Two years after Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, the new institution sent out 100 photographers to document the nation’s environment writ large.

Now, those photos have made it out of the root cellar of the National Archive and onto Flickr Commons, where they are getting a wider viewing than they’ve ever received. The first group of what will become a 15,000-photo set from the Documerica project are now available online to the public.

The photographers were charged with three broad goals: “to photograph America’s environmental problems, to document America’s natural and man-made beauty and to photograph the human condition.”

The original director of the EPA project, Gifford Hampshire, hoped to recreate the success the Depression-era Farm Security Administration had in calling attention to the plight of the nation’s rural poor. The new target was the environment. The visual evidence of the nation’s various pollution problems would help justify the existence of the EPA.

But as it happened, the photographers interpreted their task in different ways. What they captured was not simply a portrait of “nature,” but the environment as people knew it and lived in it.

Many of the photos captured the infrastructure necessary to support the large-scale mining and power operations. Here, we see the coal cars loaded up at the rail yards in Danville, West Virginia.
Photo: Jack Corn/National Archives and Records Administration

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Some of the world’s most baffling social problems, says Peter Eigen, can be traced to systematic, pervasive government corruption, hand-in-glove with global companies. At TEDxBerlin, Eigen describes the thrilling counter-attack led by his organization Transparency International.

As a director of the World Bank in Nairobi, Peter Eigen saw firsthand how devastating corruption can be. He’s the founder of Transparency International, an NGO that works to persuade international companies not to bribe or play with corrupt governments. And it’s working.

TOXMAP uses maps of the United States to help users visually explore data from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and Superfund Program.

From Progress Illinois: Will State Lawmakers Take On TIF This Year?

Concerned about the pressure that TIF districts are putting on taxpayers who are forced to pick up the slack for the billions that are siphoned off the tax rolls across Illinois each year, the legislative Property Tax Reform & Relief Task Force is recommending that the General Assembly finally review the state’s TIF statutes in an effort to rein in the billions that are diverted off the tax rolls each year.

I’d say it is past time to address TIF issues.

IL State of the State Address LIVE @noon. WUIS

WUIS will air live coverage of Governor Pat Quinn’s State of the State address today at noon. Governor Quinn will deliver his message before a joint session of the Illinois legislature, followed by reaction and analysis from WUIS State Week in Review moderator Bill Wheelhouse and WUIS News Director Sean Crawford along with State Senator Michael Frerichs (D-District 52, Champaign) and State Representative Jim Durkin (R-District 82, Western Springs).

hat tip Progress IL

Local governments taking back corporate welfare

As the recession drags on, municipalities struggling to fix roads, fund schools and pay bills increasingly are rescinding tax abatements to companies that don’t hire enough workers, lay them off or close up shop. At the same time, they’re sharpening new incentive deals, leaving no doubt what is expected of companies and what will happen if they don’t deliver.

“We will roll out the red carpet as much as we can (but) they are going to honor the contract,” said Brendon Gallagher, an alderman in DeKalb, Ill., where Target Corp. got abatements from the city, county, school district and other taxing bodies after promising at least 500 jobs at a local distribution center.

So when the company came up 66 workers short in 2009, Target got word its next tax bill would be jumping almost $600,000 — more than half of which go to the local school district, where teachers and programs have been cut as coffers dried up.