A Promising Sign Regarding Sign Desecration

Results of a new poll of North Carolina voters shows that when it comes to provisions of a new billboard bill, legislators who have felt insulated may finally be risking support at the ballot box.

As smoothly and many feel deceptively crafted as SB 320 and HB 304 were  by the billboard lobby, North Carolinians are overwhelmingly opposed to its provisions.

But bi-partisan voter opposition to bills that favor out-of-state billboard companies isn’t new.  More telling this time is that the opposition is strong regardless of gender and geography.

Historically, men have been less protective of scenic preservation but this time they poll even more opposed to these bills than women.

Opposition to provisions such as permitting digital even where they are now prohibited runs 2 to 1 in the northeast and southeast and 3 to 1 along the mountains and metro areas where cities have already permitted them.

Of course, opposition is also high across the age groups billboarders and their remaining advertisers are trying hardest to reach.  The poll shows 5-to-1 opposed for those between age 30 and 45, increasing to 8-to-1 opposed among those age 46-65.

Of particular note to the few advertisers still using billboards is the high turn-off to turn-on ratio they have among consumers they are hoping to reach.

But most revealing is how voters plan to hold supporters accountable.

For a decade now, studies have found that elected officials are rarely held accountable at the ballot box, in part, because “the voices of American citizens are raised and heard unequally,” opening the door for special interests.

This is why a tax loophole, one of the six largest, permits billboard companies to escape paying their share of taxes by claiming their profits are only “rents.” 

Ironically, “rent-seeking” is also the word economists use to describe when companies such as these work the political system to gain favorable treatment rather than working to create economic value in the marketplace.

Similarly, this new legislation would also create another big loophole, permitting thousands of illegal billboards to become legal overnight, further desecrating the North Carolina brand.

To further assault North Carolina taxpayers, if passed and signed by the Governor, this new legislation will also guarantee billboard companies millions of dollars for each one that is removed when it comes time to widen the roadway.

This, even though the courts have ruled the billboards parasitic property because they would have no value in the first place were it not for the taxpayer funded roadways.

However, according to the poll, Tar Heel voters recognize that this is essentially a tax increase on them to benefit out-of-state billboard companies, not exactly the kind of tax-shifting voters like.

This provision in the proposed North Carolina legislation made voters overall less likely to support a legislator who votes for the bill by almost 5-to-1, including 4-to-1 among Republican voters.

If voters remember and follow through come election time, this would represent a sea-change where elected officials are held more accountable for actions they felt were safe in the past because they harmed only those who were not their constituents.

It is a mistaken calculus often used by organizations such as chambers of commerce and more passively, some tourism organizations, which align with the 1/5th of Carolinians who ally with the billboarders, including some doing so in direct opposition to the wishes of businesses and residents in their communities.

This latest poll may reveal not just overwhelming opposition but emergence of a resentment that could drive North Carolina voters to ban billboards altogether one day as voters have in some other states.

4 Reasons Small Business Should Be Beware Of Billboards

Even though less than 3% of small businesses still make extensive use of outdoor billboards for advertising, many small business owners are sitting ducks when it comes to fending off this nearly obsolete medium.

This is because most small business still buy advertising based on a price point (a set dollar amount.)

But even if these businesses know to ask instead for the much more important cost per view (CPM – cost per thousand) billboard representatives aren’t likely to volunteer or even know other information which is even more critical to decisions about the use of this medium.

As a 40-year marketing veteran and small business advisor here are:

Four Reasons To Beware Of Billboard Advertising

• Advertising on an outdoor billboard will turn off eight potential customers for every one who may find the information useful giving it a negative ratio which is unaffordable at any price point, even as a freebie. (The turn-off to turn-on ratio increases to 9 to 1 if travelers see trees have been clear-cut around the billboard.)

 

• Half of potential viewers of a billboard message have already shifted access roadside information to in-vehicle navigation systems and/or portable navigation systems. (This includes nearly 6 of every 10 drivers and passengers in the lucrative consumption ages of 25-44.)

 

• This is only part of the reason that overall advertising on mobile devices will pass overall outdoor advertising within a little more than two and a half years.

 

• The percentage of outdoor ad revenue derived from small business categories such as retail, amusements, casual restaurants and hotels and resorts has fallen significantly since 2001, by nearly half from the later category alone which now contributes just 4-5%.

Average spending for ads on billboards is virtually flat or even down significantly since 2001 when adjusted for inflation.

It is tragic, that at a time when it is being rapidly supplanted by navigation technology, exit logo signs and other less destructive and intrusive alternatives, the outdoor billboard industry is doing everything possible including the buying of influence to destroy much more valuable trees and vegetation along public roadsides.

Hollow are arguments that these companies are valuable taxpayers.  In my adopted hometown the average billboard contributes less than $50 or $60 a year, while the average value to the public of a single tree is worth 34% more annually at $76.26, based on scientific research.

Equally hollow is the suggestion that this about property rights.  Courts hold that any property rights of outdoor bill board owners are “parasitic” because they are solely reliant for value on traffic carried on publicly owned roadways.  The billboards are erected on private property and then officials are bullied into sacrificing publicly owned trees, many planted at public expense, in order to make them viewable.

Citing the number of jobs related to billboards as an argument is a false choice even if the small number involved were local or in-state which most aren’t.  Jobs are important but there is no reason anyone should lose a job as outdoor billboards cease to exist.

There are plenty of other types of outdoor or out-of-home advertising alternatives to which more savvy and environmentally sensitive billboard companies are transitioning and they don’t require sacrificing trees and other elements of sense of place to be viewable.

Beware of outdoor billboards!  They are much more expensive than advertised.

Sources: Federal Studies, Public Policy Poll, Billboard Trends

Republicans Strongly Oppose Give-Away To Billboard Companies

Using estimates by the North Carolina Department of Transportation and applying the updated values economists attribute to trees in ecosystem services alone, a handful of Republicans lawmakers handed out-of-state billboard companies a $5 billion gift when they pushed through a bill permitting these firms to clear-cut trees along public roadsides, even letting them sell the wood to cover the cost of harvesting public property.

It was repulsive to some other Republican lawmakers and drew criticism from newly-elected Republican governor, Pat McCrory.  Now a new scientific measure of public opinion shows why, especially when it comes to Republican voters and women of all affiliations in the state.

By 218 to 1, each of these groups strongly believe it is “unfair for billboard owners to cut down trees in front of billboards on the state’s right of way without fully compensating the citizens of North Carolina for the use of this public property.”  This is higher than the 76 to 1 ratio of those strongly opposed statewide.

Overall, Republicans and women in North Carolina oppose the give-away by 19 and 15 to 1 respectively, higher than the state average of 11 to 1 with only 4.6% undecided.  Registered Independents and Democrats were only slightly less opposed at 14 and 7.6 to 1 respectively.

