Next month, the state’s most important environmental/conservation organization plans to give Taft its award for lifetime achievement as a consistent backer of policies and programs for clean air and water. So the governor who skipped his green fees is being recognized as Mr. Green. The Ohio Environmental Council says it will bestow the honor Nov. 10 at its annual “Green Gala” in Columbus.

Taft is being seen in hindsight as the kind of R who wasn’t afraid of standing up for the environment. That is a rarity in today’s GOP, where Rush Limbaugh routinely denounces tree-huggers as enviro-fascists, and the EPA is widely portrayed as a jobs-killing hydra. Of course, few remember that Republican President Richard Nixon created the EPA. Nor do they seem to recollect that Teddy Roosevelt — when he wasn’t hunting elephants or elk — is the patriarch of the national park system.

Taft gets credit for taking on his own party, which recently considered tapping water from the Great Lakes. He had supported strict limits on withdrawing water from Great Lakes feeder streams for industrial and mining purposes — those streams replenished Lake Erie. Taft believed the Great Lakes were resources that needed more protection from special interests; they did not need more abuse and exploitation.

Taft also favored reauthorization of the federal Clean Water Act, and he wanted Superfund legislation fixed to add so-called “brown fields,” which were old industrial sites that could be cleaned and put back into use as commercial real estate. He supported an energy policy that would have 25 percent of all U.S. energy coming from renewable sources by 2025. He pushed natural gas companies to set aside funds to help low income families pay their heating bills.

As far back as 2003, Taft was urging governors and Congress to take drastic action to stop the spread of the Asian carp, the giant jumping fish that now are in the Ohio River near Cincinnati. He called such invasive species “perhaps the most serious and potentially destructive threat” to Ohio’s natural ecosystem. His warning about all the invaders came too true. Since then, Emerald Ash Borers have appeared and destroyed too much of Ohio’s forestland. And Asian longhorn beetles are on the march in Clermont County, where the Department of Natural Resources and Forest Service have drawn battle lines against the pest. Taft worried about water pollution, too. He said too many beaches were closed from bacteria and sewage, and he saw the solution as “not better information about when to close the beach, it’s not having to close the beach in the first place.”

So Taft is getting a thoughtful reappraisal. He may have been comfortable at play on the country clubs. But his reputation is coming back from low ebb.  

Newly restored digital copies of 73-year-old maps detailing where U.S military veterans are buried throughout Hamilton County will be unveiled Wednesday.

The Hamilton County Recorder’s Office recently received map books dating to 1939 that were thought to have been destroyed. Created by the Works Progress Administration, the map books register the burial location of every veteran in the county who had served dating back to the Revolutionary War.

The maps list details about area veterans who served in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the War with Mexico, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and World War I.

Eventually, the records were transferred to microfiche between the 1950s and ‘70s, and the map books were given to a local resident. The filmed copies began degrading over time and are of poor quality, causing problems for historians, genealogical researchers and others who tried to use them.

A member of the Ohio Genealogical Society ultimately acquired the original copies of the map books and presented them to the Recorder’s Office in February. Since that time, the office has worked to transfer the images to a digital format and enhance their quality. All of the images now are available on the Recorder’s Office website.

County Recorder Wayne Coates will unveil the newly restored records at 2 p.m. Wednesday. The event will be held in Room 205 of the County Administration Building, located at 138 E. Court St., downtown.

With all the blather about banning or restricting the construction of mosques in the United States because of Islam's alleged connections to terrorism, now is a good time to examine exactly what the religion is and what its central tenets are.

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Today is Veterans Day, which began as Armistice Day on Nov. 11, 1919, the one-year anniversary of the end of World War I. President Eisenhower formally made it Veterans Day in 1954.

HBO airs a new documentary film tonight, Wartorn: 1861-2010, focusing on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among U.S. soldiers as well as soldier suicides from the Civil War up through the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Actor James Gandolfini is the film's executive producer and conducts on-camera interviews. Watch a preview here.

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