Follow Up to Community Journalism

The Chapel Hill News and the Carrboro Citizen have both posted stories/blog entries on the Dan Coleman park incident since I questioned their failure to do so last week. Community journalism is alive and well in Carrboro and Chapel Hill!

Altar Call for True Believers

I loved Janisse Ray's first book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. And now she's done it again with a brilliant article in Orion Magazine, Altar Call for True Believers.

I want to see our communities get more and more localized, with more local food produced and consumed, more local goods bought and sold. I want to see local entrepreneurship and craftsmanship encouraged. I want a renaissance of the hands, so that we use fewer electrical gadgets and motorized tools.

I want to hear of an organization that decides, because of the climate crisis, to cancel its annual conference. I want to see us relying on the mail and conference calls and e-mail for corresponding with distant colleagues, and engaging more deliberately with our neighbors. I want to see us using petroleum as if it were precious, which is to say sparingly and wisely, driving shorter distances and less often; in fact, I want getting in a single-occupancy vehicle to be a last resort.

I want us to get radical. I want us choir members to make even the hardest decisions while holding the Earth in mind.

I want us to raise the bar for ourselves.

New Environmental Paradigm

A environmental assessment tool develop by Dunlap and Van Liere in 1978 to measure attitudes toward environmental protection and the development of a systematic way to address the increasing depletion of natural resources (carrying capacity). This new environmental paradigm contrasts with the dominant social paradigm which "reflects the view of the industrial era where economic and population growth and continued exploitation of natural resources can continue without damage to the environment." (Sussman)

The New Environmental Paradigm Scale

• We are approaching the limit of the number of people the earth can support.
  
• The balance of nature is very delicate and easily upset.
  
• Humans have the right to modify the natural environment.
  
• Humankind was created to rule over the rest of nature.
  
• When humans interfere with nature it often produces disastrous consequences.
  
• Plants and animals exist primarily to be used by humans.
  
• To maintain a healthy economy we will have to develop a "steady state" economy where industrial growth is controlled.
  
• Humans must live in harmony with nature in order to survive.
  
• The earth is like a spaceship with only limited room and resources.
  
• Humans need not adapt to the natural environment because they can remake it to suit their needs.
  
• There are limits to growth beyond which our industrialized society cannot expand.
  
• Mankind is severely abusing the environment.

Community Journalism?

Community journalism is defined as "reporting of news and information for a certain geographic area... a community, if you will, with the purpose to serve the best interests of that certain group....'Make them happy... make them mad... but whatever you do... make them think.'"

Chapel Hill and Carrboro are served by two newspaper conglomerates, the Herald Sun and the News and Observer, both of which allocate a page to goings-on in each county within their service area. The N&O also owns the subsidiary Chapel Hill News, which covers Orange County in more detail. The most recent addition to the local media scene is the Carrboro Citizen which promised to provide more in depth coverage of local politics and arts. And then there are the broadcast media.

With all this coverage, you would think that our local news would be covered with more than a cursory nod. So where is the coverage on alderman Dan Coleman's assault with a deadly weapon? Both the N&O and the Herald covered the story the day after the incident, although the Herald omitted the fact that it occurred during a Carrboro High School cross country meet. Three days later the Carrboro Citizen still hasn't updated it's electronic version, as it did promptly when John McCormick was arrested.

The police have 5 written, eye-witness accounts to the incident, in addition to Dan's written statement and the verbal report made by the alleged victim. None of these individuals have been interviewed. Carrboro High has not been asked to confirm that an official cross country meet was underway and that Ms Kotecki was an authorized volunteer. Nor has Carrboro Parks and Recreation provided any confirmation that they knew the meet was taking place and that traffic could be disrupted. Isn't it the role of local media to confirm the facts of a case such as this? And yet we know nothing more than was reported the morning after the incident based.

The incident itself is distressing, but what I am more concerned about is this lack of media coverage. Dan was a regular columnist for the Herald prior to his appointment to the BOA and had frequent guest posts in the Chapel Hill News. More than likely he has friendships with the Carrboro Citizen editorial staff. Do these personal and professional ties explain the lack of investigation? This is an election year and Dan will be running for the first time. Will it be left to his detractors to cover this story on Squeeze the Pulp or other citizen-based outlets. Or will the press step forward and try to provide a more detailed and unbiased account?

Sometime back Fred Black wrote that the financial model of print newspapers precludes investigative journalism. And yet looking at the number of outlets dedicated just to Orange County, I find it hard to believe that staffing can explain this current failure. Is local journalism broken or just protecting one of its own?

Garden Quotes

I'm cleaning out all the dead plants from my garden today. Drought is brutal. Hopefully some of my native perennials have simply gone dormant and will return next year although I'm rethinking my entire garden design. Going to be looking for shrubs this fall. Even though I've been quite diligent about planting drought resistant perennials, they still need SOME water.

"I can't resist a pretty plant. When I see it, I want it, I buy it, take it home, and plant it where ever I can find a place. If I had a similar moral code when it comes to romance, I would be divorced several times over by now. That is the reason I grow a cottage garden. I can stick everything in with complete abandon and no discrimination whatsoever."
-- Cassandra Danz, Mrs. Greenthumbs Plows Ahead: Five Steps to the Drop-Dead Gorgeous Garden of Your Dreams

"Gardening... is a painstaking exploration of place; everything that happens in my garden--the thriving and dying of particular plants, the maraudings of various insects and other pests--teaches me to know this patch of land more intimately, its geology and microclimate, the particular ecology of its local weeds and animals and insects. ... Lawns work on the opposite principle. They depend for their success on the overcoming of local conditions."
-- Michael Pollan, Second Nature

"I sometimes believe that acknowledging a consciousness and a conscience within nature actually holds the last best hope for a humanity seemingly bent on destroying this fair Earth."
- Jim Nollman, Why We Garden: Cultivating a Sense of Place

Letter to the Editor: Sustainability

Excellent letter praising the county for creating the Lands Legacy Program in today's Chapel Hill News. But what I liked was the call to define sustainability in terms of Orange County in order to incorporate it, with metrics, into the comprehensive plan.

The next step should be to continue funding Lands Legacy, but also to define what sustainability means. With a broad commitment and emphasis on sustainability, the comprehensive plan should describe the processes by which the basic needs of our citizens are provided and protected without depleting the quality of life. It should set up an annual measurement of the natural and man-made indicators of sustainability, such as water supply and air quality, and add new ones like the supply of locally grown agricultural products and foods. This annual report would reflect the quality of our planning and our successes.

Sustainability is easy to talk about. Putting it into practice, balancing out the various aspects from affordability to environmental conservation, will require political leadership and collective action. Do we have will to pursue this challenge?