North Carolina’s Earliest Post Progressives

Following the American Revolution and creation of a new system of government, North Carolina spent the first four or five decades of the 1800s under the control of regressives.

Before delving into the small but determined resistance to regressives during that period and what they would be able to eventually change, as well as a state icon they couldn’t in time, it may be helpful to explain what regressive means.

Philosophically, regressives differ from other conservatives because rather than just seeking to tap the brakes on what they see as unbridled progressivism, regressives actually seek to reverse progress.

Following the American Revolution, most were not among the third of North Carolinians still loyal to Great Britain or, of course, the 25% in bondage.

But regressives represented a faction that lobbied for a return to those pre-war values and ideals.

In the Tar Heel state, a slightly higher percentage were regressives than than those who were characterized as radicals or rioters because they wanted even more change.

Together, these two group narrowly outnumbered the remaining loyalists, most of whom would emigrate elsewhere.

Throughout the nation, as other states perpetuated the progressivism upon which America was founded, regressives in North Carolina during those early decades earned it a reputation as the “Rip Van Winkle” state.

As a result, land values plummeted as more than a third of North Carolinians moved away.

Between 1830 and 1840 alone, nearly half of the counties lost population according to a superbly documented book entitled, North Carolina Through Four Centuries.

The 1850 census revealed that 31% of all native North Carolinians still living in the United States resided in some other state.  Backwardness had driven away more than 400,000 Tar Heels, two-thirds of whom were white.

This was equivalent to half the state’s population in that census.

For the first half of the 1800s, the legislature was controlled by less than 10% of the population, including slave-holding planters living down east who were adamantly opposed to public education, roads, government in general and taxes.

Fast forward two hundred years.  Sound slightly familiar?

Between 2000 and 2010, half of North Carolina’s counties were again losing population with most relocating to the state’s more progressive cities.

Regressivism is as much a part of America as any other view, if not a bit ironic in a nation forged by progressives.  But it doesn’t take popularity for this view to seize control.

Because very few voters today are able to vote for the handful of legislators who are in control of setting legislative agendas in many states, including North Carolina, those decisions are also essentially controlled by about 10% of the electorate.

In part, it is an inherent flaw in representative democracy vs. more “popular” forms of democracy, but not perhaps, a view currently held by regressives who often seem to rationalize overriding the views of the majority of voters by insisting that the same would be done to them were they not in power.

Fueling this partisan view of “screw them before they screw you back,” is the fact that since 1998 “fewer than 10% of both state senate and state house seats have been competitive,” a factor driven by partisan gerrymandering of districts.

The thing to remember is that during much of that earlier period of regression following the Revolution, a handful of deeply concerned and resilient North Carolinians were persistently advocating progressive ideas, which following the Civil War, would put “the state on a totally new course.”

They were named Yancey, Caldwell, Fisher, Swain, Gaston, Morehead and Graham.

But their architect was Judge Archibald DeBow Murphey who was born in Red House, which is now called Semora, a crossroads just northwest of what is now Hyco Lake, a twin in Person County just west of Mayo Lake where we now split time with our home just south in Durham.

The area of Murphey’s origins is now a part of Caswell County, but when he was born it was a part of Orange County. 

Judge Murphey eventually practiced law down in Hillsborough a few miles west from what is now Durham and established a residence in Hawsfield (southwest of current-day Mebane.)

It was during this period that Murphey crafted his plan for North Carolina’s salvation including “establishment of a public education system, construction of canals and turnpike roads, as well as a general public welfare system,” and eventually railroads.

In fact, regardless of sympathies, North Carolinians weren’t paying much attention to succession leading up to the Civil War.

Instead they were focused on constitutional reform and a struggle over ad valorem taxes as a means for wealthy plantation owners to pay their fair share to fund Murphey’s vision.

Many of Durham’s founding generation were heavily influenced by Murphey’s strategic views including his close friends here, the Camerons.

