by admin | Feb 13, 2020 | Books, Climate, Coastal Management, Disaster, Disaster policy, Environment, Floodplain management, Government, Housing, Natural Hazards, Politics, Public policy, Resilience, Uncategorized, Urban Planning, Water, Weather
In the days shortly after World War II, writes Gilbert M. Gaul in The Geography of Risk, Morris Shapiro and his family were busy building their own version of Levittown, the famed suburban tract housing development of Long Island, on a barrier island in southern New...
by admin | Jan 21, 2020 | Activism, Books, Christianity, Government, History, National security, Political philosophy, Politics
In the mid-1960s, before the advent of the personal computer, when a manual typewriter was the state of the art in original document production, I took a high school typing course in which I learned the QWERTY keyboard and how to manipulate my fingers to put words on...
by admin | Dec 2, 2019 | Climate, Disaster, Disaster policy, Economics, Environment, Floodplain management, Natural Hazards, Parks, Politics, Public policy, Public safety, Resilience, Water, Wildfire
Warning to readers: This is not my usual single-focus essay. It is a collage of news from two coastal states with an assortment of serious natural hazards challenges—Florida and California. In recent years, their politics has tended to diverge widely, but perhaps we...
by admin | Nov 23, 2019 | Activism, Business, Disaster, Disaster policy, Emergency Management, Government, History, Politics, Public health, Public policy, Public safety, Technology, Urban Planning
That headline is a quote from Mayor Tommy Muska of the town of West, Texas, in the Dallas Morning News of November 21, regarding the Trump administration’s rescission of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards for disaster prevention in chemical facilities,...
by admin | Oct 20, 2019 | Activism, Blogging, National security, Personal history, Politics, Religion, Writing
For the last four weeks, I have failed to find adequate time to write a respectable blog post. Events and past commitments have gotten the best of me. I spent four days in Iowa during the first week of this month, and two days in North Carolina the following week. In...
by admin | Sep 22, 2019 | Activism, Civil rights, Crime, Immigration, National security, Politics, Public policy, Public safety, Racism, Terrorism, Volunteerism
National Park Service photo We have become so accustomed to a certain Homeland Security phrase since the events of September 11, 2001, that we have never seriously contemplated its larger meaning. “If you see something, say something,” for most people simply means...
