue to fight to protect the tidal marshes of the Georgia Coast.

Our recycled music this week is from the Balanescu Quartet.

Recycled Cars, Green Cemeteries, Frog Watchers and Joni Mitchell This Weekend on Sustainable Georgia

Junkyards, scrapyards, auto salvage yards--You might not think so, but they were recycling before recycling was cool. In fact, automobiles are recycled at a rate higher than paper, plastic, aluminum, glass or electronic goods. This week on Sustainable Georgia we talk with Steve Levetan, Senior Vice President of Pull-A-Part, a ten-state automobile recycling operation. Levetan, whose family started in the scrap iron business in Atlanta in 1919, has worked for nearly 40 years in business and in public policy to create solid waste policies in Georgia that have left us with less clutter and a more pleasing environment to look at. For that and more, Levetan was named the Keep Georgia Beautiful Man of The Year. We'll talk with him about recycling, solid waste, and the future of the automobile in our car-culture.
On Earth News we talk about Georgia DNR's search for frog surveyors to help count Georgia's frog population. T. Boone Pickens is slowing down his alternative fuel plan now that oil is cheap again. And Josephine Bennett reports that if you want to be buried in a 'green' cemetery, then don't plan to rest in peace in Macon.
Our shout out goes to the Live Oak Library System, based in Savannah, which is building a green LEED-certified building at their newest branch.
Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi was too hard to resist as a recycled music cut. We hope the public radio audience can tolerate a single, just this once.
Sustainable Georgia airs Saturdays at 12:30p, Sundays at 4:30p and Tuesday nights at 1:30p. You can also listen on demand online by going here.

Climate Change and Fall Colors, Eco-Villages, Nuclear Power, Food Banks, e-Peanuts and Vince Guaraldi This Weekend On Sustainable Georgia

The winds of change are blowing across the nation and right here at home. This week on Sustainable Georgia in Earth News we'll look at what Obama the candidate promised to do about environmental issues versus the agenda he will push as president. A UGA scientist has research that shows Georgia climate change has pushed back the peak of Fall colors by a couple of weeks. The Georgia Public Service Commission is beginning a series of hearings about whether or not to allow Georgia Power and other state utilities coops to build the first new reactors to be approved and built since the Three Mile Island incident in 1979. The two reactors would be built at Plant Vogtle in Burke County.

In our feature interview we talk with Myra Bales and Architect and Designer Greg Ramsey with Village Habitat Design. Bales is trying to create a sustainable cooperative Eco-Village in Carroll County. Village Habitat Design is a leader in Conservation Community design that's worked on such notable Atlanta-area communities as Lake Claire Co-Housing and East Lake Commons.

Our shout out goes to Georgia's Food Banks, who are low on food with high demand in a weak economy. Please do what you can to support them by going here.

With news that 1964-era vintage Peanuts cartoons have been animated and are available for download for your iPod or mobile device, we decided to celebrate change this week by ending the show with Vince Guaraldi's best known Peanuts song Linus and Lucy, suitable for dancing atop your dog house.

Energy Independence, Carbon Footprint Travel Guilt, and Huey Long This Weekend On The Election Day Edition Of Sustainable Georgia

As we hurtle towards Election Day on Tuesday, the conversation about national security is strangely absent from the debate. Environmental issues have also slipped under the tide of tax cut sound-bytes washing through these final days before the vote. But there may be no more important issue in front of us as a state and as a nation than energy independence. If we’re relying less on foreign oil, then we are a safer country, and a more sustainable country. Americans cut our use of foreign oil by more than half in the late 1970’s. What will it take to do that again? On this week's Sustainable Georgia we’re going to re-air an earlier interview with Jimmy Carter Library Director Dr. Jay Hakes about his book A Declaration of Energy Independence. The discussion encompasses history, public policy, and the differences between the two major candidates on energy policy and what that bodes for our future foreign oil consumption.