They encouraged others in what would become Durham to push for statewide progress such as building railroads and a strong banking system.

Keep in mind by 1820, only 7% of Americans lived in cities and progressives such as Murphey saw a scalable role in development and progress for state government. 

There were only 61 settlements with more than 2,500 people in the whole country at the time and only five with more than 25,000 people so progressives such as Murphey were clearly farsighted.

But progressives at the time were not able to save the longleaf pine forests that provided North Carolinians their “tar heel” nickname as well as a species of our state tree.

In pre-settlement times, these savannah-like forests dominated a swath from northeast North Carolina in a strip that straddled the fall line between the Piedmont and Coastal Plain continuing in an arc down through the south all the way to Texas, 90 million acres in all.

These would have been the forests where my 8th great grandmother Mary Jane was born on Salmon Creek, more than three hundred years before I would uncover my North Carolina roots.

But from a time before North Carolina earned its “tar heel” nickname until the mid-1800s, these trees were used for naval stores or in other words tar, pitch, rosin and turpentine.

More than just shipping, it was the “wagon” industry that relied on grease produced from these distinct trees as well as uses for their wood by settlers, such as fencing.

Colonists would gird or strangle the trees to death while replacing the understory savannah grasses with corn and other crops as well as letting livestock such as hogs range wild.

Soon huge numbers of hogs, cattle, horses, mules, sheep and goats eventually trampled through these forests contributing to their demise while depleting the soil across much of North Carolina by 1900.

By 1920, the longleaf pine was virtually extinct. 

Gone were not only trees that take 100 to 150 years to reach full size (between 98 and 115 feet) and may live to be 500 years old, but gone too were seas of understory savannah grasses.

Environmental and science historians have placed nearly as much blame on these practices for the sediments that will muddy North Carolina’s streams, rivers and lakes for a thousand years, as they do on the farming practices used to raise cotton and tobacco.

Another factor is that we know now that our soils in the South are much more fragile than other parts of the country.

Fully two-thirds of the deforestation that has taken place across America over the last 400 years occurred during the sixty years between 1850 and 1910.

When a movement took hold to re-plant pine trees in North Carolina, short-leaf pines such as loblolly were used instead of longleaf pines because they grow faster, much closer together and don’t require ground fire to reproduce.

Since the 1960s when collectively pines were named North Carolina’s state tree, efforts have been underway to re-establish longleaf pines using prescribed fire along their base as well as protecting the tiny old growth stands that have been discovered.

But one thing is for sure, for now this means that North Carolina has a much different natural sense of place than it once had.

It is in the wake of this desecration that culminated in the early 1900s that another strategic wave of progressivism took hold in North Carolina, launching its mainstream status as a tourism destination.

More on that in the next post, including a fourth wave in the early 1970s that voters embedded in the constitution, something that legislators including regressives today choose to ignore.

Imprinting Values - Hope From Another Era of Regression

Only in retrospect am I able to pinpoint when I was imprinted with the value of conservation.

It was during my early years as the scion of five generations of Idaho ranchers.  In the early 1950s, horse and cattle ranchers not only practiced - but were respected - as conservationists.

But it wasn’t until my mid-20s in my second year as the CEO of my first community destination marketing organization that I learned from a sociologist and marketing professor how values are formed.

In 1976, Dr. Morris Massey of the University of Colorado was giving presentations on his theory of values formation entitled, What You Are Is Where You Were When.

Up to the age of 7, I was imprinting values such as conservation from my parents and grandparents, especially my paternal grandfather with whom I spent a part of nearly every day doing light chores on the ranch, until I reached school age.

That’s when we “learn a sense of right and wrong, good and bad,” and in the Mormon culture of my native Rockies, reach the “age of accountability.”

Massey believed that people modeled not only family members but other people between the ages of 8 and 13, including teachers.  There is then a “socialization period” between 13 and 21 when we turn more to peers and the media.

