David Underhill's blog

Originally posted in New American Journal on March 20, 2016.

Photo: BP oil and chemicals make landfall during Gulf oil spill, May 8, 2010: Glynn Wilson

MOBILE, Ala. – Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Between these beginnings and endings comes water. You are mostly water. Remove it and only a sift of ash and grit remains.

Originally posted in New American Journal on December 13th

MOBILE, Ala. – If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the Paris climate conference just built an eight-lane freeway to Hades.

Originally posted in New American Journal on September 6th.

Originally posted in New American Journal on June 17th

MOBILE, Ala. – After a couple years trudging through the weeds and thickets of laws, regulations, technical standards, hazard assessments, health effects, economic impacts and other consequences of petroleum storage tanks, Mobile has arrived at nearly the same place it began this trek.

Photo: Cover Page from No Petro-Chemical Storage Tanks on Our West Bank–A Compendium of Citizen Concerns

Originally posted in New American Journal on May 13th

MOBILE, Ala. – Thoroughbreds charging around the final turn and down the homestretch. Blinders strapped on the sides of their faces to keep their attention on the finish line straight ahead. Preakness Stakes at Pimlico racetrack in Baltimore. Second leg of the Triple Crown later this week.

Image:  Horse and Human Blinders, by Walter Simon

Originally posted in New American Journal on June 18th 

Image: Translation of In God We Trust, by W. Simon

MOBILE, Ala – From the agenda for the Mobile County Commission meeting on June 19, 2014:

resolution authorizing the public display of the national motto “In God We Trust” in Government Plaza

Opposites appeared at opposite ends of Alabama on June 5. At the upper extreme a rally in Florence called for tar sands mining to stop before it begins. At the lower extreme of the state the energy industry staged a forum to which the public was invited — as spectators, not participants – in Mobile.

Mobile has lapsed into a coma. Whether it stays stupefied or recovers will indicate whether it wishes to continue existence as constant reruns of historic hallucinations or to create a liveable future.

Originally posted May 2nd in the New American Journal. The first foreign substance flowing into Mobile’s drinking water from the new crude oil pipeline is not oil. It’s mud — and whatever welding and other construction debris got stirred into the disturbed earth of the pipe’s broad right-of-way through the watershed of the metro area’s reservoir Big Creek Lake.

Photo: Plains Mobile Watershed Pipeline after the flood – Walter Simon

School Superintendent Instructs Adults in Non-Critical Thinking, Which Contributes to Environmental Injustice

Originally posted on New American Journal.