Independents and Democrats were strongly opposed by 79 and 63 to 1 respectively as were men by 42 to 1 in the statewide poll conducted by North Carolina-based NanoPhrades.

In an earlier poll by Public Policy Polling, also based in North Carolina, 80% of North Carolinians were opposed to permitting billboard companies to cut any additional trees at all, but the voters were ignored by lawmakers.

State lawmakers pushing the bill also ignored poll results showing that overwhelmingly North Carolinians believe local communities, not the state, should have authority over outdoor billboards on roadways in or passing through their communities.  Voters also overwhelmingly opposed overriding local tree ordinances.

It is unclear if the give-away will be remedied or if it is, that NCDOT will have updated its formula which currently values trees only as pulp.  Many lawmakers I know at every level, seem slow to grasp scientific public opinion polling, riveted instead on a spate of less generalizable but angry voice mail or email messages.

Of course, lawmakers may be responding to lobbying or campaign contributions the outdoor billboard industry uses to get its way past voter sentiment.  Of course, I know far too many who are much more honorable than that.

The explanation for being so out of synch with citizens may be as simple as not reading bills and relying too much on what others say.  Or it be relying far to much on their own opinions and self-interests or, perhaps, the powerful condition of “reciprocity” upon which lobbyists rely so much to exploit conflicts-of-interest.

Dr. Dan Ariely, a Durham, North Carolina-based behavioral economist and researcher discusses this type of “reciprocity” in his new book, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, explaining its power to influence irrational and unethical behaviors unless there is reputational-risk.

Even at this latest $4-to-5 billion dollar give-away, which should be prohibited by the interpretation many give to the state constitution, trees are only symbolic of the preferential treatment given billboards as a special interest.

Even though studies now show that fewer than .02% of consumers rely on billboards for purchasing decisions, and courts have long-held that their only value as property is parasitic on tax-payer constructed and maintains roadways, these businesses pay almost nothing in fees and local property taxes.  They also contribute nothing to the cost of the roadways upon which they leech.

In the opinion of economists, these nearly obsolete devices are not worth sacrificing the much greater value placed on roadside vegetation in terms of such benefits as climate control, water and air purification and soil retention alone.  We should add to that the central role that forested roadsides and view-sheds contribute to visitor-centric economic and cultural development as well as the appeal to relocating executives and businesses

If we are going to tolerate them at all, we should assess them as we do similar societal liabilities such as tobacco and alcohol. Under full-cost accounting, outdoor billboards should not only be assessed to offset the destruction and blight they create but these companies should also be required to shoulder the full share if not all of the cost of constructing and maintaining public roadways.

Poll Reveals NC Voters Strongly Prefer Local Control of Billboards; Majority View Outdoor Advertising as Detracting

North Carolina voters oppose proposed changes to state law that would take away local control of billboards and would allow more electronic billboards along highways and roadsides, according to a new statewide poll released by the N.C. League of Conservation Voters.

The telephone survey indicates that North Carolina voters overwhelmingly hold the view that billboards detract from the appearance of communities and strongly believe that placement of billboards should remain a local decision.

 

• 78% of Independent voters, 70% of Democratic voters and 68% percent of Republican voters, hold the view that billboards detract from the appearance of communities and strongly believe that placement of billboards should remain a local decision.

 

• More than 80% of those surveyed said they opposed removing more trees so that billboards could be seen for longer distances.

 

• Two thirds of those surveyed said they generally opposed any increase in the number of billboards in North Carolina.

 

• There is virtually no support from North Carolina voters for having the state tell local communities where and what kind of billboards can be put within their boundaries,” said Tom Jensen, director of Public Policy Polling, a Raleigh-based firm that does public opinion surveys. “This is a rare issue where Democrats, Republicans, and independents are all in agreement.”

 

• 80% of voters surveyed opposed allowing up to seven electronic billboards per mile.

 

• An overwhelming 70 percent of North Carolina voters surveyed said that electronic billboards that flash changing ads every eight seconds would present a distraction to motorists.

 

• 68% of those surveyed said they almost never use a billboard in deciding where to buy a product or service, 20% used billboards a few times a month and 9% said they did so a few times a week.

 

• 90% of voters surveyed said state lawmakers should focus on creating jobs than weakening billboard restrictions, the same among Republicans, Democrats and Independents.

The poll was commissioned by the N.C. League of Conservation Voters based on the concerns expressed by a number of local community groups including Wilmington Council of Neighborhood Associations, Durham Inter Neighborhood Council, and Winston-Salem Neighborhood Alliance.

Contact: Carrie Clark, NCLCV

Tom Jensen, Public Policy Polling

For more information on proposed Billboard legislation, www.Savetheview.org

An Achingly Slow Epiphany to Blight

I’ve only met one person who likes roadside billboards.  Ironically, he’s a friend of mine.  Still, I wonder if he might be pulling my chain, but he says it is because he has trouble reading the “logo signs” alerting travelers to businesses located at exits.

Like many of my former colleagues in community destination marketing, including several who have been counseled by my friend, he may need stronger glasses so he can see the blight created by billboards.

Of course, truth be known, I didn’t really see it myself until the last decade of my nearly four-decade career in community destination marketing.

In Spokane, where my career formally began, I was too busy cutting my teeth on destination marketing to notice billboard blight, or possibly I was just too focused on transforming industrial blight to even notice.

After all, wasn’t the Highway Beautification Act which was passed as I finished high school supposed to limit billboards to only commercial areas already blighted at the time?    Little did I know lobbyists had already corrupted enforcement.

In Anchorage, where I spent the second decade of my career as a DMO exec, billboards had been constitutionally banned at statehood two decades earlier, so they weren’t an issue.

Billboards didn’t begin to come into focus for me until I arrived in Durham, North Carolina in 1989, but it took another dozen years for me to truly “get it.”

During my initial due diligence to understand Durham values, always a core element of a community’s brand, I learned that not only had Durham banned outdoor billboards five years earlier, but the community had also won a decision in the United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit a four years later after Fairway Advertising (then named Naegele) sued.

Rejecting claims that the billboard prohibition infringed on free speech, the Court held that it “advances legitimate city interest in aesthetics.”  In other words, the Justices recognized that scenic preservation is a crucial element of sense-of-place and economic development.

So naturally, I nixed inclusion of billboards in any Durham marketing efforts, especially when public opinion polls used to monitor internal stakeholders showed them growing even more unpopular with residents, including newcomers.

But across most of the state, I stood alone on this issue.  What is now the North Carolina Restaurant & Lodging Association, whose members are predominantly chains, had submitted a brief against Durham on behalf of Fairway during the lawsuit.

