Page 10 RAIN October 1981 COMMUNITY The City That Works, (periodical) bimonthly, free, from: Community Renewal Society 111 N. Wabash Ave. Chicago, IL 60602 Short and sweet, this newsletter takes important issues of community development and examir~es them in brief but highly ACCESS enlightening articles. It's a wonder how much they're able to fit in 4-6 pages per . month. Each issue focuses on a specific topic. Recent issues·have included articles dealing with how schools can help alleviate the youth unemployment problem and the impact of Reagonomics on neighborhoods. The latter piece could have been a boring replica of every other article you've read on the subject-but instead was original and fact-filled. The editorial staff has a neighborhoodbased perspective that mistrusts bureaucrats and bankers alike, but attention to the local level doesn't keep them from writing intelligent, professional stuff. Best of all, though, are the delightful and pithy quotes sprinked through each issue, like this one from Lester Thurow: · l "My ethics tell me there is something wrong with cutting nutrition prograrr;is for poor pregnant women. Mr. Stockman's ethics tell him they are precisely the group whose benefits should be cut. Perhaps that is the difference between [my] learning ethics and economics in a department of economics rather than in a divinity school." -SMA I ,,_..,.....,.....C~.....C>4J-940.--Mc~~..-M..-M.-..C.-..C~~~J-9CC~J-9CC~) ENVIRONMENT ---------------- News of the Universe, edited by Robert Bly, 1980, 305pp., $7.95, from: Sierra Club Books 530 Bush Street San Francisco, CA 94108 There is a self-limiting quality to this book that I find disappointing. Sierra Club Books wanted to publish poems that could in some subtle manner encourage an ecological world view-the theory being that if we admit to a consciousness, a being-ness, in the universe outside the self, we may be more inclined towards respectfully keeping the whole thing humming along. Bly was a good choice as editor and commentator. His own poetry reflects what he calls "poems of two-fold consciousness" and he has dared to use his poetry to affect politics (most notably in his anti-Vietnam war work). But News of the Universe feels compromised, circumspect. Questions that are critical to his analysis of the spirital and political implications of a man-centered universe are mentioned and tiptoed around. Unbelievable is his condescending treatment of women. Bly, perhaps more than any living male poet, has explored the bonding of women to nature and the separation of the two from men. He's struggled to describe the imbalance of power following from that separation, and ' the loss to society in terms of cultural information from silencing women. So what went wrong? In this book he backslides. "It appears that in the male psyche; women, earth and the unconscious form a sort of constellation, or triangle. Usually the attitude a man has towards pne extends without his being aware of it, by secret underground channels, to the others .... If the details of nature were not worth observing closely, we can expect that the psyche of women will not receive much attention either." If the details of nature are worth "observing closely," can we speculate that the "psyche of women" merits some attention too? So where are all the women poets? There are only a handful in this collection. After writing a book like Sleepers Joining Hands (1973, Harper & Row) where he explored the separateness of man and the more female myths needed to unify the planet, how could he give such short shrift to women's version of the whole scheme? Is he trying to produce a nice, clean, simple (read unpolitical) book of nature poems? News of the Universe is a nice book. It won't ruffle any feathers or stir water into storms. -CC Sensitive Populations and Environmental Standards: An Issue Report, by Robert Friedman, 1981, 54pp., $5.00 plus $1.50 p&h, from: The Conservation Foundation 1717 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20036 This is worth plowing through-I suspect it may be one of the most important reports published this year. Focusing on the Clean Air Act (CAA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), ironically at a time when both are under attack, it raises key questions: Can air quality standards really protect the health of all Americans? Who will and will not be protected by environmental health and safety legislation? Can the legal requirements of CAA and OSHA be successfully implemented? Are the very concepts of "thresholds" and "margins of safety" archaic? To what degree is.society willing to protect its "most s.eri.sitive" groups (the very young, the aged, the infirm, and other susceptible individuals) I in light of limited resources and competing pressures? There are no proposals here as to·how to decide health standards. Instead, the nature of the problem is defined by analyzing current legal requirements and the policy dilemmas they pose. A valuable contribution to a complex and difficult debate, this report is a must for all those concerned with environmental health regulation and research. -MR
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