This is why experts note that people rarely change much after age 15 or 16.

Coincidentally, people born after 1976 when Dr. Massey laid down those three periods of value formation, are likely to have imprinted controversial and partisan notions of conservation, especially the now-politicized label of environmentalist.

My first DMO was formed by grants from Spokane Unlimited and the City of Spokane in hopes of leveraging the community’s notoriety from producing Expo 74, a World’s Fair for the Environment.

It is mind-boggling to most people when I explain today that the origins of that theme came from the local business community.

Being concerned about the environment and being business friendly like being an environmentalist and a rancher weren’t considered mutually exclusive values back then.

My very conservative ancestors would seem moderate by today’s standards, not because they would have changed their views but because conservatives in general seem to have moved so far right.

It is probably why, as an Independent, I am called liberal by my friends on the right and conservative by my friends on the left.  I even get holiday cards from both former governor and Republican Presidential hopeful Jeb Bush and President Barack Obama, a somewhat liberal Democrat.

Conservation as a movement long pre-dates President Teddy Roosevelt who gave it prominence when he declared it a national duty in 1908 in a speech delivered on my grandfather’s 10th birthday and well into that second phase of values formation.

By necessity, before and after that time nearly all ranchers considered themselves conservationists, because it was just good business, something that had impressed Roosevelt during the time he spent ranching prior to his political career.

So the value my grandfather imprinted on me prior to turning 10 had been imprinted on him too by that age.

A second era of conservation began in 1948, when eight days before I was born, Congress passed the Federal Water Pollution Control Act which was then broadened in ‘56, ‘65, ‘72 and ‘87 as it was this year by President Obama in implementation.

North Carolina, where I’ve lived most of my life, appears to have dodged a bullet this month when conservatives, moderates and progressives in the General Assembly rejected a proposal by construction special interests and regressives in the Senate to narrow vegetation buffers along streams and creeks.

By the way, the term regressive is not a pejorative.  Today it is most often used to describe those few who, when disguised as conservatives, seek not to merely tap the breaks on progress but roll it back.

But regressives have long existed at both ends of the political spectrum.

This includes a wing of progressives.  While giving regressives power is almost always a mistake, it is important to listen to them because so-called progress in some instances turns out to be problematic when taken to extremes.

This crossed my mind as we took our old runabout for a spin up Mayo Lake this past weekend.  Experts have remarked at how clear that lake is, the clearest in North Carolina, they claim.

Some credit is due to a unique vegetation buffer that is protected between homes and the lake shore.  But even more important is that wetlands at the mouth of the primary stream that fills the lake are fully intact and ecologically functional.

Wetlands such as this scrub the water of pollutants including sediment which is the number one source of pollution in our state, impairing the overwhelming majority of our waterways.

North Carolina passed a law to control sediment in 1973 and defined it as “solid particulate matter, both mineral and organic, that has been or is being transported by water, air, gravity, or ice from its site of origin.”

For the first time, I noticed a pasture of cattle along a stretch of shoreline on spin around the lake last weekend, north of the Triple Springs boat ramp.

It was primarily, but not totally buffered by trees, and was probably grandfathered as an exception when the lake was created in the late 1970s/early 1980s. 

Cattle can be a source of contamination to waterways too, even when pasture-raised and especially when nitrogen is over applied and then washes into waterways.

But don’t jerk that knee quite so fast.

A technique called holistic management of pastures has shown that cattle grazing actually helps the land store 25% more carbon, and that for “each 1% of carbon stored in the soil, an additional 60,000 acres of water per acre can be retained on the land.”

Click here for an excellent video on why soil is so critical to solving our climate change threat.  Click here for an excellent Washington Post essay on the issue of “grass-fed” cattle and whether they are good for you, the animal and the planet.

Grass-fed is a form of regression, a roll-back from today’s massive feedlots where cattle are “finished” using anything but grass.  When I was coming up in the 1950s it was the predominant way cattle were raised, including our 500 head.

