To help celebrate Arizona’s centennial, there is a new web portal that “offers a tour of the people, places, and events that defined our past and are shaping our future. The Arizona Experience is your passport to Arizona’s hidden treasures. Interactive features allow you to customize your tour. Visit Arizona’s iconic landscapes, listen to the oral histories of descendants of early explorers, settlers, and miners, or discover how our leading innovations in biotechnology, alternative energy, and high-tech products are creating a promising tomorrow. Each month during the 2012 Centennial year will launch a new theme to showcase the 48th state.”

The theme for March is mining and minerals.  The features include:

Mining Arizona’s Metals – interactive map of active mines in Arizona, Morenci mine flyover, and surface and underground mining techniques slide show.

Rock Products – Building Arizona – interactive cement plant tour, map with  locations and mineral commodities of more than 300 quarries or mines, videos and photo gallery.

Featured Artist – World renowned mineral photographer Jeff Scovil presenting a photo gallery of some of his best images of Arizona minerals, as well as a short video on “how to photograph minerals”.

Miners Story – Video gallery of the men and women of San Manuel recounting their experiences living and working in one of Arizona’s historic mining communities.

H. Mason Coggin Photo Collection – Arizona historic mines and miners photo gallery.

The Arizona Experience is a dynamic, multimedia, 4D web environment with interactive maps, hundreds – soon to be thousands – of images, historical time-lines, flyovers of iconic landscapes, interviews with Arizona leaders, featured artists, hours of videos – onsite and at the Arizona Experience YouTube channel, and oral histories that capture the experiences of the men and women that shaped the state.

According to Dr. Michael Conway of the Arizona Geological Survey, “We used Microsoft Research’s new Layerscape visualization software to produce the 3D flyovers, and we worked closely with ESRI to broadcast interactive maps that incorporate spatial data, content, interactive timelines, and photo galleries.  These dynamic tools and extraordinary content are tailor made for teachers challenging their students to explore Arizona’s past, examine its present, and imagine its future.”

Take a few minutes to look over the home page, and sample the various features.  There is more to it than initially meets the eye.  There are lots of nooks and crannies that bring up very interesting material.

Click on http://arizonaexperience.org/ to start your tour.

Last year in January, President Obama pledged a new get-tough policy on over-regulation.  In the year since that pledge the feds have imposed 32 new major regulations which will cost almost $10 billion annually along with another $6.6 billion in one-time implementation costs.

The Heritage Foundation has a new report which documents the regulatory regime of the Obama administration.  The abstract reads:

During the first three years of the Obama Administration, 106 new major federal regulations added more than $46 billion per year in new costs for Americans. This is almost four times the number—and more than five times the cost—of the major regulations issued by George W. Bush during his first three years. Hundreds more regulations are winding through the rulemaking pipeline as a consequence of the Dodd–Frank financial-regulation law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s global warming crusade, threatening to further weaken an anemic economy and job creation. Congress must increase scrutiny of regulations—existing and new. Reforms should include requiring congressional approval of major rules and mandatory sunset clauses for major regulations.

See the full report here.   It seems that there is a great difference between rhetoric and reality.

See also:

The economy, the deficit, and the blame game

“Sustainable development” and “sustainability” have become mantras of environmentalists, the UN, federal, state, and local governments, and even some corporations that strive to be politically correct. The City of Tucson has an Office of Conservation and Sustainable Development. Perusal of that site shows that City bureaucrats and administrators have swallowed carbon-dioxide flavored Kool-Aid and sing Kumbaya to each other.

Sustainable development (aka Agenda 21) has its origins in a United Nations program.  Henry Lamb of Sovereignty International traces its history in an article in Canada Free Press:

Agenda 21 was developed over a period of time, traceable from the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Environment, which identified “environmental protection” as the world’s greatest problem, and gave the world the U.N. Environmental Programme, followed almost immediately by Nixon’s Executive Order that created the EPA.

Then came the 1976 U.N. Conference on Human Settlements, signed by the U.S., which proclaimed that “Public control of land use is…indispensable.” The next major step was the creation of the U.N. World Commission on Environment and Development in 1983, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland. The commission issued its final report in 1987, called Our Common Future. This document produced the concept and defined the term “Sustainable Development” to be: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

This rather ambiguous definition was spelled out in great detail in a 40-chapter, 300-page document titled Agenda 21, signed and adopted by 179 nations in 1992 at the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro.

A document from that 1976 UN conference states: “Land…cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice…”

From “Our Common Future” we find this definition: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

On the surface, that sounds all warm and fuzzy, perhaps even prudent.  But below the surface we find impracticality and an assault on private property rights and liberty.

Sustainable development invariably involves giving some central authority control over the economy.  The former Soviet Union is a good example of how badly that works.

The reason central planning doesn’t work is that we cannot know what the needs of future generations will be.  The concept of sustainable development is actually one of arrogance. How is your crystal ball working?

For instance, a sustainable development planner in the 1890s would seek to control whale oil for heating, rock salt for food preservation, and draft horses for transportation and agriculture. Fifty years ago, who would have considered the role rare earth minerals play in our current electronic age? Under the illogic of sustainable development, no generation has the right to use or draw-down the natural resource base given that a future generation has a claim on those resources, and the generation after that has a claim and so on, i.e., no resource rights exist for any generation.

Under sustainable development we have developed unsustainable, uneconomic “green” energy that would not exist without being heavily subsidized by a government that thinks it knows better.

Just a few years ago myopic academics were worried about “peak oil”, the imagined end to a resource upon which our civilization depends.  Then came shale oil and natural gas discoveries.

As a political philosophy, sustainable development will not accomplish “fairness” in seeing that everyone will get a fair piece of the pie, because under government control of resources, the pie will become much smaller.

On a resource conservation basis, sustainable development is a “glass-half-empty” philosophy. Only by maximizing knowledge, technology and wealth today, will we insure that the needs of tomorrow are met.   Ultimately sustainable development is itself unsustainable and anathema to a free society.