CLEAR March 2013

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UN Marks 1st Internat'l Day of Happiness March 20
by Duane 21 Mar '13

21 Mar '13

http://www.opednews.com/populum/ UN Marks 1st Internat'l Day of Happiness March 20th . . . Happy Days are here again, the skies above are CLEAR again, Let us sing a song of cheer again, Springtime is here again! d.g.n. Don't worry, be happy by Meryl Ann Butler The United Nations has proclaimed March 20, 2013, the First International Day of Happiness. The initiative to declare a day of happiness came from the Kingdom of Bhutan -- a country with a Gross National Happiness Index. Bhutan promotes the concept that sustainable development should take a holistic approach towards progress and give equal importance to non-economic aspects of well-being. It's a big idea from a tiny, landlocked country in the Himalayas. The term "Gross National Happiness" was coined in 1972 by Bhutan's fourth Dragon King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, according to the wiki. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon notes, On this first International Day of Happiness, let us reinforce our commitment to inclusive and sustainable human development and renew our pledge to help others. When we contribute to the common good, we ourselves are enriched. Compassion promotes happiness and will help build the future we want. The U.S. Constitution acknowledges the right to the pursuit of happiness. Positive News website reports: A raft of events and activities will take place on 20 March 2013 to mark the day itself. There is the Happy Lunch event in Brussels, for example, or the thought-provoking Economics of Happiness conference in Australia. Those in Washington DC can expect a flood of happiness when the free hugs flashmob takes over, and passers-by at London's Liverpool Street train station will be inspired by groups of people holding up boards and banners with positive messages written on them. One of the most ambitious events is the launch of Happathon, a 12-month effort to crowdsource a new definition of wellbeing and what makes people happy. The project will then create the digital tools to use this information to drive global contentment and build a new economy based on a more holistic sense of value. Action for Happiness notes that it is a movement for positive social change. We're bringing together people from all walks of life who want to play a part in creating a happier society for everyone and offers 10 Keys to Happier Living. Flowchart for Happiness by Meryl Ann Butler Studies show that happier people are healthier, live longer, and are better at solving problems. click here Deepak Chopra and Oprah Winfrey by Chopra Center Deepak Chropra and Oprah Winfrey are currently offering a free, online, 21-day meditation event, that offers an oasis of peace and wellbeing. The event started on Monday, March 11, but participants may sign up for free at any time during the 21 days. The 16-minute meditations are available for free for 10 days after they are posted. Duane Nichols, Cell- 304-216-5535.

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Re: [CLEAR] Cheat Lake Environment and Recreation Association WEB-PAGE proposed
by Reger-Nash, Bill 15 Mar '13

15 Mar '13

I concur Sent from my HTC on the Now Network from Sprint! ----- Reply message ----- From: "Duane330(a)aol.com" <Duane330(a)aol.com> Date: Thu, Mar 14, 2013 6:46 pm Subject: [CLEAR] Cheat Lake Environment and Recreation Association WEB-PAGE proposed To: "clear(a)osenergy.org" <clear(a)osenergy.org> To: CLEAR members and friends: MESSAGE FROM DONNA WEEMS: I vote that we vote to pay Jonathan Rosenbaum $300 to develop a CLEAR website, train Peggy Pings, Donna Weems and any other board member on how to use it., and set up a CLEAR facebook page. I also vote that we pay him an additional $60 a year to host the website on his server and pay him $25 / hr for additional work. Thank you Peggy for organizing. Donna Weems, March 14, 2013. PLEASE REPLY TO THIS EMAIL BY VOTING: Yes, I agree with Donna. No, let's save our money. P.S. We currently have more than adequate funds in our bank account to pay these fees.

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Cheat Lake Environment and Recreation Association WEB-PAGE proposed
by Duane330＠aol.com 15 Mar '13

15 Mar '13

To: CLEAR members and friends: MESSAGE FROM DONNA WEEMS: I vote that we vote to pay Jonathan Rosenbaum $300 to develop a CLEAR website, train Peggy Pings, Donna Weems and any other board member on how to use it., and set up a CLEAR facebook page. I also vote that we pay him an additional $60 a year to host the website on his server and pay him $25 / hr for additional work. Thank you Peggy for organizing. Donna Weems, March 14, 2013. PLEASE REPLY TO THIS EMAIL BY VOTING: Yes, I agree with Donna. No, let's save our money. P.S. We currently have more than adequate funds in our bank account to pay these fees.

