Category: Politics

Like gardening, all politics is local.

Clinton Library gets green roof

clinton library roof constructionThe William Jefferson Clinton Library in Little Rock, Ark., is getting a green roof.

Bill Clinton likes to brag about his presidential library being an eco-friendly building.

Now even the roof is going green.

Over the past two weeks, workers have been hoisting 90 species of plants and more than four truckloads of soil atop the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum to create a garden on an area surrounding Clinton’s penthouse apartment.

Instead of bare concrete, the glass and steel building will be topped with strawberries, ferns, switch grass, roses and other greenery.

“This is just an area he can come and relax in and just enjoy the view,” Clinton Foundation Facilities and Operations Director Debbie Shock said in a recent interview on the roof.

However, it’s not just for looks. That layer of soil and plants will provide insulation and capture rainwater that otherwise would just be wasted as runoff.

clinton's other libary?You can hear ‘Bill’ wax eloquent on the roof via the Stephanie Miller Show [mp3]. “You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.”

I’m a little confused, because looking for better images of Clinton’s green roof garden I ran across this image of a tornado threatening the Clinton Library.

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NY Times: How Green Is My Garden?

click to go to full articleIn an op-ed in this morning’s New York Times, Thomas C. Cooper, garden designer and former Horticulture magazine editor, encourages gardeners to become ‘backyard biomass producers’ and feed their lawn waste into energy sector.

IF the government wants to reduce its dependency on imported oil and, in the words of the Department of Energy, “foster the domestic biomass industry,” it has only to stop by my backyard with a pickup. The place is an unlikely but active biomass production center — especially at this season with countless autumn leaves eddying in every nook and cranny — and I’ll happily donate my production to the cause.

Is he serious?

I have two concerns with his reasoning:

  • The energy we collect and store in the biomass of our yards is tiny compared with what we burn.
  • That biomass is best used by being returned to the soils in our yards.

Cooper says he’s overwhelmed by how much biomass he produces. But do you know any other gardeners who complain about having too much compost? Sure, put your woody waste on the curb for local recycling. But for goodness sake, rake the rest onto your beds, around the base of your trees and shrubs, or put it in a modest-sized compost bin.

Improving your soil is a better use of that biomass than burning it.

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Exploding pumpkin

Hat tip to Ann Raver who plugged this video in her article in today’s NY Times, In the Pumpkin Patch, an Orange Thumb, about growing and showing giant pumpkins.

Rep. Pete Stark (D – CA) from the House debate on the override vote on Bush’s veto of SCHIP:

But President Bush’s statements about children’s health shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than his lies about the war in Iraq. The truth is that Bush just likes to blow things up. In Iraq, in the United States and in Congress.

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Who volunteers to captain the Titanic …

… after it’s hit the iceberg?

That’s how John Oliver summed up the possibility of Al Gore running for president on The Daily Show last night:

Actually, there are signs that Al Gore is already running for president. Check out these three very short videos of Gore on his on CurrentTV website since he awarded the Nobel Peace Prize:

They are commercial-length, no-bullshit progressive views on the three top issues of the day. (Well three of the top four. We know where he stands on the fourth.)

They have all the production value of a dorm-room, videocam rant. Nothing you would see on TV. But just exactly the kind of thing that plays well in this new medium we call the Internet.

Thom Hartman speculated today that we are perhaps seeing the first candidacy that will rely on the Internet and bypass the mainstream media (MSM). Just as radio replaced print in campaigns decades ago, and later TV replaced radio, Gore again sees the future and is reaching out directly without having to go through the MSM filter.

It’s not like the MSM ever did him any favors with their coverage. See Going After Gore in the latest Vanity Fair for a great article on how the media got it all wrong on the ‘discovering the Love Canal’ and ‘inventing the Internet’ memes they created.

Through the Internet, he’s going to hoist the MSM on their own petard.

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