And our state’s division of tourism gladly used complimentary billboards across North Carolina to promote the state’s brand to residents.  Interesting juxtaposition…promoting the state’s brand while simultaneously desecrating it.

Learning to dodge “friendly fire” while promoting Durham became a career skill.  Even counterparts who marketed communities which had also placed curbs on billboards seemed oblivious at best to being out of synch with their community’s values.

Having lost at every level in the courts, Fairway went to work on state legislators where campaign contributions can be influential.  My job often involved joining together with others to help educate state officials and lawmakers about the impact of tourism.

In doing so I became aware that given their lack of success in the courts, Fairway and other billboard companies were investing huge amounts of campaign contributions along with other favors – all legal at the time - to influence the legislative process.

But admittedly, my focus in rejecting them in marketing plans was based on being consistent with community values.  Even the use of them to appeal to prospective visitors from communities that encourage billboards seemed hypocritical.

As I began the last decade of my career, I was forced to think more deeply about billboards.  An supply side economic development counterpart, who narrowly fancied himself a marketer instead, never missed an opportunity to refer someone to me who advocated the element of advertising.

This brought a socialite and philanthropist to my office often over a period of many months in an effort to persuade me to use billboards to promote Durham.  Unfazed by my logic or Durham’s prohibition, the person even tried to corral me by lobbying governing board members and elected officials.

That is when I began a deeper investigation into all sides of the issue of roadside billboards.  This included those passionately pro- and anti-billboard and a deep evaluation of the metrics on their effectiveness or, as it turned out, lack thereof.

Everything I studied seem to validate my decision not to use billboards.  But then something happened that turned me passionately against the huge roadside distractions.

In 2004, out-state billboard companies reaped a huge a return on their “investment” when Democratic lawmakers pushed through a law to deny cities and counties the right to use amortization to remove billboards which had been ruled fair and lawful by the courts.

The Democrat who spearheaded the legislation was clear in news reports that he wanted to make it “too expensive” for cities and counties to prohibit new billboards and/or remove those that were non-conforming as Durham had.

Many people including some of the nation’s founders misused the theory of “states’ rights.”  Often it has been perverted to enable travesties such as slavery and then later for denying of civil rights which continues even today.

I believe in the concept because to me as long as they  are consistent with the U.S. Constitution and the laws of the land, the closer governance is to where people actually live and work, the closer it comes to being truly representative.

This seems especially true at the local level which is the only one shown in polls as highly regarded by the public.

Taking away amortization was a sleazy tactic to end run local governments and the democratically-expressed will of their residents. That one act turned me from avoiding billboards to becoming a passionate opponent.

Hoping Durham had somehow forgotten, Fairway was back in Durham the year before I retired at the end of 2009 with a clever, but thinly-veiled proposal to trade the removal of some billboards for the right to make others digital.

Quickly stacking a committee of the Chamber of Commerce with supporters and then chilling discussion by its board, Fairway won endorsement there, stunning many who recalled that organization’s support of the prohibition.

The executive of the downtown organization felt confident enough in his personal endorsement of the proposal to make the organization’s website homepage a billboard but the downtown board refused to take a stand.

The organization I led polled residents to better inform the debate and neighborhood activists took up the prohibition’s defense when city officials were told they had to be neutral after a complaint by Fairway.

The result of the poll showed residents were overwhelming against the proposal and in support of the 25-year-old prohibition.  Durham had grown 36% larger since the ban was put in place but its population even more adamantly valued aesthetics over billboards.

Officials voted a few months before I retired.  I heard that some Fairway executives were overheard to say they had enough voted for a favorable outcome. They were stunned.  The vote was 7-0 against any change to the billboard prohibition.

In a rage, billboarders turned statewide again.  Finding sympathetic Republicans now in power,  they leveraged the power of campaign contributions even more.  To those suspicious, they claimed the proposed changes that would undermine communities were “minor technical fixes.”

With others, they fueled mutual resentment of North Carolina’s cities and towns.  Behind closed doors and in print it was crowed this was done to “teach Durham a lesson.”

In two sessions now, legislation has passed that essentially overrides local community values and concerns statewide.  Even the Governor, now also a Republican has backed away from campaign statements that billboards should be left to local control.

I guess states’ rights for these particular Republicans is a one-way street. Good as a defense when they consider any federal action as over-reaching but quickly brushed aside when they want to lord it over local communities.

So there it is, the story of how I came to see billboards for what they are and become a passionate defender of scenic preservation.  Hopefully, my former colleagues in community and destination marketing won’t take as long as I did to see through this obsolete and destructive form of advertising.

But I am not holding my breath.  Many may be even slower than I was to grasp that wherever blight is tolerated it becomes your community’s brand. Others have the same chip on their shoulder that billboards do.  Some don’t seem to have a clue.

Nothing short of a voter-approved constitutional amendment embedding the overwhelming anti-billboard sentiment of North Carolinians as shown in public opinion polls will stem an enablement of blight that will only get more egregious.

My pessimism is born by the fact that until such a amendment occurs, billboard interests are voting each and every day in the halls of the legislature both by arm twisting and through copious amounts of strings-attached cash to underwrite election campaigns.

It isn’t how democracy is supposed to work.  As experts write, it may literally be a corruption of democracy and a subversion of public sentiment and will, but it is legal, legal corruption.

Chillingly, Lisa Margonelli, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation writes in the current issue of Pacific Standard that social norms about what is okay are less defined than they were just five years ago, the last year of my career.

It is no wonder then that trust is so low and concern about corruption is so high on polls of Americans.

Cattle Country and Trees

Dillon, Montana is a quintessential ranch town where the Ruby Range gives way to the Blacktail Mountains on the climb up the Beaverhead and Red Rock rivers, just under the “chin” of Montana and over the Continental Divide back into Idaho.

It is just west and over the divide from our ancestral ranch in Idaho’s Yellowstone-Teton nook. Dillon has always been one of my favorite places, dating to trips we took to trade horses or when passing through to see family when I was the age of my grandsons and older.

We were sure to stop there last month as we returned from an annual family lake-rendezvous.

The area surrounding Dillon is the center of Montana’s cattle and hay country with 137,000 head of Cattle, 14,000+ sheep and 2,200 horses being ranged on more than 400 surrounding ranches spread over more than 5,500 square miles on 2 million acres of range land.

Livestock - 28 per square mile, people - 1.7 per square mile, about a third forested and wooded-mountains with incredible wildlife habitat. I’m a long way from the country of my youth, but country such as this has never been far from my heart and soul.

This area is God’s country!

Dillon’s population is about 4,000 with a little more than 9,000 people county-wide.  Dillon, while much younger and smaller than Durham, North Carolina where I live, has two things Durham doesn’t, a full-fledged local history museum and a sanctioned Tree Board.

