A lot of powerful people in this county have helped her to “hide” what she is doing in plain sight.

Disgraceful.

It seems you have begun the process of connecting the dots between the local global warming alarmists embedded in Loudoun County Government and the crony capitalist cottage industries being created to service their mutually beneficial manufactured needs. I suspect Andrea McGimsey was first in line to advocate for and then advance the cause. I recall seeing a Video of Supervisor McGimsey as a guest speaker at one of these energy/ global warming lectures asking the crowd if they wanted to make money on energy efficiency.
I suspect the deletion of emails and the shredding of documents will soon begin.

G. Stone
on December 9th, 2009 on Too Conservative

yeesh.

Nothing like GIVING kids nightmares, so you can use them to implement one as a moneymaker.

I wonder, did any public classrooms in the US send clips for the project?

The little girl should be very happy that polar bears are thriving :

In the Davis Strait area, a 140,000-square kilometre region, the polar bear population has grown from 850 in the mid-1980s to 2,100 today.

“There aren’t just a few more bears. There are a hell of a lot more bears,” said Mitch Taylor, a polar bear biologist who has spent 20 years studying the animals.

Barbara,

Suspect that there is one sad truth to the GW hysteria, the number of young children who are fed a constant stream of nightmare scenarios by their parents, educators or other GW misguided adults.

Then when the kids are emotional wrecks, they blame it on GW..

Barbara,

The tree thing has always perplexed me as well. On one hand they preach the use of renewable resources, yet they fail to realize that timber is one of our most renewable resources. What we don’t harvest from the forest, nature surely will. One need only look at the western wildfires to understand that.

I have spent a great deal of time in forests, hunting, backpacking, wildflower viewing and wildlife watching, one thing that I became aware of many years ago is that a managed forest is a healthy and very robust ecosystem, supporting a broad spectrum of life, both plant and animal.

Several weeks ago, I motored down 15 S through Buckingham County, as I had not been there for many years. I had completely forgotten the thousands of acres of pine forests in this part of the state managed by the paper and timber industries. It is an impressive area, one that the metropolitan tree huggers should visit at least once.

I believe any students, when told of tree destruction by their teacher, should immediately return their textbooks…

This was part of a county partnership/enhancement some years ago. PEC used to do an art contest on saving streams in the elementary schools–worthy goal, but as always, how is it implemented?

Did you know the Mosby Heritage Area group used to–don’t know if they still do–have an offer on their website to send a costumed interpreter into the classroom to show kids what was “lost” when their communities were built?

Barbara,

Much of the activity in VA pertaining to stream monitoring and quality assurance is an offshoot of the VA Izaak Walton League Save Our Streams Program.

http://www.vasos.org/index.htm

SOS has volunteers trained by the state who travel around giving locals instruction in stream monitoring. Tuscarora Creek has been in the local program for years. Sadly, some local groups are only interested in coloring books.

Guess this is the program you refer to :

Mosby, Heritage, and You—A Classroom Program for 4th Grade Virginia Studies.

Our interactive classroom program comes right to your public or private school at no charge if you are in Loudoun, Fauquier, Clarke, Warren, or Prince William counties It is designed to review and enrich 4th Grade Virginia Studies SOLs, while promoting student and teacher interest in local history and the value of heritage and its preservation. Each program is customized to the school by introducing “the Gray Ghost” in a local context. We use Mosby events that occurred near your school to spark interest in the stories, photographs, and artifacts that we share. We stress the role students can play in uncovering and preserving the stories and sites of local history in the Mosby Heritage Area. Students in Loudoun, Fauquier, and Clarke counties will be armed with a scavenger hunt at the end of our visit to explore interesting sites in their county. The teacher will be armed with pre-visit and post-visit materials to extend the lessen as well as to review it. Understanding Mosby in many ways is a foot in the door to understanding our local history.

Unfortunately, with programs such as this there will be participants with hidden agendas. I would hope they are weeded out once they are exposed.

I guess, on further thought, that those older tools were the marketing that got hunt country declared a Heritage Area?

And now we have Journey Through Hallowed ground!

Perhaps what we are seeing is the difference in marketing between men (Mosby organizers) and women (Journey organizers)? lol, but not really.

Ship, I have nothing against the scenic byway designation.

