Word: local
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...only natural, therefore, that Columbus people should have taken to gourmet cooking with the gusto of Fellow Ohioan Ulysses S. Grant taking Vicksburg. Ohio State offers for credit classes in French, Italian, German and Chinese cuisine. The International Wine and Food Society has a thriving local chapter, which produces an annual banquet. Cooking classes have lately sprouted in a number of private homes, as well as in a few well-stocked local emporiums such as the French Market and the Cook's Palace...
Like many protest movements, the antinuclear battle began on the local level. Loosely knit coalitions of environmentalists, '60s rebels, disaffected youths, and newly politicized Middle Americans began organizing to fight power plants sprouting in their backyards. Three years ago, there was the Clamshell Alliance harassing the unfinished nuclear plant in Seabrook, N.H. More than a dozen other local alliances followed, named Oyster Shell and Conchshell, Catfish and Abalone. They formed loose ties with scientists unhappy with the handling of the country's nuclear-power program, such as the Cambridge-based Union of Concerned Scientists. The movement affected...
...days after the incident, plans for a march were made at a hastily called meeting in Washington, sponsored by Nader's group. "This represented a real turning point for the movement," says Tim Massad, one of the organizers. "Before this we had a network of groups on the local level. But now we see people directing mass action at the President and Congress, the people ultimately responsible for Harrisburg, instead of individual utilities." The "May 6 Coalition" initially raised $20,000 from foundations such as the Stern Fund and other private contributors, and collected $100,000 at the march...
Business groups are also becoming increasingly more effective in indirect lobbying at the grassroots level. The Chamber of Commerce maintains a network of 1200 local Congressional Action Committees which can generate enormous letter-writing and telegram-sending campaigns. It was just such a business-inspired campaigns that helped defeat the Agency for Consumer Protection in the 95th Congress and led Speaker Tip O'Neill (D-Mass.) to declare that he had "never seen such extensive lobbying" in his political career...
WHILE THE authors try to deflect these criticisms, their own position, especially in light of some questionable applications, is not entirely convincing. Thom writes that "our use of local models...implies nothing about the 'ultimate nature of reality'." His catastrophe theory purported not to "explain" phenomena but merely to describe them--a crucial distinction the authors, as well as other proponents, refuse to make. If the mark of a science is both to explain and to predict phenomena, and catastrophe theory often does neither, a re-evaluation of its worth may be in order...