Chris Hardie's Blog

In yesterday's Palladium-Item, editorial board member and local blogger Matthew Hisrich proposed that eating locally, and other kinds of localized consumption behaviors, might be ineffective, or even bad for us:
[W]here does this drive for relocalizing come from? Perhaps it has to do with a vague sense of ethical rightness more than anything scientifically verifiable. University [...]

It's not April first yet, so I couldn't really stop my jaw from dropping to the ground on this one: The Richmond-Wayne County Chamber of Commerce and the City of Richmond will be holding a press conference tomorrow afternoon to promote buying local - to be held at the mall, which is predominantly [...]

One of the recurring themes in my writing in speaking about how to make our communities more self-reliant is that we can't necessarily depend on entities and organizations that aren't locally rooted to address the issues that are of local concern. The natural corollary to this is that, in addition to individual citizens taking [...]

I don't feel guilty for not blogging for a while, no I sure don't. Guilt is certainly not why I'm posting a bunch of random (but great) links for you to look at. Nope, not at all:

Hospitality for the Coming Age: Sharing in the midst of scarcity: Anna Lisa's new blog chronicling her [...]

It's been a while since I posted one of these, here are a few highlights from my Delicious link feed:

Dave Pollard's process flowchart for blogging [GIF]
travis poling, the blog - A new blog by Travis, who's taking blogging to a new level
Bikes as Transportation - A new blog by Mark, locally based but globally [...]

This is a republishing of a series of blog posts looking at the pal-item.com Terms of Service, discussing what they actually mean and how they might impact your use of the Palladium-Item website.  (The Palladium-Item is Richmond, Indiana's daily newspaper.)  You can view the original posts where they appeared on the Pal-Item site: Part 1, [...]

On Wednesday this week, I experienced the great joy of being a part of what might have been Richmond's first 100-Mile Radius Potluck - where all of the ingredients in the dishes you bring come from within 100 miles of Richmond. It was a great success, with delicious food, good company, and a strong [...]

When you hang around with Jim Hair, you sometimes find yourself thrust into the middle of interesting artistic and cultural experiences you hadn't planned on. That happened today, when he suggested I be an interview subject in a news segment produced by NewsLink Indiana out of Muncie about the forthcoming party to celebrate the [...]

We've recently returned from a three-week road trip through the U.S. It covered around 5,400 miles spread over about 85 hours in the car and a 7,000-foot elevation change, with an average speed of 64.0 mph (max of 90.8 mph), across around 13 states, and using countless gallons of gasoline.
It's the kind of trip [...]

Last week, the Palladium-Item - Richmond's daily paper - launched an updated website. Here's my initial review:
Good:

The site clearly continues the paper's commitment to encouraging conversations and interaction between people who track what's going on in the community. As I did in 2006, I commend them for this.
The abuse reporting system in the [...]