The board is a volunteer group of community members who meet regularly with the paper’s editorial staff to discuss issues facing our area, and to help ensure that the viewpoints expressed by the paper are the result of careful consideration and broad consultation.  In the end, it’s the Palladium-Item staff (and not the advisory board members) who craft the resulting columns, but Dale McConnaughay and others responsible for that task rely on the input received (and strong disagreements aired) through the board’s private conversations.  They also regularly invite community leaders to meet with the board for updates and discussion about projects underway.

This is a bit of an odd pairing, to be sure.  In the past I’ve not been shy in this space about pointing out some of the ways in which I think the paper could improve in its journalistic role in Richmond, and sometimes I’ve just plain disagreed with their editorial positions or the framing of their news stories.  I’m sure that there will be editorials written while I’m a board member that don’t represent my personal views.

But I’ve also found that the Palladium-Item and its staff have not only been willing to fully engage the constructive criticism it receives from me and others, they remain one of the most central spaces in our community for the exchange of information, ideas and conversation about the place we live.  One of my personal goals is to help raise the quality of public discourse in Richmond, Indiana, and so I’m honored by this invitation and look forward to serving.

Whether it is the 2009 Christmas Eve Senate passage of a huge, and hugely controversial, health care reform measure by Democrats narrowly controlling the U.S. Senate or, closer to home, Republicans and Democrats waiting until after a general election to craft their respective political handiwork, this is the stuff that alienates and isolates the public from those who have sworn to represent their best interests.

Through any such conversation we must of course be sensitive to Mr. Welch’s experience along the way.  I certainly wish him the best in recovering his health, and appreciate the years of time and service he has given to the Richmond community and the residents of District 5.  It’s not easy to be a political figure in the public spotlight even when you’re healthy, and so we know that it must have been particularly hard on Bing and his family to have health concerns and questions about his ability to serve in that role all mixed in together.

But when someone is elected to represent the interests of voters, their own story is not the only story that needs considering.  Calls for privacy and sensitivity are legitimate to an extent, but I think elected officials at any level should be held to a higher standard than private citizens when life events affect their ability to do their job.  When a health issue actually prevents someone from doing the job at all, or from making the case to voters that they should be re-elected, that’s when the interests of their constituents are most vulnerable, and the most in need of the protection that comes from extreme candor and accountability.

My perspective on this is hardly objective – I campaigned for most of a year for a seat on Council and now someone else will be selected after campaigning for part of an evening.  But one of the mantras repeated by candidates in all parties during the recent campaign was that in order to move Richmond forward, we have to be willing to have hard conversations about sensitive topics without taking it personally.   Talking about what’s best for the voters of District 5 and for City Council is one of those conversations, and those who would suggest that we shouldn’t go there because it might hurt the feelings of the Welch family, or who say that a thirst for information should be satisfied by just trusting that the right thing was done, are missing the point.

Make no mistake, no one is suggesting that any laws were broken or that the local Republican party isn’t well within its rights to caucus and appoint a new District 5 representative until the next election.  You could make an argument about what might be more ethical or “fair” to voters, but in this case and many others, “fair” doesn’t necessarily line up with what’s “legal” according to Indiana law or what’s strategic for a political party.  Like it or not, we have to respect that until the law is changed.

But the point the Pal-Item editorial makes (and that I agree with) is that if we want members of our community to feel like their voices matter in the course of electing and working with government leadership, then we must have a higher standard of transparency and communication on the part of those leaders.  If the motivating vision for would-be leaders in a political context is “win a victory at any cost” instead of “do the right thing for the community,” then we’re not going to make it very far as a city.

We don’t know what really happened behind the scenes with Mr. Welch’s health and subsequent decisions by his party about how to handle his seat on Council; their choice was to share as little information as possible, and only when repeatedly asked to do so.  In the absence of the information that should have been forthcoming, we’re left with the appearance that Bing Welch’s health issues were exploited for political gain, and there’s no forward motion for Richmond that comes from that.

[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 of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt classifies such efforts as attempts to attain (and potentially guilt others into) a sense of moral purity. “Food,” he says, “is becoming extremely moralized these days.”

The problem, of course, is that purity is hard to come by in a world as complex as ours, and simplistic answers often have consequences that their proponents do not intend. Consumers should think twice before jumping on the localvore bandwagon.