But for anyone dismayed by the havoc regressives have created the last few years in the legislature, it may give hope to look back two hundred years to another era when they held sway in North Carolina.

Following the American Revolution and creation of a new system of government, North Carolina spent the first four or five decades of the 1800s in the control of regressives.

Throughout the nation, as other states perpetuated the progressivism upon which America was founded, North Carolina earned a reputation as the “Rip Van Winkle” state.

As a result, land values plummeted as more than a third of North Carolinians moved away.

Between 1830 and 1840 alone, nearly half of the counties lost population according to a superbly documented book entitled North Carolina Through Four Centuries.

The 1850 census revealed that 31% of all native North Carolinians then living in the United States resided in some other state.”  Backwardness had driven away more than 400,000 Tar Heels, two-thirds of whom were white.

This was equivalent to half the state’s population in that census.

For the first half of the 1800s, the legislature was controlled by less than 10% of the population, including slave-holding planters living down east who were adamantly opposed to public education, roads, government in general and taxes.

Fast forward two hundred years.  Sound familiar?

The thing to remember is that during much of that period of regression, a handful of deeply concerned and resilient North Carolinians were persistently advocating progressive ideas that would put “the state on a totally new course,” following the Civil War.

They were named Yancey, Caldwell, Fisher, Swain, Gaston, Morehead and Graham.  But their architect was Judge Archibald DeBow Murphey who was born in Red House, which is now called Semora, a crossroads just northwest of Hyco Lake, a twin lake just west of Mayo Lake.

It is now a part of Caswell County, but when Murphey was born it was a part of Orange County.  He eventually practiced law down in Hillsborough a few miles west from Durham and established a residence in Hawsfield (southwest of Mebane.)

Here Judge Murphey crafted his plan for North Carolina’s salvation including “establishment of a public education system, construction of canals and turnpike roads, as well as a general public welfare system,” and eventually railroads.

In fact, North Carolinians weren’t paying much attention to succession leading up to the Civil War.

Instead they were focused on constitutional reform and a struggle over ad valorem taxes as a means for wealthy plantation owners to pay their fair share to fund Murphey’s vision.

Many of Durham’s founding generation were heavily influenced by Murphey’s ideas including his close friends the Camerons, who encouraged others in what would become Durham to push for statewide progress such as railroads and a strong banking system.

They were living proof of Dr. Massey’s theory of value development that “what you are is where you were then.”

My value for conservation was obviously imprinted by my family but I am also a product of a twenty-eight year period when conservation, ecology and environmentalism were bipartisan values.

The partisan demonization of those values over the past 40 years has taken a toll, and yet polls today show that 77% of Americans support stricter environmental protections including 58% of Republicans, the party primarily responsible for their demonization.

People who point instead to another recent poll showing that 49% of Americans view government as an immediate threat, need to read more closely the reasons given. 

Too big 19%, gun control 12%, law enforcement 4%, surveillance of citizens 4%, overregulation 3%, taxes 3%, illegal immigration 3%, and environmental regulation just 1%.

You sure wouldn’t know it from the obsessions in news headlines or by partisan statements by lawmakers.

There are even more Americans who are concerned that government isn’t doing its job.  Inconvenient to journalists and reporters and bloggers for that matter is that people can hold contradictions.

In fact, news stories miss an important point.  When people disagree, it usually isn’t about a specific issue, such as being for or against billboards or trees.

They just hold different values.

The Price for Being Quiet

I could smell Spring as it sprung a few days ago.  It is an early morning smell I recall from my job as a morning delivery paper boy fifty six years ago.

It is the quietness I also remember from my youth.  This map of the quietest and noisiest places across the contiguous United States shows that my native Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho is still very quiet.

In fact, it is amazing how quiet the West is compared to the Midwest, Northeast and South, as shown on the map in this blog.  I’ve been intrigued since first spotting it in a blog posted last month on Discover and now in High Country News.

