A Chicken "Coup" in Hyattsville, Maryland?

Yours Truly has started a campaign to return chickens and chicken coops to Hyattsville, Maryland. My family wants fresh organic eggs raised without chemicals, without the demand for long distance shipping from the sources and without cruel treatment of animals. I've contacted a member of the Hyattsville City Council asking for help on changing the current city law that prohibits keeping chickens as pets, food or otherwise. I hope I can report, sometime in the near future, that chickens for egg raising are welcome once again in the Maryland suburbs.

Let me know your thoughts on the returning trend of urban chicken coops.

The accompanying photograph comes from the DOCUMERICA collection at the National Archives. World-famous photographer Charles O'Rear took this photograph of farmer John Dolezal collecting chicken eggs in May 1973 on Dolezal's farm near Bee, Nebraska.

Keep Your Cuff Campaign™

Yesterday I noticed my office waste paper basket had not been emptied for several days. Because I recycle every scrap of paper possible, the only thing that ends up in my waste paper basket are my discarded coffee cups and there were three of them in there. No, I don't drink three cups a day. They were left over from last week. For every discarded coffee cup there was also a discarded cardboard comfort sleeve. What a terrible waste! That revelation inspired me to start the Keep Your Cuff Campaign™.

Joining the Keep Your Cuff Campaign™ is simple and will prevent needless waste of perfectly good paper products. Unless you are a particularly uncoordinated and sloppy coffee/tea drinker, you comfort cuff should be clean and unstained and perfectly good for many repeat uses. Before you toss your used paper coffee/tea cup, slip off the comfort cuff and store it in your desk drawer for your next cup. If you enjoy you coffee/tea on the way to work (I don't advocate drinking anything while driving!), slip off the cuff and tuck in the car's console or in the glove box and take it with you when purchasing your next hot beverage. Your coffee/tea vendor will thank you for reducing demand for supplies and the Earth will thank you for reducing landfill waste and saving trees.

You can find numerous reusable cup cuffs for sale. Some are funny, some are artistic, some are carved from wood and double as wrist jewelry, but most are just expensive. The one you get at the coffee vendor is free, so use it for as long as you can!

And yes, I've approached my agency's catering company about offering reusable travel mugs in the cafeteria or allowing customers to use their own mugs, but they gave me a flat, "No." I'm not taking that as a final answer, and will post about progress on this front in the future.

P of C Fact of the Day

Don't flush away all our clean water resources!

Problem: If your toilet is from 1992 or earlier, you probably have an inefficient model that uses at least 3.5 gallons per flush.

Solution: New high-efficiency models use less than 1.3 gallons per flush—that's at least 60 percent less than their older counterparts. Compared to a 3.5 gallons per flush toilet, a WaterSense labeled toilet could save a family of four more than $90 annually on their water bill, and $2,000 over the lifetime of the toilet. The WaterSense toilet pictured here is by Kohler.

A low cost and more immediate way to save more water is to remember the popular saying, "If it's yellow, let it mellow ..." Well, you know the rest. Start saving money and clean water now! Learn more about WaterSense labelled toilets.

Source: http://www.epa.gov/

DOCUMERICA in NARA's Prologue

My recent DOCUMERICA article now appears online in Prologue, the quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration. Please have a read and let me know your thoughts. I should mention that many more DOCUMERICA photographs appear in the article's print version.

Air pollution then and now

As I said in my initial posting, I'm going to make posts featuring images from DOCUMERICA. Learn more about DOCUMERICA. For today's post I'm starting with a photograph taken by Marc St. Gil, one of the many photographers who participated in the project. The image is of a factory in Houston, Texas, taken in April 1972. The name of the factory is unknown. This image appeared in numerous publications and exhibits relating to pollution issues during the 1970s and can be considered an iconic image of the air pollution crisis during that era.

St. Gil titled the photograph Smoke from burning of old auto batteries. This link directs you to a catalog record for St. Gil's photograph in ARC at the National Archives. Once at the catalog record, click the Digital Copies tab to see the color image. I'm interested to know your reactions to the image.

Recycling goes Claymation on Shawn the Sheep

The most recently aired episode of Shawn the Sheep titled, "Abracadabra", features household recycling scene with the farmer. Sorry, but the full episode is not available online here in the U.S. 

The overall theme of the episode can be summed up as "what happens when sheep get their hooves on an old, but potent magician's kit". The initial scenes with Farmer creating more and more glass bottles to recycle really caught my eye and made me laugh.

I recommend this for teaching young ones about the importance and fun of household recycling. Check YouTube.com from time to time to see if you can catch the Abracadabra episode.

Just saw Disneynature's Earth at the theaters this morning. Great movie for getting young ones interesting in protecting the global environment. Let me know if you've seen this movie yet.

Welcome to Preservation of the Creation!

This blog will be dedicated to all things related to the greener way of life, and preserving the gift we have in mother Earth. There is a particular collection of documentary photographs at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, which has been my facination for the past couple of years ... DOCUMERICA or Project DOCUMERICA.

I plan to make my work here on P of C blog more of a routine feature of a particular series of images from DOCUMERICA, or a feature on one the many talented photographers who contributed to the collection.