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^ummerutUe Naus
— The Official Legal Organ of Chattooga County —
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Editorials
Harvest Balance Needed In Ga.
Once the ball gets rolling, it is usual
ly harder to stop. That simple fact often
forms the foundation for much of the
opposition preservationists and en
vironmentalists have to so-called pro
gress.
Yet, as in ecology, there must be a
balance, a point where “need" squares
with "consequence.”
This is true in the search for alter
native energy sources.
Sen. Herman Talmadge, speaking at
Georgia Tech recently, announced a ma
jor legislative push to develop
agricultural energy and wood fuels.
Talmadge said new and increased
development of agricultural and wood
fuels from the state’s fields and forests
can give Georgia a “new cash crop,”
promote industrial expansion and rural
development, create new jobs and in
crease incomes where they are most
needed.
At the heart of Talmadge’s proposed
bill is the accelerated use of Georgia’s
forests as a source of energy.
Opposition from conservationists
could be expected, and justifiably so. It
is reasonable to assume that once the
state’s forests become viewed as
energy sources, there will be wholesale
Oil, U.S., Israel
One of the little-publicizejd results of
the Shah’s fall in Iran is the cutoff of oil
Iran formerly supplied to Israel. Up to 60
percent of Israel’s oil needs were supplied
by Iran until the Shah fell from power.
Shipments continued for a time
thereafter but recently were stopped.
Israel is finding it very difficult to buy
oil, and having to pay more’when it finds
a seller. Oil companies fear being placed
on the Arab blacklist if they supply Israel
and most secondary trading firms won’t
have anything to do with Israel, for fear
of Arab retaliation.
The importance of this new situation
for Americans is considerable. It will be
remembered that when Israel agreed to
return land seized militarily from Egypt,
including Egyptian oil fields, then
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger com
mitted the U. S. to supplying Israel with
oil—if her supplies were cut off.
That chicken is now coming home to
Dating Foods
Despite excessive government regula
tion in many fields, the public is still often
unprotected in the grocery store, when it
comes to the dating of foods.
Americans are probably better warned
than most, and recently the dating of
perishable foods like milk has been re
quired. Yet in many states a vast array of
perishable foods remain undated.
Eggs, for example, are often undated.
Perhaps the worst exploitation of the
public by grocery chains and producers is
the coding system used to date
foodstuffs. That system hides the very in
formation dating laws are supposed to
Best Oj Press —
SUGAR COATED
Darling, this cake is delicious. Did you
buy it yourself?—Gosport
♦ * *
AND DESIRE
Great minds have purposes; others
have wishes.—Grit
♦ ♦ *
SWEET OBLIVION
Perhaps if we could forget our troubles
as easily as our blessings we would live
better.—Oskaloosa (la.) Tribune
timber cutting.
But Talmadge’s proposal offers the
balancing feature that is necessary to
assure the preservation of the state's
woodlands while offering new energy,
employment and economic oppor
tunities.
“By using only the twigs, bark and
other forest wastes, we could supply as
much as 25 percent of (Georgia’s) cur
rent energy needs now purchased at a
cost of about $750 million annually,”
Talmadge suggested.
He explained: “In the mixed hard
wood forests of the Appalachians, the
logger who removes 1,000 board feet of
saleable wood leaves 11 tons of tops
and limbs lying on the ground when he
has finished. This ‘waste’ material is
equal to 750 gallons of No. 2 fuel oil or
five tons of coal.
Talmadge’s proposal may sound
futuristic to some, but the state of
Georgia has already taken a leadership
role in wood energy technology. The
state Forestry Commission was
allocated $500,000 last year by the
Georgia Legislature to conduct a series
of wood energy studies in cooperation
with Georgia Tech.
timber cutting.
roost. Beset with an energy crisis of our
own, Americans now find that they must
face the task of supplying oil to the
Israelis. Israeli consumption is small by
comparison to America’s (160,000 barrels
daily), but the burden can be real, never
theless.