Durham, North Carolina where I have now lived for 39% of my life --longer than any other place -- is relatively noisy, but you wouldn’t know it on our early morning walks down through a city park and then up the steep slopes of what we affectionately call Mt. Rockwood.

About a mile and half from downtown Durham, Mt. Rockwood is a ridgeline that appears to be the highest elevation between Chapel Hill and the even higher Red Mountain in northern Durham.  Where I live now is not only noisier, it is also 4,789 feet lower than the ancestral ranch where I was born.

Durham County is the 17th smallest land area in North Carolina but created for a city of the same name that is now the fourth largest in population.  It has been the epicenter now for two different manifestations of the New South.

Initially, proponents lobbied to name it Mangum County in honor of a Willie P. Mangum, a U.S. Senator from here who had stood firm against hardliners in the state legislature, in favor of a national compromise regarding slavery.

In his day, it was Democrats who had been the regressives in control.

Durham was selected as the name making it synchronous for the city for which it was created, the only place in the state where a county and city by the same name are both found in one location.

While much of the state was overrun by marauding gangs of the KKK, Durham had emerged after the Civil War as a center for the progressive South and an accepting sanctuary for people fleeing the violence in rural areas.

In the 1950s, northern Durham spawned another U.S. Senator William Umstead, this time elected as governor of North Carolina who before he died in office set in motion the development of Research Triangle Park here.

Building on a long history here for innovation, RTP marked Durham’s emergence as the center for creativity it is today, and a magnet for talent and relocating businesses and corporations from around the world.

Today, another wave of regressives, Republicans this time, are devoted to dragging Durham in reverse along with other urban areas by pitting rural against urban as a metaphor for when those of this mindset in another political party, pitted white against black.

Regressives also tried this approach in the 1920s, pitting rural against urban, rolling back voting rights and openly being hostile to women and immigrants.

Public opinion polls show that only about 18% of Americans today think this way but is it coincidence this is also the percentage of Americans who deny climate change and worry “not at all” about the environment?

They sure make a lot of noise.

Probably also not a coincidence, this happens to be the same percentage of the American workforce in general as well as in North Carolina specifically, shown to be “actively disengaged,” meaning they are:

“employees not just unhappy at work; these employees undermine the accomplishments of their engaged coworkers.”

Maybe a quick follow up or cross-tab would confirm that all of this noise comes from the same 18% of Americans.

Protected by clever redistricting, those in elected office here are doing everything possible to deconstruct cities such as Durham by overriding popular ordinances to curb blight such as billboards as well as design guidelines to protect neighborhood property values and sense of place.

Now they have their sights on tourism, also known as visitor-centric economic and cultural development. Cities such as Durham work hard to be appealing including to the millions of North Carolinians who visit here annually on daytrips.

The purpose is twofold: fuel the local business climate and expand the local tax base, something the state’s largest cities forget when they provide subsidies to draw events in excess of the tax revenues they will generate.

People live in rural areas instead for many reasons, the quiet, being closer to nature but also to avoid paying taxes for services urban dwellers seek.

Now regressive want to redistribute the wealth cities generate by letting rural North Carolinians “have their cake and eat it too” - enjoy the benefits of trips into cities without helping to provide for that environment and then take their sales taxes back home.

So how does 18% of a population pull down the other 82%?  Clever redistricting for sure.  And a lot of voters who fail to hold their elected officials accountable for harm they do to others including fostering warfare between lifestyles.

But even more enabling are other elected officials who fall for clever introductions written for bills but fail to read for legislative intent and consequences, settling instead for horse trades.

In the end, tyranny and regression in this country never work for long.  But it always takes decades to repair the damage.

We need a little more noise in North Carolina.

A Clear Difference

Maybe not in Salt Lake City which I visited over the weekend, but according to Gallup, Utah, is six points more conservative than North Carolina, where I live.