I’m all for thinking twice before jumping on any sort of wagon, but I think Mr. Hisrich’s logic is flawed in a number of places. Read on for my point-by-point analysis of his column:

In April, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University published a study in the journal Environmental Science & Technology that all of the transportation associated with the American food supply chain accounts for only 11 percent of foods’ climate impact.

You can view the full study online. The basic conclusion that they make is that the transportation of food isn’t as big a factor in carbon footprint as the production and other factors, and so that we might be able to reduce our footprint more by changing our diet — eating less meat and dairy, which create the most pollution — than we will by changing where it comes from.

This study seems well done, and convincing in its assertion that food miles are only one part of overall considerations when it comes to the environmental impact of food choices. Of course, carbon footprint is not the only reason many people like to eat local; there are lots of other benefits, including the relationships that come with knowing who is growing your food and how, and the proud self-reliance that comes from being able to eat off of the land we live on.

And, “It’s still useful to think about transport,” says David Pimentel of Cornell University, an ecologist who has conducted life-cycle analyses of food’s energy use. He recently calculated that if a typical American drives home with a 1 pound can of corn, 311 calories of fossil fuel energy are used to transport the 375-calorie corn in the can.

In fact, by focusing on local production, emissions may actually rise. This is because growing foods in the conditions best suited to their production can often offset the relatively small impact of transportation. In the United Kingdom, for instance, fewer emissions are released by importing milk and apples from New Zealand and tomatoes from Spain than devoting the energy and resources necessary to produce them locally.

One of the core tenets of the local food movement is not only to eat food that is produced locally, but to avoid foods that can’t be produced locally. Mr. Hisrich is correct that if we try to grow avocados and oranges here in Indiana in the dead of winter, we’ll of course use much more energy to do that than someone growing those foods in a climate naturally suited for it. So while the point is technically correct, it unfairly ignores some of the ethos of the local foods movement – few people are suggesting we try to grow every kind of food here just to satisfy our “exotic” cravings.

[W]hat the growing local advocates encourage often has less to do with an actual weighing of the costs and benefits of local farming than it does with a value judgment about what should be good for rural economies. While one might be able to argue that eating local improves the lot of a particular group, it is more difficult to argue that spending more for local produce improves the economic well-being of either local shoppers or the local economy as a whole.

I’d ask Mr. Hisrich to back that assertion up with some data, the “actual weighing of costs and benefits” of which he speaks. By definition, dollars that are spent on locally produced goods and services, given to vendors that live and work here, are dollars that will tend to stay in the geographical region to be spent again on other locally produced goods and services. This is why every economic development organization in the state works to bring businesses to their towns that will pay good wages to local workers who will then turn around and spend it locally. This is why local currency and time banks are popping up everywhere, and why our own Chamber of Commerce has a “buy local” program. Just because we’re talking about food, the principles don’t become any more mysterious.

What about impoverished farmers in developing countries who merely seek the chance to compete on a level playing field? This movement provides advocates of protectionism another rhetorical tool in their effort to prevent that from happening.

Quite to the contrary, the local food movement is part of a larger cultural perspective that seeks to remove the artificial protections that prevent people from sustaining themselves on their own land-base. If you take into consideration the subsidies, trade tariffs, import/export controls, immigration policies, monopolies and compulsory price controls, and injustices related to wage and labor standards that help create the “impoverished farmer in a developing country” in the first place, it’s clear that the leveling of the playing field needs to happen well before we get to the buying choices of the end consumer.

By encouraging communities to be more self-reliant, we actually help all communities move toward being able to make a sustainable living for themselves.

John Cloud, however, points out that local does not necessarily mean safe. When he asked Joseph Mendelson III, legal director of the Center for Food Safety, a liberal Washington group that supports strong organic standards, whether local food should be favored, Mendelson replied, “I don’t know what local means. Do they use local pesticides? Does that mean the food is better because they produce local cancers?”

This is an unnecessarily flippant remark in a serious conversation, but I’ll address it anyway. Not every local food effort advocates the banning of all pesticides and chemicals from the growing process, and communities can set their own standards as they see fit.

The point is that when you can visit your local grower and see what practices they use to create the food you eat (or perhaps even help yourself!), you have much more control over and knowledge about what you put in your body. We only have to look back to this past summer and remember the food-borne illnesses that came from unsupervised, poorly conducted growing processes in an industrial agriculture setting to see how the safety of our food is improved when we’re more engaged in where it comes from.