Dillon has already inventoried its public trees and is completing a tree management plan.  Hopefully, Durham may move in that direction soon.  Dillon is proof that being conservative and overwhelmingly Republican isn’t mutually exclusive of loving trees and respecting your heritage.

Durham is proof that unparalleled levels of community passion and pride doesn’t mean that many important things aren’t being overlooked or neglected, such as trees and a museum worthy of its incredible history.

Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly, eager to surrender trees and the state’s sense of place to billboard companies and mega-landfills for out-of-state haulers, could learn something from Montana’s members of that party.

Hell, they could learn something by just listening to 8-in-10 North Carolinians.  Trees and other elements of scenic preservation are important to sense of place and economic vitality and even more to public health.

Montana is only 24% forested, mostly in the western third of the state which includes Dillon.  This is also the part laced by the state’s 100 ranges of the Rockies.

But 60% of Montana is flat prairie land, part of the Northern Great Plains.  Custer didn’t make his last stand in the old west or where “A River Runs Through It,” but on the plains stretching up from the Texas Panhandle, Kansas and Nebraska.

Even in the most mountainous regions of Montana and Idaho, one of the first things settlers did was plant trees, not for scenic preservation but to protect air and water quality, stem soil erosion, prevent flooding, lower temperatures around dwellings and livestock and to provide screens from wind and blowing particulates.

It was more often the miners who came not to make a homeland but for fortune, who denuded the landscape as they did entirely around Butte by the time Dillon was being founded in the 1880s, an hour’s drive south today.

However, Butte is battling back and today has a comprehensive urban forest management plan while North Carolina surrenders its sense-of-place to out-of-state billboard companies, even though billboards are an antiquated marketing tool now used by less than fifth of one percent of consumers.

Rocky Mountain pioneers and settlers such as eight sets each of my great-great and great-great-great grandparents also understood that trees were good for economic development and the evolution of sense of place, both on homesteads and in nearby towns and cities.

It isn’t easy in the Rockies to foster canopy because of the harsh climate, short growing seasons and insect infestations.  So it seems that most people there don’t seem to take it for granted like we do in North Carolina where the enemies trees include human infestations.

Trees have nothing to do with political ideology and sacrificing them has everything to do with special interests.  Eight-in-ten North Carolinians oppose permitting trees to be cut down by billboard companies.  This includes nearly 7-in-10 Republicans who believe billboards should be a local decision.

Obviously this doesn’t include some lawmakers and now the Governor.

That didn’t stop Republican lawmakers, given plausible deniability by billboard lobbyists who told them it was just a tiny technical change, from using a backdoor to override tree and billboard ordinances statewide, spitting in the face of a constitutional amendment requiring the state to:

“…preserve as a part of the common heritage of this State its forests, wetlands, estuaries, beaches, historical sites, openlands, and places of beauty.”

One of North Carolina’s largest forestlands is along its roadsides.

It remains to be seen if North Carolinians will notice this defiance, let alone be outraged enough to take power back from those beholden to billboard and other destructive special interests.  Even local governments seem complacent.

As a whole, North Carolinians seem unaware that things we take for granted such as this can be put at great risk.  For the first time, I hear more people talk about leaving the state than loving it.  For the first time in a quarter-of-a-century, it has crossed my mind too.

But this would only please those who are legislatively turning the clock back to a time when North Carolina was fodder for ridicule.  It was only a year prior to passage of the conservation amendment that North Carolinians rejected efforts to perpetuate poll taxes and literacy tests for voting.

When North Carolinians finally rise up, the desecration wrought may move them to ban billboards altogether by constitutional amendment as several states have.

If not, they may seek to put more teeth in an amendment passed in 1971 to protect trees and waterways and other ecosystem capital or elect judges and lawmakers who will respect it.

For scenic preservation, these seem like the worst of times.  But they may be the beginning of the best of times.

We’ll see.

The Travesty on Sandy Creek

Tree canopied hills, dales and ridge lines dominate the landscape of Durham, North Carolina, where I live.  They are contoured by scores of streams that feed rivers and lakes and provide drinking water here and for many other communities downstream.

Durham is an activist community and nowhere is that more apparent than in the restoration of streams and wetlands, but thousands of volunteer-hours and the collaboration of scores of public and private organizations such as Duke University are now violated by outdoor billboard companies.

Sandy Creek is a Durham stream that drains nearly the entire campus system of Duke University where researchers study aquaterrestrial biogeochemistry including the urban stream impairment plaguing all communities and threatening water supplies.  The restoration of Sandy Creek has even appeared recently in scientific journals.

Overall, 1,400 acres of the community drain into Sandy Creek as it makes its way to merge with New Hope Creek and then flow into the drinking water supply stored in Jordan Lake.

Upland, Duke has made some amazing provisions to restore and protect Sandy Creek as it passes the president’s house and down through the university’s acclaimed hotel and golf course, while volunteer groups, neighborhoods and local governments have worked to restore and protect the lowland floodplain and wetlands through which it flows after passing under US Highway 15-501 Bypass just south of Cornwallis Road, including recreation trails and the conversion of an abandoned treatment plant into an education center.

Now that collective work has been desecrated by four huge billboards erected along that highway by out-of-state companies which have been enabled by new legislation forged by a handful of their advocates in the NC General Assembly.

These companies can now clear cut football length areas of trees and vegetation in either direction from these billboards as well as in front of and behind the unsightly structures.

As shown in the series of photos linked here and to the image in this blog, the action by this billboard company, which happens to own half of the fewer than 90 that still remain here after billboards were banned in Durham in 1984, has also denuded the banks of Sandy Creek wiping out the trees and vegetation that were preventing soil erosion and slowing run off and preventing sediment from the impervious surface of the roadway from polluting this environmentally sensitive stream and making its way into the water supply. 

Aware of the overwhelming objection of North Carolinians to the measure, particularly the 8 out of 10 opposed to sacrificing trees for billboards, advocates for the legislation enabling this travesty claimed at least twice on the floor of the General Assembly that respect for local ordinances and efforts such as Durham’s would be protected from the abuse.

But in fact, as those assurances were uttered any such provisions respecting local efforts in communities such as the restoration of Sandy Creek were being stripped out of the final version of the bill by a small conference committee of just 12 legislators, one of whom ramrodded the legislation and another a now federally-indicted owner of billboards himself.

Many in the legislature are only now waking up to the havoc being wreaked across the state by this billboard legislation including another particularly egregious threat to water quality in Charlotte.

There are many other examples but it all adds up to the fact that all of this destruction of tax-payer-owned green infrastructure commons is being permitted to an out-of-state enterprise over the strenuous objections of 8 out of 10 North Carolinians just so the already-visible structures can be sure to be seen by the 8% of motorists who may still use them in a given year.