Yet last week the state legislature in Utah voted to bar discrimination against people who are LGBT, something done by individual cities such as Durham, NC but recently voted down in Charlotte, the state’s largest city.

Utah is slightly less liberal or moderate than my native Idaho, just slightly more moderate than North Carolina and more than four points less liberal but the measure passed by nearly 7-to-1 in the House of Representatives and nearly 5-to-1 in the Senate.

Yet it is unthinkable that the legislature in North Carolina, which does not mirror the state’s population when it comes to ideology, could ever reach a similar compromise as that in Utah.

I suspected the Utah law would pass when last month, during a visit to the Pacific Northwest, I saw three Mormon leaders announce the church’s support on the news, quite a turn-around from 2008.

By its actions, North Carolina’s legislature appears to be controlled by “regressives.”

Conservatives want to tap the breaks on progress, while regressives want to take society in reverse.  Nearly all regressives are conservative but only a tiny percentage of conservatives are regressives.

Here, we just happened to put them in charge.

Mormons know a thing or two about regressives too.  The church was founded as restorationist, meaning a return to the original Christian church.

From time to time, regressives have taken a toll, such as during a period in the 1850s known as the “Mormon Reformation.”

It was during this period that at least two of my ancestors who had crossed the Rockies for sanctuary against persecution and discrimination were sanctioned and forced by regressives to be re-baptized for questioning local church officials regarding civil decisions.

North Carolina, too, knows a thing or two about regressives from its past.

The state was ambivalent about the Civil War, with many areas outspoken against slavery and pro-Union until surrounded by secessionist states and threatened with economic isolation and retribution.

Next month, festivities in Durham will mark 150 years since the surrender here effectively ended the Civil War.  Within five years of the war’s end, Durham was known for Bull Durham tobacco adding warehouses to factories, and within a few years, even telephones.

But in 1870, many other parts of North Carolina had turned instead to regressives, joining the KKK which was centered one county over from Durham, while across the nation the Bull City was forging a progressive view of the Tar Heel state as the New South.

The KKK was revived at the turn of the century when a North Carolina clergyman published a book entitled The Clansman, soon adapted to film as The Birth of a Nation, and reinvigorated old racial stereotypes from slavery.

Corruption doomed that incarnation of the KKK, but a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1954 sowed the seeds of its re-emergence by 1960 among descendants of earlier regressives, fueled by rhetoric from a Raleigh TV newscaster soon-to-be U.S. Senator.

This history and more is available in a new documentary entitled Klansville, USA released this past January on the acclaimed PBS series, American Experience, and based in part on the excellent book by David Cunningham.

It is now also available via website or by streaming via Netflix.

By 1960 a few years after Durham became a center for the Civil Rights movement, descendants of earlier regressives resurrected the KKK in North Carolina vowing to stack the state legislature by playing on the fears of rural North Carolinians.

During the 1950’s Durham was busy helping to develop Research Triangle Park here, but it was also a training site for students conducting civil rights protests across the state.

Every few months, I drive up to the parking lot of Durham County Memorial Stadium to drop off e-waste such as old batteries and irreparable electric gizmos, or anything with an electric motor or charge cord.

Erected in 1959, four years after the Supreme Court desegregated public schools, the stadium was built for Durham’s “whites-only” high schools, a lasting monument to segregated schools at the very time legal action and protests were allowing black students to transfer to previously all white schools.

Desegregation such as this set off a resurgence of regressives and a third resurrection of the KKK.  One of those appearing on the documentary in footage filmed before his passing in 2005 is C.P. Ellis.

Ellis owned a Texaco station in Durham when during the early 1960s he joined the KKK and became the Exalted Cyclops for the clan here.  Membership surged across the state as school officials implemented policies to racially balance the schools.

Instead, whites, most of whom were poor, fled to private and parochial schools reducing public school enrollment in Durham by 40% during the 1960s.

