Shorewood Covered in Shopping Bags

By Keith R. Schmitz

This morning as a slight mist that grew into a driving rain, scores of volunteers fanned out across the Village of Shorewood to drop a reusable shopping bag at the door step of every house and apartment within its one square mile area.

Sustainable Shorewood is the group behind the effort. Made up of the members of the Village of Shorewood Conservation Board, which was formed last year by the village government, Sustainable Shorewood is looking to drive programs like this in the future.

This program is already getting national press, being one of the first such effort in the state and maybe in the country. One Shorewood resident was looking forward to his bag after his father called from Arizona after seeing the story on the program.

Plastic bags are a major fill in land fills. Many of them will take decades if not centuries to degrade. Just to give you some idea the local Pick and Save -- one the smallest in the chain -- uses about two pallets of plastic bags every week.

The really great feature about the Shorewood bag drop is this shows what can come out of a partnership of government, local business, and some great bottom up activism. The cost of the shopping bags was totally supported through donations by businesses, and the logistics was completely grassroots.

Jenny Achuthan, one of the organizers of the bag drop hopes other communities can learn from Shorewood's experience and organize a program of their own. Anyone who is interested is encouraged to reach Sustainable Shorewood through their web site.

The other wonderful aspect of this program was the involvement of Jenny and the other organizers who were under age forty. Most of the volunteers were families who involved their very young children in assembling the bag packages and going door to door.

Thanks to the efforts of the group, Shorewood has a start in bagging the plastic bag problem.

A Soclist Take-Over of a US Business

By Keith Schmitz

Florida Governor Charley Crist announces a new government initiative:

At a news conference Tuesday, scheduled for 10:30 a.m. near the imperiled "River of Grass", Governor Crist is expected to announce a $1.75 billion deal to essentially buy the U.S. Sugar Corporation, including 187,000 acres of farmland that once sat in the northern Everglades. If the deal goes through (and though the announcement will be taking place, the deal isn't set in stone), it will extinguish a powerful 77-year-old company with 1,700 employees and deep roots in South Florida's coal-black organic soil. It will also resurrect and reconfigure a moribund 8-year-old Everglades replumbing effort that is supposed to be the most ambitious ecosystem restoration project in the history of the planet.

"It's mind-blowing," said Kirk Fordham, the executive director of the Everglades Foundation. "Who would have thought we'd see this in our lifetimes?"

The purchase would give the state control of nearly half the 400,000 acres of sugar fields in the Everglades Agricultural Area below Lake Okeechobee, although sources said U.S. Sugar would lease back its land for several years. Environmentalists hope that eventually, the area will become storage reservoirs, treatment marshes and perhaps even a flowway reconnecting the lake to the Glades. This could help recreate the original north-to-south movement of the "River of Grass", and eliminate damaging pulses of excess water into coastal estuaries. That would be good news for panthers and gators, dolphins and herons, ghost orchids and royal palms.

Gotta love the initiative on the part of Charley Crist. Nevertheless, it would be hard to see Crist making it on the McCain ticket after a move like this. I know a lot of libertarians who must now be writhing.

What next?