This travesty led Republican candidate for governor, Pat McCrory to call attention to the legislation in the first debate even though the measure was sponsored by a powerful leader in his own party while his Democratic opponent remained mute perhaps because he has taken thousands of dollars in campaign contributions over the years from out-of-state billboard interests.

According to the most current annual Gallup poll on the topic, by nearly 8 to 1, Americans greatly worry about pollution of rivers, lakes, reservoirs and drinking water, and this concern has remained consistent over the past 10 years, even through the economic difficulties of the last five.

Spurred by the Federal Clean Water Act, communities such as Durham with stakeholders such as Duke University understand that it is economically far more efficient to prevent pollution and runoff with green infrastructure than it is to treat water with gray infrastructure.

However, the North Carolina General Assembly need not rely on federal legislation or public opinion polls to know that the new billboard legislation is against the will of the people.

Just over 40 years ago, by more than 7 to 1, North Carolinians voted to embed an amendment in the State Constitution:

“to preserve as a part of the common heritage of this State its forests, wetlands, estuaries, beaches, historical sites, openlands, and places of beauty” (Section 5, Article XIV.)

#2 – Really?

I may not be fair that travel and tourism is compared with true industries in the Harris Poll’s annual reputational ratings.

Tourism is actually considered a sector or cluster of six or seven industries that have customers in common.  Since several of these are listed separately, there must be more to the story.

But it is truly impressive that it ranks #2 right behind technology with only a few businesses ranked in the top 20 or 30, if you don’t count secondary suppliers.

More than that, it is amazing the general public isn’t nailing travel and tourism overall for the logistical hassle it is to travel, billboard blight along highways, communities that have sold their sole to be “Anywhere USA” and the crushing experience of mega-hotels and mega-cruise ships not to mention public health concerns.

The poll ranks on the basis of perceptions related to social responsibility, emotional appeal, visionary leadership, financial performance, workplace environment and products and service.

For anyone new to the “Triple Bottom Line,” it is clearly incorporated.

Significant for travel and tourism is that  positive ratings hovered just above 50% a couple of years ago.

More to the point that Harris must use a bifurcated notion of travel and tourism when it clusters the results by so-called “industry,” is that this year the positive ratings rest at 59% for retail (the activity with most tourist participation) and 34% for airlines.

Clearly travel and tourism taken as a whole would likely fall several places lower on the list.

Making every industry or sector feel good is that they aren’t government, which receives on 13% positive.  But of course that is more a reflection of the constant flood of pejoratives perpetuated by the Republican Party in general and special interest lobbies for these industries.

Lost now on the public is that without roads, bridges, airports, forests, parks, wildlife refuges, urban forest preservation, ordinances that reduce blight, litter cleanup including rivers and streams, water, curbs on air pollution, solid waste removal, consumer protection, community and destination marketing and dozens of other things facilitated by government…

Well, there would not only be little or no travel and tourism but very little reputation left for any of these industries to coattail.

In fact, blinded by hubris and egged on by partisan extremists, this is lost on much of corporate America as well, many who argue that government provides these benefits only through transfers called taxes.

My response is “and your point is?”  Clearly for all of its merits, the market is not capable or incentivized enough to provide these benefits on its own and “TBLers” understand that.

The poll also shows that this is also not lost on an increasingly discerning public.

At What Point Does A Product Or Service Become Useless?

The scientific results of a poll showing how often outdoor billboards are actually used makes you wonder how much longer we can afford them.

The poll showed that less than one in ten North Carolinians use them a few times a week to decide on a product or service, one in five use them a few times a month and nearly seven out of ten never use them.

A hundred years ago they may have seemed quaint or humorous but already states were curbing them. At what point do they become obsolete? At what point are they no longer worth the blight they bring to roadsides and communities?

At what point do we pull the plug because North Carolina’s scenery is so much more valuable as a cornerstone of the state’s $17 billion tourism economic sector?

At what point will the economic value of the trees and vegetation swathed so they are visible be worth more than the billboards in their ability to remove pollutants from the air and clear storm run-off?

At what point do advertisers realize that it isn’t worth reaching such a tiny segment of the population while irritating the the vast proportion who responded to the poll that outdoor billboards are a detraction and distraction?

At what point will legislators and local officials say enough is enough, even for the small amount of “parasitic” property right involved.

At what point will outdoor billboard owners take management guru Peter Drucker’s advice and pull the plug on them as an obsolete service?

We now have a benchmark so will it be when the proportion of population that finds them completely useless inches up from 68% to 75%? It is only a matter of time.

If I were in or owned stock in a business that owns outdoor billboards, I’d be divesting as fast as possible. Being in the business of irritating people doesn’t have a future.

In the meantime, to keep billboards out of landfills, let ReMakes, an incubator for environmentally-sensitive consumer products, recycle them into hundreds of unique placemats.

Durham Residents Support Existing Billboard Ordinance

A scientific public opinion poll was conducted by NanoPhrades to inform any future position the DCVB Tourism Development Authority might take should a proposal be made to modify the existing Durham ordinance prohibiting additional billboards in Durham or upgrading existing billboards.

Support for the existing ordinance was nearly 9 to 1 overall, with the ratio of strongly agree to strongly disagree at 8.4 to 1. In all, 72% of residents supported the existing ordinance, 20% were undecided and 8% did not support the current ordinance.

Support for the existing ordinance was consistent across gender with males and females, 72.4% and 71.4%, in favor respectively. Newcomers (2 years or less) supported the ordinance by a ratio of 4.5 to 1 while those here 3-5 years were 9 to 1 in favor, and those here 6 to 10 years in favor by 20 to 1. Residents of 11-20 years supported the ordinance by 14 to 1 and those living in Durham more than 21 years showed support by a margin of 8 to 1.

Caucasians supported the existing ordinance by 10 to 1, African Americans by 11 to 1, Asians by 4 to 1, and Hispanics by 5.5 to 1.

Residents supported the existing ordinance regardless of their level of pride in or image of Durham. Even those undecided about either supported the existing ordinance.

The poll was taken in August subsequent to several months of discussion in the community and neighborhood groups, as well as reports in the news of a possible proposal to change the ordinance to permit moving some billboards and upgrading them to digital.

If They Thought Billboards Touched A Nerve…

I was amazed that elected officials were amazed at the number and ratio of emails they received opposing a change in the Durham billboard ban, prior to the Durham City Council taking a unanimous vote against a request by Fairway Outdoor Advertising.

Maybe some hadn’t fully grasped the results of a poll conducted to inform discussion by NANOPHRADES as part of DCVB’s annual survey. It clearly showed strong community support to retain the ordinance as is.

