Economic Changes Over Time
You’ll never see an exhibit on this at SciTrek: Impact of Giant Meteor Felt in Georgia:
ATLANTA (AP) — A layer of quartz grains found in an east Georgia kaolin mine have been traced to the impact of a giant asteroid that crashed near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay 35 million years ago.
And why will you never see this exhibit (or any other) at SciTrek? Because SciTrek is closing; due in part to a lack of funding.
I wonder what State Superintendent of Schools, Kathy “Don’t Call It Evolution” Cox thinks about this move. She is after all, the mastermind behind the proposed changes to Georgia’s curriculum that would have stricken the word “evolution” from Georgia’s science curriculum and replaced it with the phrase “biological changes over time.”
Problem is, SciTrek’s been burning through funding for ages — long before the evolution debate reared its wilfully ignorant head again. DeKalb County has been able to maintain Ferbank and open SuperFernbank without (as far as I know) as many of the financial issues that SciTrek’s had.
It was great when it opened; problem is, everyone has since added nifty science museums — Birmingham has one, for example — and neither its location nor its content were good enough to overcome the lack of funding.
SuperFernbank would probably be the better place for anything on the giant meteor, though, since that seems to be the place for geologic/natural history.
Thanks for the comments.
Atlanta is known to keep institutions that but through money – MARTA (mass transit) immediately comes to mind.
Yes Fernbank is great, but in a city that claims to want to be an international city – 1 science museum!!! 1 science museum is great for a small city like Birmingham, but Atlanta??
It’s just another reason why I feel that Atlanta, the city I love, will forever be a suberb of an ATLANTA that doesn’t exsist. (hope that makes sense)
It’s a lot easier to justify burning money on a mass transit system, since it moves labor (and, in this case, is connected to the airport) than on a science museum, sadly.
My own theory is that Atlanta came of age as a city at the wrong time. Cities that predated it (NY, Chicago, San Francisco) benefited from strong-arm mayors and political machines that were able to make everyone go along with a new development whether they wanted to or not. Cities that postdated it (Charlotte, Memphis, maybe Seattle as well) have gotten used to the idea that a livable, workable downtown is an asset overall, and planned accordingly. Atlanta came of age in the 1970s, a time when everyone (in and outside Atlanta) was scared sh*tless of downtown. Obviously it grew in the 1980s and 1990s, but MARTA was introduced in the 1970s (precisely the wrong time for such a thing to be introduced), the professional sports teams all arrived in the late 1960s, a lot of the big hotels downtown were 1970s John Portman products. So we have a central city that grew in a period that started with the 1968 riots and ended with the Missing and Murdered Children cases. (My understanding is Detroit and Cleveland have had variations of the same problem.)
They’re starting to move away from that stay-away-from-downtown model — the Olympics, the development of GSU (which is the best thing to have happened to downtown, in my opinion), and now, maybe, Atlantic Station and the Aquarium — but the new downtown-okay! model hadn’t taken hold yet when SciTrek opened, and I think SciTrek suffered for it once the novelty wore off.
It’s not dead yet; Tech High is still there, for example. If they re-open hopefully they’ll be able to introduce some new features and establish themselves among the growing downtown attractions.
“It’s a lot easier to justify burning money on a mass transit system, since it moves labor ”
Intresting point – since it’s prcisely the lines and busses that move labor that the burning money is not being spent on….
(I’m actually gonna write more later) but here’s just an example. Last week I had to go to The King Plow Arts center and decided to take Marta. When I left KPAC to come back to the highlands I took the bus that goes to the Bankhead station. Now if ever there was a neighborhood in need of Mass transit to move labor, it’s this one.
So why was it that at 6:15 the station was packed and I waited 50 minutes for a train to come. But as I got back to the highlands the n/s line was running great as usual.
As a Marta rider for almost 10 years (even when I drove) the one thing I’ve noticed is that Marta butns money not where it needs to (to move labor) but… If I continue, I will digress into a whole rant about economics and race – so I’ll stop here…
BTW – ask a few Marta bus drivers how they feel about marta and whether it will be around for another twenty years and the answers may suprise you.
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