All of which maims the recently
advocated policy of presidential can
didate John Connally sound quite
reasonable. Connally favors economic
pressure on Israel to force the Begin
regime to withdraw from occupied Arab
land. This action could produce a peace
settlement, defuse the power keg in the
Middle East and ease the energy crisis.
Arab border states seem willing, now,
to accept Israel’s existence, Israel’s
security would have to be guaranteed by
Washington. Only Israel’s hope to hang
on to Arab land seized in recent wars bars
the way to such a peace settlement and
relaxation of the oil crisis.
provide.
It gives the store manager that infor
mation; but who wishes to rely on all
store managers everywhere to remove
stale food from all shelves promptly? It
just isn’t done. In some smaller stores,
the margin of profit is so thin this is
avoided.
Every packaged food item sold in
grocery stores with no exceptions, should
have a date stamped clearly on the out
side of the package specifying when the
contents will be stale—and this vital data
should not be hidden from buyers by a
code.
THEY DON’T
Some people speak from experience.
Others, from experience, don’t
speak.—Great Lakes, Antenna
* * *
TRIAL AND ERROR
He who never makes a mistake actual
ly never makes a discovery either.—Pen
sacola, Gosport
* * *
DEFINITION
Cranberries: grapes with high blood
pressure.—McAlester (Okla.) News
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WHERE IS TOE GOVERNMENT
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'-TOM KIRWAN
wL Off the Newsdesk
Some Christmastime Lessons
Things I learned this Christmas:
* Buying shares in a battery manufac
turer would be a good investment. My
wife and I came to this conclusion after
stuffing over a dozen power cells in
several toys. A simple flashlight gobbled
up four “C” alkaline batteries, as did an
electronic football game. One toy took
two “C” batteries and one 9-volt battery!
We also learned that invariably the toys
that you put the expensive alkaline cells
in invariably are the ones left on by the
kids all night; the toys that you put the
cheaper batteries in are slavishly turned
off after each sitting.
* Our admonition to our Kids not to
get up before dawn was a wise one, we
decided. A couple we know who invoked
no such rule were awakened by their
children at 3 a.m., one hour after Santa
Claus had gone to bed. As the sun came
up the toys were already unwrapped for
two hours and the family was exhausted.
Their little girl became hysterical because
two “C” batteries weren’t available for a
game (see paragraph above), and no
stores are open at 4 a.m. anyway,
especially on Christmas morning. When
we visited at 3 p.m., the whole family was
crabby and the mother looked like she
had been driven over by a battalion of
Sherman Tanks in practice maneuvers.
* Foregoing the formalized Christmas
Day Dinner routine has its advantages.
My wife decided to shuck working in the
kitchen on Christmas morning—opting to
do her Christmas cooking on Christmas
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Eve and its eve too. So she was able to
play with the kids and do whatever she
wanted on the big day, while the family
enjoyed a buffet-style dinner of turkey
and ham sandwiches. Napkins replaced
plates, so clean-up time was minimal.
And neither of us looked like we had been
run over by that tank unit by the after
noon.
* Christmas can be Christmas with a
fake tree. I didn’t want a fake tree this
year, but at $3 a foot for the real thing,
my aesthetic sense caved into my cents
sense. Some artificial trees, we learned
after visiting four stores, are especially
artificial, looking something like giant
feather dusters. But the one we found
didn’t look that fakey, once its bare, long
base was covered with gifts. In fact, after
I got my wife to stop apologizing for the
tree (“We decided to go with a fake tree
this year...”), some of our friends didn’t
know the difference. We missed the
evergreen fragrance, but not the daily
watering ritual and picking dead pine
needles from the carpet.
♦ Holding back on one good toy has its
advantages on Christmas Day. If a kid
begins squalling he’s been “shorted”
(“Sis got more than me ...”) you can
whip out the “forgotten” toy or game. If
no complaints of that sort are heard, our
kids will testify, it’s a great surprise later
on Christmas Day to give them a wrap
ped present to dispel the “all-my
presents-are-open-and-I ’m-bored” blues.