But if elected officials were surprised that element of community appearance touched a nerve, they should recall now how important overall appearance is to residents in scientific polls.

Thinking it superficial I suspect, local governments here have steadily cut back on beautification, litter removal and mowing and maintenance of medians, right-of-ways, roadways so much over the years, they’ve probably forgotten what “best practice” was.

And I understand some administrators had quite a chuckle at a proposal by one of their own results-based citizen groups to make clean-up and beautification an overarching strategy since it has been well proven to impact assessed valuation/revenues, crime reduction and prevention, public health, economic development, neighborhoods, code enforcement and several dozen other public responsibilities.

It must be tough to keep a finger on the pulse of a community. But everyone knows it takes much more than watching your inbox or counting noses at a public hearing.

Maybe the real legacy of this drawn out debate and drama but failed billboard issue will finally connect some dots that overall appearance issues are a top priority for Durham residents.

The Antidote To Billboards and Sprawl

Something didn’t seem right in news stories about a poll last month by Harris Interactive reporting that only 27% of Americans describe themselves as environmentally-conscious, so I drilled down a bit.

A more accurate statement would be that only 12% report that being environmentally-conscious doesn’t describe them at all.  Everyone else to a degree was environmentally-conscious, 28% somewhat, 33% fairly, 18% very and 9% completely.

Before we obsess too much about “12% who apparently don’t give a flip or possibly just own billboards, there has been an uptick since 2009 in the overall percentages which now show that 20% of Americans describe themselves as conservationists, green 17% or environmentalist 16%.

That may not seem large but by comparison it trumps the current popularity of the US Congress (10%) or the North Carolina General Assembly (18%) or Tea Party (12%.)

Illustrating why 79% of Americans yearn for far more and better coverage of the environment, a local city official recently stopped me in mid-sentence to ask me what I meant by the term “green infrastructure.”  It wasn’t a trick question nor was it only because environmental consciousness has been brutally politicized.

What news coverage occurs about the environment (e.g. 1% of stories last year) has become politicized by a phenomenon described by co-authors of an op-ed last week in the Washington Post (one from a conservative think tank and the other from a progressive think tank):

“We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.

Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?”

By now all Americans, especially anyone working in government at every level but especially local, should understand that:

“…green infrastructure is the ecological framework needed for environmental, social and economic sustainability—in short it is our nation’s natural life sustaining system. Green infrastructure differs from conventional approaches to open space planning because it looks at conservation values and actions in concert with land development, growth management and built infrastructure planning.”

More specifically, as defined by the Green Infrastructure Work Group:

“Green infrastructure  is our nation’s natural life support system —  an interconnected network  of waterways, wetlands, woodlands, wildlife  habitats, and other natural  areas; greenways, parks and other conservation lands; working farms, ranches and forests; and wilderness and other open spaces that support  native species, maintain natural ecological  processes, sustain air and water resources and contribute  to the health and quality of life for America’s communities and people.”

That definition is strategic and overarching.  Some have narrowed the term to be more tactical such as this guide the how to value green infrastructure for storm water management.  Still others think of it only in terms of a “green roof” on a building.  But I prefer the more all encompassing, strategic sense of the term.

“Green” infrastructure is every bit as crucial as what is called “gray” infrastructure such as utilities, roads, sidewalks and buildings.  Just like social and cultural infrastructure, they require a careful balance.

As sense-of-place champion Edward T. McMahon co-wrote a decade ago, green infrastructure may be a new term to some but it is not a new idea, and because it balances conservation and development it differs from traditional open space planning.

A fascinating new book entitled American Canopy: Trees, Forests and the Making of a Nation by environmental lawyer Eric Rutkow explains historically that even before the founding of this country, people understood that sustainable development was enabled by a balance of infrastructures.

Development is far more sustainable and valuable when informed by holistic green infrastructure planning which includes a series of hubs and links throughout a community.  Without it sprawl gnaws away at the character of a community.  Without it inter and intra agency silos result in what we see in the North Carolina Department of Transportation.

Within NCDOT roadside environmental engineers carefully plant trees, turf and wildflowers and protect scenic by-ways for economic, health and aesthetic reasons, but maintenance is done by another department, which as we’ve seen recently along Interstates here, can be scalped and clear-cut or surrendered to private billboard companies even in violation of the department policies, federal guidelines and with no disregard for local regulations.

As documented in the 2004 book Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles and the American Landscape, by Dr. Catherine Gudis at the University of California – Riverside, sprawl did not begin after World War II.  It began much earlier in the years after WWI and in the absence of zoning was fueled by the outdoor billboard industry which first desecrated downtown buildings and then wallpapered roadways as fast as they were built while fueling development that even today is many times what would be justified by the growth in population.

To me the antidote to sprawl and blight, such as billboards and unsustainable development and the desecration of community character, is more coherent infrastructure planning beginning with a development-balanced, overarching and strategic green infrastructure plan.

“What If It Were Our Property?”

While obviously peeved, a forester posted a list of observations recently.  I stepped on some toes, no doubt, but his pejoratives and condescension aside, he makes some valid points.

To my point about why residents here seemed stunned rather than mad about some massive clear cutting of urban forest canopy, he speculates that “landowners aren’t mad because it’s their own [someone else’s] damn land.”

Maybe, but doubtful, based on public opinion surveys.

I am not just talking about queries that show how passionately and overwhelmingly Durham residents feel about tree canopy as one of the reasons they love living here.

Interestingly, another community I recently wrote about that had surveyed residents in depth about trees, probed much further.

Asked if they would choose tree preservation or replanting over allowing individuals property owners to remove trees, by 4-1 residents there chose preservation.

More revealing though, when asked if they favored tree preservation regulations even if they had the opportunity to develop their land, they agreed by nearly 3-to-1, especially the preservation of groves.

By an even greater margin, residents objected to leaving decisions to preserve trees to developers.

These would be useful questions to inform Durham resident views about urban forest policies which, by the definition of United States Forest Service researchers and experts, includes not only public, but private land, and rural as well as within city limits.

The answers would vary, I suspect, community by community across North Carolina as they do regarding roadside billboards, which are opposed statewide.

A hint of statewide public opinion regarding tree canopy preservation on private land is found in a poll taken when out-of-state billboard companies successfully lobbied lawmakers here to double the amount of public roadside forest they could cut based on the argument that billboards are private property.

More than 8-in-10 North Carolinians opposed cutting more trees along roadsides even in view of the claim of private property.

From the surveys I’ve read, I’ll bet residents in communities across the nation overwhelmingly believe trees are important to every community’s character and desirability as a place to live or visit.

