Indiana: Still toxic after all these years
- Media
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- Going to jail
- Bloomington Recycles: Fact or Fiction?
- Poverty
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- How public is our library?
- Interstate 69
- The Insider's Guide to the Outdoors
- Who owns downtown?
Who owns Kirkwood?
-- The story
-- The list
Who owns the Square?
-- The story
-- The list
Alternative Features
Chef Daniel Orr trots around the kitchen of FARM restaurant with ease, dabbing each plate with his culinary touch. Whatever the order, whatever the day, Orr knows "real food."
And from experiences on his family's farm in Columbus and his eatery in Bloomington, he can attest to the significance of supporting local farmers and buying local food.
"FARM is community-driven, where we support local farmers," he says. "We do sustainability projects, such as composting and recycling. We try to give back to the community, and, hopefully, we will earn the trust of our locals and people that come in from IU."
A much-needed recovery period from knee surgery, coupled with the holiday season, left little time for working anywhere but on the computer these past two weeks. No interviews, few e-mails, mostly surfing government Web pages. And the effort produced an alarming deja vu.
While researching a story for NUVO readers in Indianapolis on the connection between autism and toxic chemicals, I returned to territory familiar from my stint as an environmental writer at the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) from 1996-2000. I spent hours analyzing Indiana's Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), a gauge for how polluted Indiana or any other state is.
This Community-Right-to-Know tool is a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) database through which polluters quantify their annual releases of "nearly" 650 chemicals into the nation's air, water and land, according to the TRI Program Fact Sheet.
Executions are legal in 59 countries; the United States is one of them. Executions are legal in 36 states, one of which is Indiana. It's pointless to debate the morality of the death penalty: arguments about personal belief and individual opinion are unresolvable through discussion. Instead, it makes sense to assess the merits of the death penalty in terms of public policy. Is capital punishment sound public policy?
The death penalty is expensive. According to Chris Hitz-Bradley, an Indianapolis attorney and president of the Indiana Information Center to Abolish Capital Punishment (IICACP), writing in the Indiana Abolitionist, "The cost of just the initial trial and appeal of a capital case [in Indiana] is estimated at $300,000 to $500,000. The state's economists" he goes on to say, "have estimated that 'the cost of this first phase of a capital case is 1/3 more than a case of life without parole.'"