So, back to the original suggestion Mr. Hisrich shared:

So where does this drive for relocalizing come from? Perhaps it has to do with a vague sense of ethical rightness more than anything scientifically verifiable.

I’ll promise not to be insulted by the suggestion that people in the relocalization movement only make certain decisions just because it might be the right thing to do, if Mr. Hisrich promises not to be insulted by my suggestion that he doesn’t quite know what he’s talking about here.

All across the country and world, communities are experiencing the forced contraction that comes with rising energy costs, failures of over-dependence on the global economy, and the isolation and disconnection of the culture of “suburbia.” Communities that are working to reclaim their identities and self-reliance are finding positive ways to move past those contractions, taking matters back into their own hands instead of waiting for the next factory closure or government bailout to set the course.

The local food movement is a core part of this, and while participating in it will mean different things for different communities, it deserves a bit more consideration than Mr. Hisrich’s column gives.  I do really appreciate that he’s taken this issue on and generated some conversation around it! I hope he’ll join us at the next 100-Mile Radius Potluck here in Richmond so we can continue that conversation together.

My response, posted in the forums (despite my better judgement):

It would be possible to debate some of Mr. Yevcak’s points related to the role of the courts, the history and nuances of U.S. immigration policy, and the legal technicalities of the recent presidential intervention in the Libby case. But I’m not sure what purpose that would serve, since Mr. Yevcak seems intent not on having meaningful debate or dialogue, but just on disparaging and insulting a wide swath of people, essentially on the grounds that they don’t agree with him about how the world should work. And of course, when that is someone’s goal, you can’t really have a meaningful conversation with them.

Whenever I see those kinds of comments, I’m always on the lookout for what sort of hope, what sort of ideological alternative the speaker has to offer us, so that the conversation can be about what’s possible and what we want for the world and each other, instead of what’s wrong with each other and why we should be afraid and hateful. Progress can certainly happen when we engage each other about the issues that are important to us, even when we disagree strongly, but I think it can only happen if we’re open to the possibility of something new, something better, something greater than ourselves. If we’re just here to insult each other’s backgrounds, views, and lifestyles, then we’ve resigned ourselves, I think, to a life that does not at all honor what’s possible or good in the world. We’ve decided that our differences are all that matter, and we lose out on what it means to be a part of humanity.

I look forward to future letters to the editor that have some positive vision to share, some sort of inclusive hope for the future and how to get there. Even if I have strong disagreements with the author’s world-views, I know we can move past our initial tensions to have those conversations with respect and with an eye on the common good.

• Those who do have a public voice tend to influence the process heavily
• When decisions are made that are contrary to our own wishes, we have a harder time accepting and adapting to those decisions if we weren’t involved in the process
• When we don’t know our neighbors and their desires, interests, and needs, we can’t serve each other as community members
• When we don’t talk to each other, other forces fill in the gaps, and they often don’t have the best for our community in mind
• Our private lives tend to be less fulfilling when we are isolated from those around us

I could go on – Parker J. Palmer explores these kinds of issues well in his book Company of Strangers: Christians & the Renewal of America’s Public Life. But it seems that no matter how you look at it, any hard choice to make or difficult situation to face – whether it about zoning or preservation or poverty or racism or cultural values or the future – is going to be a lot harder when people can’t exchange ideas about those choices and situations.

So, I’d like to review the venues for dialogue that I know of, and seek comment from anyone else out there who can add to or comment on this list.

• The Palladium-Item Op-Ed Page
  The local paper has a fairly active op-ed page, but it is by no means what I would call an engaging public forum. Because it is the only such page in town and is subject to the interests and idiosyncrasies of its limited readership (and the smaller number of whom bother to write in), the quality and quantity of relevant thoughts on a given subject are not very stable. The Pal-Item also has a limit of 300 words for a letter to the editor, which tends to restrict any serious commentary or in-depth exploration of an issue unless they invite you to be a guest columnist, which just adds to the already significant discretion they have in shaping the quality of the conversation. They also seem to have a severe problem with the same small group of readers writing in regularly (thus, I assume, their requirement that you wait 30 days between submissions), and responses and “threads” of discussion are cumbersome in general, which further limits the quality.
   