Foresters by nature and training are utilitarians, much as I was growing up in the Rockies.  This is the conservation philosophy behind the national forest preservation policies of Republican President Theodore Roosevelt and Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Any argument that private property rights give someone the right to do whatever they want gave way in the 1800s to the “liberty-harm principle,” meaning that the liberty of individuals to do whatever they like is limited when harming others.

Initially it was felt that if society agreed to the harm, it was okay.  Evidence that North Carolinians don’t agree is adoption of the constitutional amendment know as the North Carolina Bill of Rights passed by 7-to-1 in 1971.

Those currently controlling high office here are often called “regressives” because ignoring the constitution, they want to take the state back to before that amendment while avoiding any vote to repeal, regardless of polls showing North Carolinian oppose this reversal.

Obviously not all North Carolinians.

Private property are “fightin’ words” in a state initially populated by immigrants from the border lands between Scotland and England, where their ancestral commons had been confiscated and fenced off beginning in the 16th century.

In his books about each of the first two Industrial Revolutions and the shift to another now underway, Jeremy Rifkin reminds us that the notion of private property was initially instituted by the rich against the poor:

“The enclosures movement and the market economy that ensued changed the very nature of property relations from conditional rights to exclusive ownership.”

These immigrants during the first half of the 18th century had only one objective in mind, a piece of property to own.

But during subsequent formation of the United States and up to 1840 when the “enclosures movement” concluded, there is repeated evidence that many Americans still thought of property relations as conditional.

Long before that, all of my ancestors began hopscotching west from South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York and Massachusetts, and finally after 1847, to what I affectionately call the Meridian of my DNA along the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains.

Many moves along the way were in search of land.  Even the ancestral ranch where I was born and spent my early years along the Idaho side of the Tetons came about when one of my great-great grandfathers found a place further north where his children could homestead.

Along the Rockies, my ancestors experimented with different ways of holding property including some in common.  They embraced conditional property rights because the restorationist Christian religion which they joined saw ownership as temporary and responsibility for stewardship as eternal.

They viewed land ownership as a variation of what the ancients called the “Great Chain of Being,” an ecological worldview adopted by the Romans from St. Augustine and brought forward during the Renaissance.

It ties responsibilities and obligations above and below to a pyramid including resources such as minerals, water, land and plant life.

Perverted by the time of the Enlightenment to justify subjugation, purer forms had made it to America with early colonists such as Puritans and Quakers and other Christians groups.

It was transformed during the Enlightenment to ethics.

Without knowing it or linking it to the Creator, many today use this hierarchy to encourage sustainability, while others use it to justify exploitation to varying degrees.  It remains, among the most religious and those with no religious affiliation, at the crux of what differentiates our feelings toward the environment.

Views of scarcity also differ such as the one described a few days ago in an op-ed by Matt Ridley, with emphasis on a view popular with readers of the Wall Street Journal, and I suspect, with the reader whose comments I posted at the beginning of this blog.

Many such as me see tree canopy at risk and the negative effects of their loss apparent in the findings of economists and ecologists and especially the growing fusion-field of environmental economics.

Others see deforestation, climate change and coastal flooding as inevitable and place their faith in some future technological innovation that somehow make forest preservation efforts unnecessary.

Forested areas to them will be sustained in parks, along streets and in state and national preserves or on private property where preservation is valued.

New research shows that those who engage in tree-planting today tend to be educated people who already have trees, a cohort I assume that also includes many foresters, including those who otherwise view urban forests only as a commodity.

I tend to be more persuaded by Rifkin’s most recent book and the transformation underway that he calls the Third Industrial Revolution.  He provides evidence that the Internet will soon revolutionize energy, agriculture and logistics the way it has communications.

All of this may take pressure off forests and allow them to re-multiply and diversify.  Billions and billions of square feet of vacant suburban commercial space will allow communities the opportunity to convert them back into tree groves for ecosystem services and quality of place.

I guess we’ll see, but by the time my grandsons are in their prime, I’ll bet the tension between forest preservationists and “it’s my land and I’ll clear cut if I please,” will dissipate. It takes 20-40 years to reach a tipping point for an Industrial Revolutions.

We’re in year six but you can already detect that as margins reach near zero, groups are increasingly both dissatisfied with uneven and insipid government management and the desecration resulting from the private monopoly of resources created by privatization.

A movement is back to the hybrid private/commons approach that has thrived for hundreds of years in parts of the free world and practiced by my ancestors along the Rockies.

Until then, the tension over trees may increase, especially on the half of all U.S. forest canopy and an even greater proportion of urban forest that is on private property.

The Same Ole’ Enemy – 239 Years Later

Taking a long-view of economic history is another way to pinpoint the fact that climate change is a direct result of human activity.

Years before it would be confirmed by Berkley Earth by scientists who were skeptical about climate change but who found the link after going over data from the last 250 years, one could see the link pinpointed in the work of economic historians such as the late Dr. Angus Maddison in his book entitled Contours of The World Economy 1-2030 AD.

Berkley Earth reconstructed climate data to make their link, while Maddison reconstructed economic growth over three millenniums to find a pattern.  He learned that between the years 1 and 1000 AD, around the time that another era of climate change spawned Viking conquests, people had actually become slightly poorer overall.

Between 1000 AD and 1820, economic growth was stagnant even in western Europe and spinoffs such as the American colonies and fledgling United States of America.  The surge following 1820 was brought about as the industrial revolution kicked into ever higher gears.

Ironically, the seminal Boston Tea Party protest was not over unfair taxes but a revolt against a tax loop-hole created by the British for a “too-big-to-fail” corporation at the disadvantage of small independent merchants, some of them smugglers, as noted in this excellent TED Presentation  published on “Black Friday” by Stacy Mitchell, a senior researcher for the Institute for Local Reliance.

I agree with Republican lawmakers that there is something wrong with government but, in my opinion, size isn’t the real issue.  Making government more nimble and responsive seems much more important. Nor do I buy the part of their tightly-woven narrative that this group’s frequent stalemating is on behalf of small businesses.

I am far more persuaded that the policies that have marginalized the middle class over the last thirty years and eroded small business by consolidating almost every part of the economy into the control of a few top-heavy players has been engineered not by government or the free market but by those on whose behalf lobbyists have rigged the system.

Even the process of devising regulations has been polluted by special interests; and those who argue that regulations should be simplified are far too often only fronting for interests, such as outdoor billboard companies, eager to see these regulations further rigged to their exclusive benefit.

“Rent-seeking,” the term economists give this loathsome activity probably dates back to the 1879 book Progress and Poverty, written by economist Henry George in the early years of the Gilded Age.  George observed that poverty occurred back then when policies permitted absurd “economic rents” to be charged by monopolists including landowners resulting in an over-concentration of unearned wealth.

