Woodie Guthrie, Big Government, Renewable Power, and Prairie Populism

Michael Tobis

Michael Tobis, editor-in-chief of Planet3.0 and site cofounder, has always been interested in the interface between science and public policy. He holds a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences where he developed a 3-D ocean model on a custom computing platform. He has been involved in sustainability conversations on the internet since 1992, has been a web software developer since 2000, and has been posting sustainability articles on the web since 2007.

It only takes a couple of generations for all our perceived immutable political alignments to get scrambled. Woody Guthrie’s federally funded paean to hydroelectricity stands as testimony.

More on this mind-boggling story here and here and here.

Woody wrote 26 songs celebrating electricity and democracy and populism and big government over the course of a month. The taxpayer was dinged for this to the tune of ten dollars and a quarter per song.

Comments:

  1. The Department of Interior still funds interesting work. The project I worked on last year is a case in point. I am starting a blog around an environmental modeling server that we got funded from the DOI as an open source project.
    http://ContextEarth.com

    The last read on Woody Guthrie is inspiring. They got a deal out of it, didn't they?

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