• Public Common Spaces
  Richmond has little in the way of traditional public spaces where people come together to engage in conversation with whomever else might be there to do so. The layout of our main street / uptown is perhaps most suited for this, with its wide sidewalks, public benches, and variety of attractions that could bring an equally diverse slice of the population together. Unfortunately, it’s largely quiet on evenings and weekends, and isn’t perceived by most as a place to come meet others for conversation. The parks are similarly well suited and wonderfully maintained common spaces, but rarely attract a critical mass for meaningful dialogue. Malls of all sorts tend not to encourage spontaneous conversation, though the Richmond Square Mall is certainly well-used as a gathering place for all ages and backgrounds. Some neighborhoods have active neighborhood associations and perhaps even street parties and the like, but they tend to be limited to very localized areas in their benefit. My sense is that the use of public common spaces for striking up conversations with “strangers” is a practice fading in most of America these days, so Richmond isn’t uniquely constrained in this way.
   
• Online Forums and Blogs
  I’m an advocate of using the technologies of the Internet to build community, and there are some good resources out there. The WayNet.org Talk of the Town forum isn’t very high-traffic but hosts conversations about everything from history to education to genealogy to restaurants. As the number of bloggers in the area increases, some interesting conversations are going on in the comments and cross-posts happening there – I think the G101.3 blog became the most popular one almost overnight (but maybe that’s the power of radio, eh). Some coffee bars and other hangout spots in town are creating online discussion areas to complement their physical spaces. And, hey parents, did you know that your teenager is posting his or her innermost thoughts on LiveJournal for their friends (and the rest of the world) to see? But of course there’s the constant problem of lack of regular access to the Internet for much of the county, and online discussion formats tend to be very limiting in their own right, removing a certain human element from exchanges. So these virtual discussions are certainly contributing to public dialogue, but for now remain a very small slice of it.
   
• Public Events
  Being a fairly small city with a full roster of clubs, organizations, and special events, there are certainly a number of times throughout the year when you can go to meet your fellow citizens. The county fair, music festivals, the Rooftop Rendezvous, Chamber of Commerce events, Young Adult Professionals, various cultural happenings at the local educational institutions, etc. Even events like a Civic Theatre production or a Symphony performance can be great opportunities for discussion. I guess the “down side” to these is again that because they aren’t really dedicated to raising the quality of public dialogue in the community, any progress made in that area through them tends to be accidental. They don’t serve as a vehicle for that discussion unless the people attending are very proactive about it.
   
• Religious Organizations
  Richmond certainly has an active community of churches, and I know that the various congregations have a lot of opportunities for dialogue between regular services, community service events, common meals, and similar gatherings. I might suggest that these gatherings are some of the most active venues for public dialogue, but while there are certainly some inter-denominational events too, I think it tends to be the case that discussions had within a given church community don’t often expand beyond their walls on a regular basis, and often don’t have the goal of engaging the community as a whole.
   
• Private Gathering Places
  The bars. More bars. Book stores. Coffee shops. Restaurants. All of these places are locations where people go to socialize, but most of the ones we have in Richmond are not laid out to be open public discussion spaces. The average restaurant experience is fairly isolating. The average bar sports loud music and other distractions. I do see people making spontaneous connections and striking up conversations at places like Charlie’s Coffee Bar & Gallery or Readmore Bookstore and Coffee Shop, but they are sadly under-used and under-appreciated as such.
   
• Intentional Public Discussions
  These are the events that are specifically organized to facilitate public discussion about a given topic or topics. Perhaps the most widely attended are City Council meetings (and related commission meetings), especially when a hot topic is on the agenda. Those particular meetings tend to be more about presenting viewpoints in front of the meeting body and public television cameras, instead of exchanging ideas freely with fellow citizens, so they are fairly restrictive. But other kinds include the Study Circles and Community Builders groups that have been organized around issues like racism and ethnic violence, community forums organized by places like the Townsend Center and Earlham College, and other one-off events put together by various civic and non-profit institutions.

This last category of venue is the one I would *love* to see more of: spaces created intentionally to bring people together to have respectful and in-depth conversation about the things that matter to us. It’s not that I think all social exchanges need to be so cerebral, but I think there are good middle grounds where people can have fun while also engaging each other authentically. Something like the Conversation Cafe Initiative provides a cookie-cutter format for such experiences, and is easy to do if you can just get the people there.

So – those are my note on where we do and don’t have quality public dialogue in Richmond today. What am I missing? How do you like to engage your fellow neighbors? What are the other opportunities out there?

But when you tend to cluster together with other people who read and write about similar things and in similar ways – as the world of blogging and online community in general encourages – the degrees of diversity within presentation styles and actual content become much smaller, and much harder to distinguish. And because blogging is already a sort of self-indulgent exercise, feeling compelled to seek out new audiences and topics just so I can sound like I have something interesting to say is draining at best.

For other bloggers and writers out there, I’m certainly curious as to whether you experience this concern, and how you deal with it. Despite my frustration, this medium remains one of the most promising for me in terms of its low barrier to entry for easily and quickly putting some thoughts down and getting them out there, before I have too much time to second-guess myself or my ability to communicate a particular idea. And while the standard for blog content is usually fairly low, I still feel that in most cases I don’t abuse that fact and tend to publish entries that have at least some non-trivial use to some group of people out there. I just hope I/we don’t reach a point where the perceived “clutter” of the blogosphere or of published writing in general becomes such that those who once felt they had something worthwhile to contribute don’t even bother.

(You can also listen to the audio MP3 version of this entry.)

For better or worse, we (myself included) are often willing to make trade-offs against this kind of consideration because these stores promise us great value and unmatched shopping convenience. But it seems it should greatly concern us when one of these locations, which typically do quite well in cities like Richmond, can’t even make a profit here. I would like to think that Target has seen increased competition from local businesses, but I suspect instead that it suffered at the hands of its own “big box” peers. And so when it is no longer just a matter of big stores driving out local businesses, but is now a matter of big stores driving out other big stores, perhaps we should look harder at what kind of economy and retail community we are trying to build.

The value we get from a strong and diverse local business community is hard to see when compared as a “bottom line deal” against the attractions of the “big box” stores. And I’m not suggesting that these larger retailers don’t have a place in a strong local economy. But my hope is that we’ll see the Target store closing as yet another indicator of an important trend. By putting so many of our eggs in baskets that lack the personal ties and community investments that our local businesses are built around, we set ourselves up for even greater disappointments and more noticeable disappearance of the business ethic, entrepreneurship, and innovative spirit around which Richmond has historically been built.

The closing of the Target store is a significant loss, but what it says about our economic priorities is the real story.

This article was submitted to the Palladium-Item as a Letter to the Editor on November 7, 2004, but exceeded their 300 word limit.

It still strikes me how little we knew about everything that goes into running a business when we founded the technology company I work for, Summersault, in 1997. We were very confident about the services we wanted to provide and very focused on the clients with whom we wanted to work, but had plenty to learn about accounting, legal matters, hiring employees, and all of the other necessary but complex areas of knowledge one must dive into when doing business.

We had the good fortune to be associated with another technology company in town that was willing to help us get on our feet. They provided us with a small bit of office space, a few basic utilities and services, access to office equipment – all at very reasonable rates, often allowing us to defer hefty capital purchases while we were in our delicate initial years.

Perhaps most importantly, they provided some perspective and wisdom about starting a technology company in Richmond, Indiana. In essence, this company incubated Summersault to the point we had some experience with those parts of running a business that entrepreneurs never start out thinking about. They eliminated many of the barriers that start-up businesses face, and increased our chances of survival many times over. This arrangement was an informal one that we felt lucky to come by.

Starting this year, entrepreneurs starting up businesses in Richmond won’t have to count on luck. The Uptown Innovation Center is a facility devoted to the incubation of new businesses in our area. As Summersault’s benefactor did, the UIC will work with individuals to make their dreams a reality by providing below-market office space, access to tools and technology for managing a business, training and counseling on a wide variety of topics, and much more. Businesses that are incubated have a much higher survival rate than those that are not, and when a start-up business succeeds, it brings new economic and social wealth to the community where it lives. The UIC is our community’s newest way of affirming to the innovators among us: “we want you to succeed.”

I wish the Uptown Innovation Center had been around when we first started Summersault, but it is comforting to know that entrepreneurs in the region now have this incredible resource at their disposal, removing barriers and providing a helping hand towards successes that benefit the long-term health of our community. If you haven’t already, I would encourage you to stop by the Center for a tour and more information.

Chris Hardie is Principal of Summersault Website Development.