Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 49. Sunrise is 6:53 and sunset is 4:27 for 9 hours 34 minutes of daytime. The moon is new with 0.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1820, an 80-ton sperm whale attacks and sinks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America. (Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick was, in part, inspired by the incident.)
Whitewater has made progress on the condition of her two lakes, Cravath and Trippe. (The video above, from part of the November 18th meeting of the Whitewater Common Council, describes that progress.)
Toward the end of the last city administration, and one of the reasons it became the last city administration, there was community ire about the state of Cravath and Trippe Lakes following a botched drainage effort. There was more than one heated meeting at which residents complained about the sorry condition of our two lakes.
While the drainage effort was botched, the controversy illustrated four aspects of Whitewater’s community response: (1) a few longtime residents were for many years concerned about our lakes, (2) the drainage effort was not properly supervised, (3) many other longtime residents who ignored the lakes for years suddenly saw it as a crisis, and (4) there was a reflex among those longtime residents who ignored the lakes for years to blame the WI DNR or any other outside group they could. Residents who lived here for many years saw the lakes deteriorate over more than a decade. We did too little for too long. (My own limited writing about the lakes was too little to count as anything like vigilance.)
Our lakes, our responsibility.
Then came a few complaints that the current local government needed to fix the lakes — pronto — when we had, as a community, ignored them for many years.
As it has turned out, that local government and the dedicated residents who have helped them in this effort have done better than most would have expected in improving the condition of the lakes. (This includes treatments for the lakes better crafted than the prior slapdash scheme around the time of drainage.)
Not finished, but a work in progress. Not pristine, but better. (But then, pristine isn’t a steady natural state.)
Better is welcome.
NASA unveils close-up images of interstellar comet 3I/Atlas: