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
Popular Science has partnered with Google to offer their entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It’s an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology’s incredible potential to improve our lives. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.
So, you have a prison in Illinois 1940s, and a medical department, Army and State Department who want to run a controlled study of malaria—a.k.a the disease that has killed the most human beings, ever. Oddly enough, they even got the prisoner’s consent, including infamous murderer Nathan Leopold. 441 inmates volunteered, I assume for extra cigarettes or something similar, and were bitten by 10 disease carrying mosquitos each. Only one died, from a heart attack after battling a number of rounds with the fever. The interesting thing about this situation, is the defence team of the Nazis during the Nuremberg Medical Trials claimed there was no difference between the prison experiments, and the forced experimentation in the concentration camp. It was during this trial that the concept of “informed consent” was cemented, into the form we know and love today.
Gleaning is the traditional practice of picking over a field after the harvest has been collected. As the University of Maine’s Cooperative Extension observes, “Food recovery is the collection of wholesome food for distribution to the poor and hungry. It follows a basic humanitarian ethic that has been part of societies for centuries. We know that “gleaning,” or gathering after the harvest, goes back at least as far as biblical days. The term “field gleaning” refers to the collection of crops either from farmers’ fields that have already been mechanically harvested or from fields where it is not economically profitable to harvest.” [more]
Low-Tech Magazine and No-Tech Magazine have some fairly well written/illustrated articles about old and low technologies. The concept being, in a sustainable future due to environmental constraints, carbon taxes, Peak Oil, etc.. these old-school technologies might be used – in some places, in some form – instead of more energy intensive modern high technology. Trolly Canal Boats, Timbrel Vaulting (vs. steel and concrete), Bring Back the Horses (and the bicycle), Tile Stoves, Wind Powered Factories, Sneakernet, more.
By spring of 2000, Texas governor George W. Bush was wrapping up the Republican nomination for president, and he went on to dominate the rest of the decade. If Dickens proclaimed of the 1790s revolutionary era in France that it was the best of times and the worst of times, the reactionary Bush era was just the worst of times. I declare it the decade of the American oligarchs.
The Great War was joined in fervor. It had only been a few months, but by December 1914, soldiers of the Central Powers could see the war wasn’t going to be as short as promised. It was the rainy season in Belgium, which reduced the ground to a gluey gray mud; bad enough in itself, but worse for the men digging the trenches used to hide from machine gun fire and artillery. The land was crisscrossed with barbed wire, and the technology of warfare had evolved faster than tactics, making it an extraordinarily brutal war. No wonder why the area between the opposing trenches was dubbed “No Man’s Land”.
