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Kaid Benfield's Blog

Issues: The Media and the Environment

Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008

May 14, 2008

Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , The Media and the Environment

Tags:
earthday, robert-rauschenberg

 Robert Rauschenberg was my favorite artist, certainly my favorite of those that have been well known.  I paid a small – well, actually, not so small – fortune for a signed screenprint of his LA Uncovered #7, image above, which...

How much the US will grow, and where: numbers and a map

May 12, 2008

Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , The Media and the Environment , U.S. Law and Policy

Tags:
development, growth-management, housing, population, projection, smart-growth, smartgrowth, sprawl

 The housing market may be in a slump right now - in part because we've been building too much sprawl - but over the next 25 years or so the US is going to experience rapid population growth, and the...

Greening LA

March 31, 2008

Posted by Kaid Benfield in Environmental Justice , Living Sustainably , The Media and the Environment

Tags:
architecture, cities, community, ecology, losangeles, urbanplanning

I'm so looking forward to reading Occidental College prof Robert Gottlieb's latest book, Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City (MIT Press, 2007).  It promises as much cultural as environmental enlightenment, examining, as the publisher puts it,...

Beneath the Roses – unsentimental small-town America

March 10, 2008

Posted by Kaid Benfield in Environmental Justice , Living Sustainably , The Media and the Environment

Tags:
disinvestment, gregorycrewdson, smalltowns, sprawl

 Ron Thomas, former director of the once-great Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, gets credit for alerting me to a riveting new book of photography, Beneath the Roses, by Gregory Crewdson.  As Esquire puts it in a highly adjectival review:  Cinematically lit....

Trouble the Water – a note from NOLA

March 9, 2008

Posted by Kaid Benfield in Environmental Justice , Health and the Environment , Living Sustainably , The Media and the Environment

Tags:
HurricaneKatrina, NinthWard, RegionalEquity08, TroubleTheWater

 Trouble the Water is the name of a new documentary film about the survivors of Hurricane Katrina.  At this point, I bet I’ve seen a half-dozen such films, but this one is the best.What sets it apart is that it...

Kaid Benfield
Kaid Benfield
Director, Smart Growth Program
Washington, DC
I was raised in the mountains of western North Carolina, surrounded by some of the...
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