We’ve all had a tough week, so let’s relax this evening to a nice story about NASA’s attempts to keep America’s Space Coast from being swallowed by the rising sea.
After soaking in the view for a few moments, Dankert, Hall and I climb down from the watchtower and drive south to Kennedy’s dune restoration site, which was completed in 2014 with federal Hurricane Sandy relief funds. Stretching a little over a mile between Launch Complexes 39A and 39B, the dune’s grassy slopes rise like lightly yeasted bread over the sprawling beach. If you didn’t know better, you might think the shoreline had looked this way for centuries.
“We’re drawing a line in the sand,” Dankert says.“The dune not only prevents storm surge from plowing inland, it’s a sand source that replenishes the beach.”
It’s an astonishingly low-tech barrier when you consider the artificial pumping systems installed at Miami Beach to keep the ocean at bay, or the enormous seawalls some experts think we’ll need to save Manhattan. But in protecting its shoreline, NASA is trying to be considerate of all of its residents. In addition to rockets, Kennedy is home to a stunning array of wildlife, from bobcats and coyotes to southeastern beach mice, scrub jays, and gopher tortoises. It’s a major nesting site for protected leatherback, green, and loggerhead sea turtles, with thousands of baby turtles born on this small stretch of beach each year.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—Welcome to the culture war against teachers, coming to a theater near you:
The campaign against teachers is special, and worth paying attention to. It's not like workers in general get much respect in our culture, at least not beyond vague lip service that only ever applies to the individual, powerless worker not asking for anything. And janitors, hotel housekeepers, cashiers, and a host of others could fill books with the daily substance of working in low-status professions, I'm sure. But right now, teachers are the subject of a campaign heavily funded and driven from the top down to take a profession that has long been respected by the public at large and make the people in the profession villains and pariahs, en route to undercutting the prestige, the decision-making ability, the working conditions, and, of course, the wages and benefits of the profession as a whole. What we're watching right now is a specific front in the war on workers, and one with immense reach through our culture—and coming soon to a movie theater near you if it's not already there, in the form of the poorly reviewed parent trigger drama Won't Back Down.
(That it's a war not just on teachers but on the workers of the future and on the government just sweetens the pot for many of the people waging the war.)