George proposed solutions he believed would benefit both capitalism and labor while curbing these rent-seekers.  Seven years after the book was published, George sought the office of mayor of New York City but finished behind a Tammany Hall candidate.

However, the coalition forged by George caught the attention of the third place finisher, Republican candidate Theodore Roosevelt.

Henry George had forged a coalition of groups that in a few years would become nationwide force known as the Progressive Era, which sought, in part, to curb the excesses of the Guided Age.  A variation would elect President Theodore Roosevelt and inspire the Square Deal including conservation and anti-trust.

It isn’t easy being a Republican right now.  A social network feedback-loop has the party torn between a “circle the wagons” approach and a desire to open up to alternatives.  A new poll for ABC, Washington Post and the Pew Center shows that by 53% to 27% Americans will blame Republicans if the current impasse persists.

The party would do well to study T.R., one of its greatest Presidents.  The real enemy isn’t government or taxes and it isn’t Democrats or women or minorities.  Just as it was in Boston harbor as the dawn of the American Revolution, the common enemy is still economic rent-seekers.

This issue isn’t about the 1% or the wealthy, although many didn’t earn their wealth but used rent-seeking instead.  The issue economic rent-seeking, as Joshua Brown, who blogs at The Reformed Broker, put it so eloquently a year ago is about the fact that:

• “America hates unjustified privilege,
• it hates an unfair playing field and crony capitalism …,
• it hates privatized gains and socialized losses,
• it hates people who have been bailed out and don't display even the slightest bit of remorse or humbleness in the presence of so much suffering in the aftermath
• it hates rule changes that benefit the few at the expense of the many…”

Illuminated Solutions from Patterns of the Past

I guess I’ve always been drawn to history for two reasons.  First for its patterns that illuminate solutions to present-day problems, but even more so because the more closely history is examined the more complex it becomes.

Anything I knew about North Carolina before relocating here nearly 24 years ago came from reading Blue Highways – A Journey Into America written by William Least Heat-Moon.  I had read this classic when it was first published seven years earlier.  Today is also available as an eBook.

During my forty-year career working in promotion of travel as a form of community economic development and preservation of sense-of-place, I hated to travel myself.  That irony led former Alaska governor Tony Knowles, then mayor of Anchorage, to quip that this was one of the reasons he had the utmost trust for me while I was representing that community for most of the 1980s.

In retirement I still don’t care much for air travel but I thoroughly enjoy cross-country road-trips.  I hope in the future to re-trace Professor Least Heat-Moon’s journey.  There is no part of that journey where the country wasn’t influenced by the US Civil War including the events preceding and/or immediately following it.

In the year leading up to the Civil War, there were only 992,622 people living in North Carolina.  No one voted to elect Republican Abraham Lincoln President of the still-United States of America.

However, nearly as many North Carolinians voted for the candidate from the Constitutional Union Party which opposed disunion, as did for the candidate from the pro-slavery Southern-wing of the Democratic Party.

Durham, NC where I live, though it had only been recognized by the post office seven years earlier, was part of the 24,554 North Carolinians who were urban at the time.  Durham was also home to some of the 30,563 free Blacks at the time and some of the 331,059 who were enslaved across the state.  Wilmington was the largest city at the time.

Voters who lived in and around Durham in 1860 may have been as closely divided during the Presidential election that year because it was home to both planters who tended toward secessionist Democrats and the former Whigs of the Constitutional Union Party - including a former U.S. Senator - who opposed disunion.

Durham was already integrated although it became less so during the Civil War.  It re-integrated after the war, promoting an editorial in the newspaper in nearby Raleigh stating something like “have you seen what’s happening in Durham?  Whites and Negroes are working side by side on the same street like a wild west town.”

In a recent article for Our State Magazine, Professor Dr. Philip Gerard, a department chair at UNC-Wilmington summarized the religious background of North Carolinians at the time. 

Gerard notes that in 1860 there were 3,000 Episcopalians in North Carolina along with 65,000 Baptists, 60,000 Methodists, 15,000 Presbyterians, 5,000 Quakers and pockets of Moravians, Lutherans, Disciples of Christ, Roman Catholics and Jews.

Many slaves were forbidden to worship out of fear it would foment discontent and “an urge to run away or rebel.”  Gerard’s article gives an excellent overview of how people of faith, especially evangelicals were able to rationalize slavery and how they transferred that zeal to rationalizing that God was on their side during the Civil War.

For many in the North, the war was initially about preserving the Union and only later became a means of granting equal rights.  Union general and later U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant was married to a southerner whose family owned slaves.  Struggling to establish a farm before the war he even owned a slave himself before granting that person freedom as war became imminent.

An understanding can be drawn from that period that sheds light on how so many people of faith today can justify intolerance of other kinds.  Many of these same people seem to rationalize inaction and obstruction to efforts to address climate change while enabling resource exploitation and desecration.

I was puzzled about why a Republican state lawmaker in North Carolina had been so determined to push through a bill granting out-of-state billboard companies a “give-away” to destroy $5 billion worth of publicly owned trees along roadways, given a poll that shows that voters affiliated with that party oppose the give-away by 218 to 1, twenty-nine times the ratio of Democratic voters who are opposed.

But then it dawned on me that the chief sponsor was apparently a Democrat-now-turned-Republican, and the measure may be more about special interests than party ideology or voter sentiment.  Maybe that will encourage newly-elected governor Pat McCrory to roll-back the give-away, although as one billboarder gloated, it will be too late to save any trees.

By some measures, North Carolina was the last state to try to secede from the United States of America and only then after every surrounding state had done so.  Even after seven other states had seceded, most North Carolinians remained remained pro-Union, voting to reject even a convention to discuss secession on February 28, 1861, preferring to see what President Lincoln would do when he took office on March 4th.

South Carolina forced North Carolina’s hand when in April it opened fire on Fort Sumter forcing Lincoln to blockade the Southern coastline and to call for troops to confront secession which he termed illegal under the Constitution. 

“As many at 10,000 or more white North Carolinians” elected to join the Union Army instead, along with 5,000 African Americans including both free blacks and escaped slaves.  “Approximately 125,000 enlisted as Confederate soldiers, and as many as 40,000 died.”

As Union General Sherman entered North Carolina on his march through the South that would end with the largest surrender in Durham and the effective end of the Civil War, he went easier on North Carolina, largely because the peace movement here was given far-reaching publicity by newspaper editor William Woods Holden that was far greater than its actual numbers.

Holden was appointed and then elected governor of North Carolina as a Republican dedicated to “protection of African American rights” and “suppression of the Ku Klux Klan” for which he was impeached and removed from office six years after the end of the Civil War.

History is never simple and while the labels and ideologies are fluid, its lessons are always relevant to the present and the future.