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Archive for May, 2008

Marshall County Landfill - Dead

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

Hey everyone!

Here is a great example of a community working together to defeat a landfill. 1,000 people protested by attending a county commission meeting wearing green shirts that said "Stop the Landfill", the created a motorcade over a mile long to lead everyone to the meeting and used lawn signs to express their dismay at the potential.

TCWN’s Elizabeth Murphy has been working with the community and they won. The Marshall County landfill is dead. Congratulations!!

Rep. Joe McCord attempts to humiliate the Executive Director of TCWN

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

Here is what happens when you take a stand for clean water and fight to keep developers from being allowed to pave, culvert and bury streams at the state Legislature.

On April 9, the Stop Work Order bill was up in the House Environment Committee for a vote. During discussion, Rep. McCord asked me to come up and speak on it. Once he got me up there, he turned the subject to the limited resources bill that we worked so hard to kill. I tried to turn his attention back to the Stop Work Order, but he would have none of it.

A couple of notes. Rep. McCord suggests that I am only in this for money. I had a conversation with Rep. Nicely at the beginning of the session. Rep. Nicely told me that because I get paid to do the work I do, it’s not worthy. When I countered that the Farm Bureau lobbyist gets paid to represent farmers, a group he claims to support, he told me that I make more money than she does and therefore what I do is not worthy. I don’t think Rep. McCord thought up the money comment on his own.

I do believe that Rep. McCord got the message.

RvH

Seymour High School Earth Day Clean Up of Dudley Creek

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

I spent Earth Day with Science Clubbers from Seymour High School. They wanted to do some service learning on Earth Day and approached the network about a river clean up. With generous support from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, we were able to use a Clean Streams Grant to get the students out into the creek. We teamed up with the National Park Service who helped us find a location and organized all the gear necessary gear: gloves, vests, bags, truck for hauling off the trash. The High School provided lunch. The kids picked up enough trash to fill a NPS truck.

We had 66 students participate and they pulled out a lot of trash!

Sadly, not everyone thought the efforts of all these students were admirable. The Seymour Herald carried a story and the blog comments were quite unkind. The kids rallied and you can hear what they had to say for themselves and all the work they did. These kids are really committed to taking care of the environment and I am proud to have spent the day with them.

Click here to see their comments.