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Message From the Point Marion River Town Action Team
by Duane 14 Mar '13

14 Mar '13

A belated thanks to all who came out for our community celebration last Thursday. Following a short trail walk and photo opportunity, over 80 people gathered at the Jordan Building on Penn Street to celebrate the receipt of a $120,000 grant that will allow design and remediation work to begin on the Sheepskin Trail from the West Virginia state line to the Cheat River Bridge in Point Marion. Fayette County and the National Road Heritage Corridor have partnered with elected officials and other organizations to secure the grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation. Fayette County Commission Chairman Al Ambrosini said that the county is now poised to earmark $30,000 from its portion of the hotel tax fund toward the additional $150,000 needed to construct the trail. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2014. Local residents and trail supporters can contribute to trail construction by sending donations to the National Road Heritage Corridor, 65 West Main Street – Suite 103, Uniontown, PA 15401. Make your tax deductible donation payable to NRHC and in the memo area write Sheepskin Trail. Community support is essential. This money can be used to secure matching grants from government and private organizations. Please help bring the Sheepskin Trail to Point Marion. After 20 years of work from many dedicated volunteers, the wait is almost over! Mark your calendars for Saturday, March 23, and KEEP PENNSYLVANIA CLEAN. Come to the Point Marion Community Park anytime from 9AM to 1 PM to pick up trash bags and gloves. Then spread out through the borough to pick up trash on public streets and along the old rail corridor (or the new Sheepskin Trail!). Refreshments will be served at the park at 1:00. For more information contact victoriaevans109(a)gmail.com Let’s get the town looking good for Spring! From the Point Marion River Town Action Team

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Happy Trails to You
by Duane 12 Mar '13

12 Mar '13

DOMINION POST Sunday 10 March 2013: GUEST COMMENTARY Rail-trail has changed life in our town BY STEVE SELIN I appreciated the recent Goodwill City (DP-Feb. 7) article about the formation of the Monongahela River Trails Conservancy (MRTC) and the 48 mile rail-trail we enjoy here in our backyard. Twenty years later, the goodwill continues. In many ways, the trail has transformed life here in Morgantown, turning the Monongahela River into a recreational and economic asset after years of neglect and abuse. The trail has also encouraged healthy, active lifestyles as commuters, families, and lovers have rediscovered their bikes, running shoes, and rollerblades, leaving their cars behind. The trail has also emerged as a catalyst for riverfront revitalization in the downtown area, Wharf District and Star City. Not that managing a 48-mile linear park is easy! Landslides, downed trees and vandalism are a constant challenge to the unique partnership between MRTC, the city of Morgantown (BOPARC), and the Monongalia County Commission charged with maintaining and enhancing the trail. Hats off to Ella Belling, the executive director of MRTC, who has provided sustained leadership and vision for the trail. Through Belling’s prolific grant-writing efforts, MRTC and BOPARC recently were awarded more than $200,000 of federal dollars to resurface sections of the Deckers Creek Trail and stabilize part of the trail being undercut by Deckers Creek. Mark Wise, Director of BOPARC, and the city of Morgantown, also deserves much praise for their stalwart support of the trail. The BOPARC maintenance crew is constantly trimming back the encroaching brush, clearing out culverts, and replacing gates and benches damaged by vandals. Our daily enjoyment of the trail depends heavily on this maintenance crew. Eldon Callen and the Monongalia County Commission are to be commended on their long-term support of the trail. Callen’s legal advice for the trail and the commission’s annual support has been invaluable to maintain the trail at a high standard, particularly outside the city limits of Morgantown. Finally, Mayor Allen Sharp and the community of Star City have demonstrated remarkable vision in realizing the potential of the trail by revitalizing their Riverfront Park and developing the recreational potential of the old Quality Glass site. Now, you can see that it takes everyone working together to manage a first-class trail system! None of this would be possible without the hundreds of volunteers who turn out to help maintain and enhance the trail. For example, an Eagle Scout project recently added a new weather shelter near Little Fall on the Mon River Trail that now offers trail users a place to rest and shelter from storms. The future looks bright for the Mon River Trails. Perhaps the most exciting new connection will be the completion of the northern extension of the trail into Pennsylvania. Anyone who’s ridden to Apple Annies for breakfast or their famous cakes and pies knows what I’m talking about! So, let’s work together to realize the great potential of the Mon River Trails. Become a Mon River Trails Conservancy member and help the rail-trail. Learn more at our website: montrails.org. Our future success rests squarely on the goodwill of all of us. STEVE SELIN is an avid trail user and a MRTC board member. This commentary should be considered another point of view and not necessarily the opinion or editorial policy of The Dominion Post

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PHOTO CONTEST ENTRY. Wonder Falls, Big Sandy River, CHEAT Watershed
by Duane 07 Mar '13

07 Mar '13

Kayak full face maneuver on Big Sandy in Preston County northern WV. Duane Nichols, Cell- 304-216-5535.