I have a very hard time with the ten-mile wide 50-mile long corridor that is basically under the non-elected control of an NGO that can receive over $1M per year in tax funding.

As for what’s Gone With The Wind, I took the Oatlands tour in a group that happened to consist of about half people of color.

After the views of the house and its contents (my favorites were the mortgage button, the sideboard, and the photo and menu at the base of the stairwell for the costume ball held after the estate passed from a powerful southern family to a powerful northern one), the guide made a valiant effort to give more information on other aspects of plantation life, in which they recounted that yes, there were slaves at Oatlands, and they didn’t really know much about them or how many there were, but they DO know that they were treated VERY WELL.

This was some years ago, and I imagine that, since research and restoration is ongoing there, more information is probably now available.

The Bowery in Manhattan is so called because it used to be the common farming plot for the New Amsterdam colony, from “boer”.

Things change, some good, some bad.

Nearly everything USED to be something else.

The JTHG partnership itself began that way as a nonprofit advocacy group, but is probably now more accurately described as something nearer a GONGO, since its approval as part of S.2739, which can be read here:

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s110-2739&version=enr&nid=t0%3Aenr%3A924

See Title IV, subtitle A for specifics on the NHA.

They can have up to $1M a year, not to exceed $15M total at this time, and I believe the devil will be in the details of their mission authorizing them to draw up a “management plan”, to include “an inventory of the natural, historical, cultural, educational, scenic, and recreational resources of the National Heritage Area related to the national importance and themes of the National Heritage Area that should be protected, enhanced, interpreted, managed, funded, and developed”, and recommend policies for managing those resources.

There are protections delineated for existing entities, but those protections only apply to existing law.

What if the management plan draws up some new ones that recommend changes in existing law, and uses part of the $15M to get them passed, since its all about protecting a very broad pool of “resources”?

It is a big can of worms, and now that it is enabled, IMO it bears watching to see where it goes.

Not to mention, who is going to have the money (or maybe even the right?) to support a driving-based tourism opportunity if some of the same people who support this get their way with Copenhagen, cap and tax, the county energy plan, and so on?

Gee, have we just created a big pot of money for people who, HEY live in portions of this area to have their own federally-protected world?

Read some of the letters that appear in the local papers from people up north of Leesburg who would LOVE to see Route 15 actually become safer and more functional.

Not to mention some of the people who show up at transportation hearings to oppose any road that might offload traffic from now-officially hallowed 15, the de facto outer beltway.

It is a very nice sounding mess, and likely to grow.

Dans, I’m talking about some of the people who live in Lucketts who would like to be able to get out of their driveways, or have better shoulders on the road, or turn lanes, and are opposed every step of the way by others who feel that will help only commuters and should therefore be discouraged.

It is an attrition-based policy, and it gets somebody killed once in a while, unfortunately. And do the commuters and trucks go away?

No, because where can some of them go TO?

I think one of the best aids to 15 would be an alternate north/south that would take some of the more dangerous commercial and commuter traffic off, but every opportunity has been shot down as a “stealth outer beltway”, unfortunately resulting in 15 SERVING as one anyway.

The struggle between the Lucketts Ruritan and the Catoctin Coalition went on for years, and got quite ugly at times.

Dans, I agree that a lot of the push is against perceived new development, but when the fact that over the past twenty years, roads have been relentlessly removed from plans and the area has developed anyway–with very bad traffic too! How did that happen! lol–roads have to be a part of the solution, and some are years overdue.

Which also costs us a lot of money in the endless repeated studies, focus groups, legal challenges, and then the grossly higher cost of land and construction when (if) something finally gets settled.

Growth is going to continue to occur, and attrition-based “incentive” planning seems to be a recipe for continued disaster.

Moorefield Station, Loudoun’s first approved TOD, has horrible triggers–first 2500 units come with NO road improvements, and the subway isn’t here yet, which was the item that justified 6000 units in one square mile (thank you, 99 BoS).

New planning in NoVA seems to lean toward not providing parking, in order to encourage transit.

It will be interesting to see how that pans out.

How many will pay the ever rising tolls until the subway gets here?

I look deep into the dregs of my tea cup and see……TRAFFIC on our two lane roads!

wait, that’s the present…

lol