The US EPA remains in deep crisis. The industry wants a pliant agency or no agency at all. I worked for the EPA from 1979 to 2004.  I wrote Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA (with Mckay Jenkisn, Bloomsbury Press, 2014).  I am adding a link to a YouTube video of a recent conversation about EPA:    https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=fGmZlwKaOJ4

  Marble column showing an uprooted woman in honor of the hundreds of thousands of Greeks uprooted from Asia Minor. Park in Nikaia, near Piraeus, Greece. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos.   100-meter sprint   In 1960, I was a high school junior in Argostoli, Cephalonia, a Greek island in the Ionian Sea between Greece and Italy. In addition to my regular classes in science and humanities, I was also learning English. I had decided that, at the end of my senior year, I would leave Cephalonia and Greece for the United States for a college education.   My years in high school, 1956-1961, were the happiest in my life. I was thoroughly innocent of the dangers of the raging Cold War, though I had vague memories of the Greek Civil War, 1946-1949, from stories I heard.     I was an outstanding student. I excelled in athletics as well, especially in 100-meter sprint. My boyfriends were also athletes. We trained together and often, when the weather was nice, we walke...

  I was delighted that a Greek journalist, Achilleas Rodites, interviewed me about the reasons I wrote my book on the history of the Antikythera Mechanism, essentially studying how and why the ancient Greeks created this computer of genius 2,200 years ago. I spent about ten years in this book, starting with mythology, then philosophy, then science and, finally, politics, so I could understand the Greeks and their science and civilization.  I concluded the following: that the Greeks had a dream of a unified Cosmos made up of the sky and Earth working together in harmony and beauty. Pythagoras captured that dream beautifully. Add to that the science and vision of Aristotle passed on to Alexander the Great and the dream becomes real. Aristotle advised Alexander to unify Greece, which he did, then to conquer Persia because Persia, in the fourth century BCE, threatened freedom and democracy in Greece. Alexander defeated superior Persian armies and turned that vast empire into a Gre...