Atlanta-based UPS Corporation spends a lot of time thinking and engineering ways to save gallons of fuel every trip down your block. We'll hear from NPR and Melissa Stiers about their latest wrinkle, a hydraulic-hybrid truck that uses hydraulic pumps and hydraulic storage tanks to capture and store energy, similar to what is done with electric motors and batteries in a hybrid electric vehicle. In this case, the diesel engine is used to periodically recharge pressure in the hydraulic propulsion system. Fuel economy is increased in three ways: vehicle braking energy is recovered that normally is wasted; the engine is operated more efficiently, and the engine can be shut off when stopped or decelerating.

The Sustainable Georgia Shout Out this week goes to Keep Georgia Beautiful’s Man of The Year, Steve Levetan. Isla Earth reveals new lighting technology that uses old world ideas. Travel Experts Rick Steves and Tony Wheeler discuss world travel and carbon footprint guilt. And, we’ll recycle an old Huey Long campaign song to pump everyone up for Election Day.

E-Waste, Dystopia, Local Food Success In Carroll County and Kumbaya All On Sustainable Georgia This Weekend On GPB Radio

Tom Braziel is a Georgia-born writer now teaching at the University of Cincinnati, his first novel, Birmingham, 35 Miles is an entertaining but grim dystopian story about the Alabama of the year 2045, when climate change has rendered the American Southeast a windswept desert where people only go out at night because of deathly UV rays from the sun and the only job left is itinerant clay mining, and the people left there are trapped in the Southeast Desert and kept by the government at gunpoint away from the Saved Lands north of Birmingham, where its rumored that grass still grows and white puffy clouds still exist. It’s a compelling, quick read, and a great first novel, as cautionary in its own way as anything by Ray Bradbury or Philip K Dick.

While fiction is often a great foreshadowing of real life, Braziel's sort of doomsday scenario doesn’t seem imminent, although recent news about polar ice regions melting permanently should give us pause to consider what might be next. But while you can’t interrupt climate change by yourself overnight, you can keep from throwing toxic heavy metals into your local landfill, and by extension, your water supply. That might help. On Sustainable Georgia this week we talk about e-waste with green entrepreneur Michael Head from Georgia E-Waste. Isla Earth discusses whether sharks are more dangerous for humans or vice-versa. Our shout out goes to The Grower’s School in Northwest Georgia and their great local food success in Carroll County. For recycled music we’ll all join hands and sing Kumbaya. So there it is, dystopia on one end and Kumbaya on the other. Let us know what you think of the show. It airs Saturday at 12:30p, Sunday at 4:30p, Tuesday at 11:30p on GPB Radio. Available always online here.

Corn Ethanol, The EcoFocus Film Festival, and World Party All Featured On The Fall Membership Campaign Edition of Sustainable Georgia This Week

Sustainable Georgia this week takes up a big chunk of our time to ask you for your support for GPB Radio during our Fall Membership Campaign. As public broadcasters, we have to get the largest percentage of our funding for programming from you. That includes everything from the cost of rights to Morning Edition and A Prairie Home Companion to the salaries of everyone at GPB Radio. So if you did not call in or log on when prompted during the show, please click here and support Sustainable Georgia and GPB. We have some nifty 'green' thank you gifts, including the chance to have a tree planted in honor of a loved one. If you like what we are trying to do with Sustainable Georgia, please show your support. It means a lot.

This week, in between the emotional appeals for your support, we'll cover the opening of a new corn ethanol plant in Camilla, and feature Rickey Bevington's interview with Courtney Gale, an anti-development activist featured in the documentary Carving Up Oconee, which will be featured in next week's EcoFocus Film Festival in Athens. That event, presented by the UGA Odum School of Ecology, will feature a number of films primarily screened at Cine, in Chronic Town. Rickey wants to give a special shout out to Michael Cardin and Carl Zornes in Athens for their help with the interview.

Recycled music this week dips back into the 1980's, for Karl Wallinger's World Party and the title track to their 1986 album (remember those?) Private Revolution.