“We talk about agribusiness and corporate farming as something to be regretted,” muses environmental historian William Cronon in Illinois Issues (April). “If those farmers have the option of selling their land to a developer or selling to a neighbor with four farms–that [neighbor] is a corporate farmer–I’d have to say I’d rather have [the latter] going on than suburban tract development. Making our peace with some increase in the scale of individual farms is one of the ways to protect the agricultural countryside from urban sprawl.”
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Need to know. The 15-year-old Chicago-based Information Technology Resource Center notes in a recent report that last year, for the second year in a row, database courses were the most popular offering in its hands-on training for nonprofits, surpassing even word processing.
“A three-network, one-month-long sample from 1997 revealed that 74% of [news] stories showed the doings of Whites exclusively, and in most of the rest, Whites were the dominant actors,” writes Robert Entman in “Race and the Media: A Decade of Research,” a paper prepared for the Human Relations Foundation of Chicago (September 27). “We see here the outlines of the way media help construct the prototypical Black person….He or she is an entertainer, sports figure, or object of discrimination. Looking at the data in a different way, we found that Black experts (defined as scientists, professors, think tank personnel and the like, professional persons unaffiliated with government) spoke 14 times. In comparison, White non-governmental professionals made 496 assertions.”