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-- We Should All Celebrate Aldo Leopold
by Duane 04 Mar '13

04 Mar '13

http://www.poncacitynews.com/Shribman2013-03-03T01-58-16 "We Should All Celebrate Aldo Leopold" David M. Shribman, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 3-3-2013 Maybe nothing much is going on right now in your hometown, but that’s not the case in Batesland, S.D. (population 108), and in the Wisconsin towns of La Crosse, Fond du Lac and New London. They’re all marking Aldo Leopold Weekend, and we should, too. Aldo Leopold Weekend — officially so designated in Wisconsin but informally marked elsewhere — comes only once a year, and it is a time for reflection and action, all in honor of one of the poets laureate of the conservation movement, a man much forgotten by the general public but much revered among those who believe, as he did, that there are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm — that you might think breakfast comes from the store and that you might believe heat comes from the furnace. Pick up your copy of his classic “A Sand County Almanac” — all libraries have one, several schools do, and those who love nature writing own at least one volume — and pause for a moment on his foreword, written precisely 65 years ago Monday. There is more wisdom in those 13 paragraphs than in a dozen 300-page works that have won the National Book Award. Pause for a moment on the second paragraph: Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher “standard of living” is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. Leopold’s book is a meditation on wild things and on the cost of civilization. Long before the word “ecology” moved from the natural-history and zoology faculty in the late 19th century to the front pages of newspapers in the late 1960s, this U.S. Forest Service supervisor, University of Wisconsin professor of game management and long-selling author (2 million copies in print) preached the precepts and values of this discipline, which he viewed in moral as much as in scientific terms: That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics … Our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. Can it be a coincidence that his masterwork was completed in the same year (1948) as “Northern Farm,” Henry Beston’s chronicle of a year in Maine, written from Chimney Farm in Nobleboro, where he lived with his wife, the equally sagacious Elizabeth Coatsworth, a Buffalo girl who won the Newbery Medal in 1931 for “The Cat Who Went to Heaven” but is best remembered in our house for her musings about rural New England? Henry Beston may be better known for “The Outermost House,” written in 1928 from Cape Cod, but I have always been drawn to “Northern Farm,” which he concludes by observing that “(w)hat has come over our age is an alienation from Nature unexampled in human history. It has cost us our sense of reality and all but cost us our humanity.” That is the Leopold insight as well. Leopold and Rachel Carson (who once said Beston was the only writer who influenced her) are almost always cited as the founding father and mother of the modern environmental movement. Open Beston’s book at random and you’ll encounter reflections like this, on page 24 of my well-loved paperback edition, now 39 years old: If there is one thing clear about the centuries dominated by the factory and the wheel, it is that although the machine can make everything from a spoon to a landing-craft, a natural joy in earthly living is something it never has and never will be able to manufacture. Like Beston, Leopold was a great observer. He contemplated field sparrows, wrens, even the beautifully named prothonotary warbler, the latter very much at home in a hole carved by a woodpecker. He made friends with the wahoo, red dogwood, hazel and bittersweet, dismissed by the less discerning as mere brush. He noticed how the wild blackberries glowed along boggy streams like red lanterns. He found that the winds of November were in a hurry. In all, the farm woodlands provided him with what he called “a liberal education,” for he concluded that “(t)his crop of wisdom never fails.” Here’s some of that wisdom, beautifully captured in a new edition published this month by the Library of America: If you are thriftily inclined, you will find pines congenial company, for, unlike the hand-to-mouth hardwoods, they never pay current bills out of current earnings; they live solely on their savings of the year before. In this month of March the “small-talk and neighborhood gossip among pines” told Leopold that a well-fed deer is too lazy to reach up beyond 4 feet for his feast of branches but a really famished one will reach as high as 8 feet. “Thus,” he wrote, “I learn the gastronomic status of the deer without seeing them, and I learn, without visiting his field, whether my neighbor has hauled in his cornshocks.” (Lest you think this sort of wisdom, rare in any age, has no equal in our time, let me recommend “Reading the Forested Landscape” by Tom Wessels, perhaps the best nature book of our century.) Some 65 years later, Leopold tells us that a “March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward, ear cocked for geese.” The other day I was in the country and looked skyward and saw snow-laden clouds at war with the sun. The snow won. All was right with the world, softened by the white. Leopold, who prided himself on knowing how a mountain thinks, saw man as merely the newest animal on the prairie he came to love, intervening by depriving the land of its onetime ally, fire. He reminds us that the great John Muir felt the same thing. “Had there been no fires,” wrote Muir, “these fine prairies, so marked a feature of the country, would have been covered by the heaviest forest.” This led Leopold to tell us that he who owns a bur oak, so prominent in southern Wisconsin, “owns a historical library, and a reserved seat in the theater of evolution.” The amazing thing is that he saved a seat for us in that theater. Sit back and watch the action. It’s Aldo Leopold Weekend. David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette

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CLEAR March 2013