✓" CLOSEUP
Facing South
a syndicated column
voices of tradition
Sylvia Bumgardner: No Place To Go
WARRENTON, N.C.— Sylvia Bumgardner is or
dinarily a potter, not a political activist, vastly preferring
ceramic manipulations to power plays. “There’s
something very special about clay,” she says.
And there’s something very special
about what she does with it. Rather
than employ glaze, gloss or ostenta
tion, she strives to achieve what she
calls, “simplicity almost to the other
extreme” with pottery marked by
muted hues as beguiling as a cloudy
spring afternoon or the first hints of
dawn.
Sylvia Bumgardner professes sur
prise that her pottery sold out quickly
at a recent New York craft show. “It
was so different from the other things there,” she says, “I
didn’t know if anyone would like it.”
Yet even as she got the coveted confirmation that peo
ple did like her pottery, the 32-year-old Warren County
native lost interest in producing more. The reason? So
meone tried to poison her.
She and her husband Stan, a guitarist, toured the Nor
theast last summer and heard little .news of North
Carolina. Among other places, they spent two weeks at
Ark Park in Niagara Falls, New York. Art Park was built
atop an abandoned chemical dump. So too was the nearby
Love Canal residential section where dozens of toxic
chemicals, and horror stories of their effects on humans,
surfaced daily. In late summer the young couple grateful
ly returned to sylvan Warren County, only to encounter a
sign warning pedestrians and motorists to keep away
from roadside soil contaminated with highly-toxic PCB,
polychlorinated biphenyl, a chemical known to induce
liver, skin and reproductive disorders and suspected of
causing cancer. The PCB-laden legacy paralleled 210
miles of rural highways in Warren and 14 other North
Carolina counties where truckers had sprayed dangerous
waste oil to avoid the costs of proper disposal.
“I never would have known what PCB was, had I not
lived around Love Canal last summer,” the potter notes
ruefully. “I moved back here, after living in cities, to get
away from this sort of thing, and to have this happen is
revolting,” she says. “I’ve realized that there’s no place
to go in terms of (getting away from) toxic wastes and
nuclear power.”
The realization altered her life, turning her from a
quiet, contented craftsman into a self-described “raving
environmentalist.” When state officials announced they
intended to bury the 50,000 tons of tainted soil close to
the water table in a landfill just two miles from her home,
Sylvia Bumgardner emerged as one of the leaders of the
aroused local citizenry. Soon she was immersed in PCB
data— and politics— for the first time in her life.
It was a crushing experience— frustrating, frighten
ing, disillusioning. “It’s affected my work. I’m a very dif
ferent potter. I fire my pots with cow manure and grass
and things people throw away. I’m not just doing it for
the principle; it s just a natural thing to do now. I’ve even
come to feel like a part of the environment instead of a
person looking at the environment.”
She recalls bitterly that one state official said early on
that local sentiments would not be taken into account in
deciding what to do with the PCBs. “People around here
didn’t take to that at all,” she snaps.
Soon the state bureaucracy seemed as much an enemy
as the PCBs. I feel confident that if the state announced
today they were going to establish a dump here in Warren
County, there would be a war,” she says flatly. "There
would be bloodshed. I know women who are ready to lay
down in front of bulldozers with their children, and there
are men ready to use guns.”
When a public hearing was held on the matter in War
renton, the county seat, between 700 and 1,000 residents
of the poor, predominantly black county showed up to ex
press their disapproval of the dumpsite to state and
federal officials. Marked by heated, sometimes
acrimonious exchanges, the meeting lasted for more than
seven hours.
She says the county s residents will continue to fight
to be heard as long as their homes, their health, and the
health of their families for generations to come remain in
jeopardy. After all, she insists, giving people a say in
shaping policies that directly affect them is what our
form of government is all about. “I believe there’s still
hope for democracy,” sighs Sylvia Bumgardner. “It has a
lot of potential.”
-BARRY JACOBS
journalist
Hillsborough, N.C.
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