Environmental racism in energy siting, worker justice in chicken industry hell (hello, Eastern Shore!), reaction to Gov. Hogan's imperial decree about school schedules, and good news about wind power -- good reads you may have missed, for your Labor Day weekend leisure moments...

The folks at Maryland Reporter did a notably fine job of rounding up the reported responses around the state to Larry Hogan’s Trump-like decree that schools will not start till after Labor Day and end by June 15.  “We’re going to build a wall to protect summer vacation between June 15 and Labor Day – and we’ll make our children and teachers pay for it,” he did not say but might have.

 We have written about environmental justice and environmental racism in the PM BlogSpace, and it of course is an issue beyond the borders of our state. The decision about fracking still looms for Maryland after years of study and moratorium, and (as one scholar notes here) there’s “a national trend where the communities who benefit from (natural gas) extraction are very different from the ones who are getting its waste.” http://portside.org/2016-08-29/color-pollution-how-environmental-contamination-targets-people-color

 Maryland’s Eastern Shore is Chicken Land, a source of a significant amount of the nation’s chicken and eggs. And it’s also a near hell on earth for those who work there. An account from Alternet about the pervasive labor practices in the industry. http://www.alternet.org/labor/chicken-factory-owners-are-some-cruelest-employers-america-workers-share-horror-stories

This is wonkier than you can possibly imagine unless you are a regular reader of business pages. But the news about wind power is pretty positive: “Wind power is no longer an “alternative” source of energy. In fact, on many parts of the grid, it’s the cheapest energy around.” Wind’s future is meticulously plotted out for 2020 and beyond here in the insider newsletter Utility Dive, and it’s good to know about as Maryland faces its next round of evaluations of its role in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative with states to the north of us.

You can find our own blog posts on our website and recent ones compiled in Progressive Maryland’s most recent Weekly Memo

Be sure to like our Facebook page, because you can get notifications about the Weekend Reader (as well as our other posts) when it is posted there after it appears in the PM BlogSpace.