The flight was even worse across the state and in less progressive communities such as Raleigh where the KKK had been instrumental in selection of a police chief in the 1920s, 5,000 KKK members rallied just months after a progressive had been governor from 1961-1965.

In the 1970s, the courts ruled that schools here must be racially rebalanced.  A committee to effect that change brought Exalted Cyclops Ellis together with Ann Atwater, a civil rights activist.

Together they each did something rare, even today. As documented in the acclaimed book, Best of Enemies by Osha Gray Davidson, they listened to each other and a friendship formed.

Regressives in North Carolina today don’t wear hoods and robes and only occasionally burn crosses, but their influence is still felt.  Helms used racially charged campaign advertising to win close reelections well into the mid-1990s.

You can hear echoes of regressives in myths perpetuated around water coolers to scare newcomers from living in progressive communities such as Durham or if they do to put their children in private or parochial schools.

Regressives are most visible behind the actions of the state legislature, abetted by peers to read only the misleading titles and subtitles on bills they submit, virtually erasing any memory of North Carolina being known as the New South.

The LGBT anti-discrimination legislation passed in Utah is a contrast and evidence of what it means to be conservative without being regressive.

North Carolina’s regressives ban the use of phrases like “climate change” in reports and meddle in local affairs, while hypocritically accusing the federal government of political correctness and meddling in state affairs.

The LGBT legislation in Utah steps forward not only in that area but pairs it with provisions granting the right of people to express religious beliefs in the workplace.

North Carolina will weather this renewed regression but it will take decades to mend all of the damage it has done including to the state’s reputation and psyche.

In the meantime, let’s just not blame their actions on true conservatives.

Really, Pretty Centrist

I am a self-described moderate but people who know me say I can sound “pretty liberal.”

But a core of regressives in our state legislature as well as in the U.S Congress make moderates and even true conservatives sound liberal.

In truth, I get exasperated with a tendency by some liberals to sound as though they are always trying to absolve groups and individuals of personal accountability.

An example is a story last week on New Republic by Dana Goldstein entitled, Inexcusable Absences about some truancy laws that hold parents accountable.

My concern as I read the recent DOJ report on the police department in Ferguson, Missouri, is that as a society we have an obsession now with institutional accountability.  That blinds us to an even more significant underlying problems in neighborhoods and homes.

In fact, there is ample evidence that even the problems of some individuals within institutions can be traced back to the homes and neighborhoods where they were raised.

But if you get “bleeding heart” beginning of Goldstein’s story, she makes several very valid data-driven points about how we can institutionally deal better deal with truancy institutionally, but few to enlighten societal interventions at home.

Okay, am I sounding moderate enough now?

I may have dismissed the article too soon had I not read Goldstein’s phenomenal book recently entitled The Teacher Wars, a well-written and documented overview of 175 years of American education.

It was particularly enlightening when read, as I did, in tandem with the just published revision of The Libertarian Mind written by David Boaz.  There is actually more agreement than people who only judge them by their titles might think.

This country was founded by liberals and libertarians who did not see those outlooks as incompatible.

The Teacher Wars illustrates just how old, tired and ineffective the polices are that are now being rehashed by regressives elected to high office across the country.  The far right still fails to grasp that we are not all born equal.

The book also illustrates how misguided teacher unions have been to shield unengaged teachers from consequences.

The Libertarian Mind brought to mind a friend I see on occasion frequenting a restaurant in our neighborhood.  Get him started and he will spend all the time you have and more explaining how the federal government is to blame for the collapses that brought about the Great Recession.

He has a point but fails to grasp that it is the free market that fails to incorporate the full cost of its actions into a fully sustainable cycle, instead pushing what are called negative externalities off onto society.

Taking responsibility for consequences is also a theme in The Libertarian Mind whose adherents would probably agree with the right of Michael Brown’s parents to sue the Ferguson Police Department as a rightful consequence.

But it is much more complex when consequences are enforced on poor parenting or neglectful neighbors and landlords or on personal behavior regardless of circumstances.

