Commentary
Drilling Offshore, That Old Song Again
Richard Nixon seems an unlikely hero of conservationists, but he was the President who signed into law what Georgetown law professor Richard J. Lazarus calls the Magna Carta of environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act. It was critical bipartisan action to regulate the impact of human activity on the environment; we soon had the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Clean Air Act.
More Explanation Needed
Editors, Vineyard Gazette:
The following letter was sent to the Chilmark selectmen:
Cuttyhunk island, lying seven miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard and 14 off New Bedford, is connected to the coast by one ferry line and the services of charter fisherman. Since the 19th century, well after its initial discovery by Bartholomew Gosnold in the 1600s, the island has been a bastion of traditional Yankee fishing history and old-world character. This quaint fishing island was once referred to as New England’s own treasure island by a New England textile tycoon whose imprint remains indelibly stamped in the island landscape.
Ries Vanderpol was 17 when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, his home country, in 1940. Before the invasion, he had seen Jewish students who arrived in his school fleeing from Nazi Germany, but had avoided contact with them regarding their troubles as somehow contagious. At 17, he had not spent much time pondering Nazi Germany and its policies of racial hatred.
One More Slice
From the Vineyard Gazette editions of September, 1933:
The Joy of Voting