The main page of the Environmental Protection Agency’s website offers a mapping feature called MyEnvironment (scroll down just a bit and you’ll find it on the left hand side), which allows you to learn quickly a whole range of environmental facts about virtually any location nationwide. Just enter a zip code, an address, a city or county name – say, for example 67060 – and you’ll find a wealth of environmental information, ranging from today’s air quality index, ozone forecast, particulate matter forecast, and ultraviolet index, to superfund and brownfields links, maps of industrial site reporting to the EPA, low birth weight statistics and cancer risk estimates for aerial toxics, streamflow level data, local water conditions, and much more. Here’s a page that explains in detail what’s available and how you can put it to use.
County-Level Unemployment
Slate Magazine offers a very illuminating county-level nationwide interactive map which shows cumulative job losses (or gains) from January 2006 through February 2009, using the Department of Labor’s Local Area Unemployment Statistics (which lists Kansas with a 6.1% unemployment rate as of March 2009).
Sedgwick County, despite adversity, appears as a relative oasis on the map, with job gains of 8,894 jobs from January 2006 to January 2007, job gains of 3,039 jobs from January 2007 to January 2008, job gains of 1,468 from January 2008 to January 2009, and even a net gain of 296 jobs from February 2008 to February 2009. In sharp contrast, the nation as a whole shows net losses of 4,197,371 jobs during that last period alone.
Ulysses S Grant
Today is the 187th anniversary of the birth of Ulysses S. Grant, victorious commanding general in the American Civil War and eighteenth president of the United States.
For more information on Ulysses S. Grant, see our earlier review of Josiah Bunting III’s Ulysses S Grant, as well as excerpts from that work posted here, here, and here.