This is also an area today’s liberals avoid, seeming instead to absolve consequences by viewing personal responsibility through the lens of victims of circumstance such as objecting to work requirements for safety net benefits even though those were required when the nets were first erected, ironically by liberals.

Everything seems to revolve around that pesky little issue of free will.  Libertarians seem to reject any other influence and liberals often seem to sweep away free will altogether.

The sticky wicket seems to be what is blameworthy.

But none of us has been held entirely responsible for each of our actions so criminalizing poor or inadequate parenting may not ensure personal accountability either and certainly doesn’t seem fair or consistent with any of the world’s spiritual cultures.

Consequentialism and Communitarianism, are to me at the opposite ends of a spectrum, one seeming to view the world only through individual responsibility and the other viewing responsibility as a result of community interactions rather than personal behavior.

So there too, I find myself clinging as a centrist, though as I get older liberals probably see me as “pretty conservative” and my more conservative friends see me as “pretty liberal.”

It’s Healthy to be Skeptical, Just Not Cynical

Whenever I come across global warming/climate change deniers, I try to carefully listen or read what they have to say.

Some don’t really deny it’s happening.

They believe we’ll just overcome it somehow as we have major crises in the past without seeing that those were ultimately overcome by action, after being made worse by waiting.

I used warming/change in my opening because a new Yale University study shows that Americans feel a sense of urgency when the term global warming is used.

Which, in part, is why more than a decade ago savvy Republican researchers suggested the substitution of “climate change” to make it seem less threatening.

That warm and fuzzy approach to global warming turned out as predicted to not only divide Americans but cause 1-in-5 to be not at all worried (p. 16.)

As an Independent I may have been cynical about the motives of “professional confusers” behind today’s gridlock but now having read this memo I’m not even skeptical.

Ironically, the 2002 Republican research called for a flip-flop.

A decade earlier conservatives had teamed in a bipartisan effort under the first Republican President Bush to break a 13-year logjam by deploying market-based “cap and trade” to successfully curb another harmful emission.

In 2002 there wasn’t the overwhelming scientific consensus there is today that climate change/global warming is a real and present danger or that it is due to human actions above and beyond natural causes over the last 250 years, especially the last 60.

If you are a skeptic who happened to read this far, you may want to read the research by scientists at Berkley Earth who until recently were also skeptical.

It is summarized their new report entitled, Know The Facts: A Skeptic’s Guide to Climate Change.

Then again, studies of “motivated reasoning” find that in many people skepticism is really a cognitive cover used to deflect unwelcome information.

This is especially true when it is sincerely held that what ordinary people believe will not make a policy difference.

Showing irrationality is often rarely enough to “induce individuals to process information in a different way.”

There is a difference between being skeptical and being cynical.

Skeptics have reservations.  Cynics believe others are motivated by selfish concerns and don’t believe in altruism or even honesty.

If you’ve never been into reading and understanding various philosophical outlooks, a new book illustrates each one instead, entitled Philographics.

Deniers often fall into both categories though it seems more often the latter while global warming believers sometimes can get caught up in being cynical about deniers.

New science shows that cynics on both sides run a much higher risk of dementia, especially perhaps those cynical about scientific studies.  The study also shows that cynics won’t die any earlier, perhaps they just won’t remember.

That 2002 Republican research memo predicted more than a decade ago what a new Yale study confirms: use of the terms global warming and climate change are synonymous to Republicans and Conservatives (or as we Independents often joke, is that now redundant?)

But the term climate change “actually reduces engagement” among Independents, Democrats, moderates and liberals.  Fortunately, groups that will soon dominate elections such as minorities and young adults light up when global warming is used instead.

And that might be why global warming is still the most used by Americans personally, as well as in the news media, and in conversation according to the Yale study.

The Berkley Earth report meant for climate change/global warming skeptics includes a breakdown of what events are unrelated, e.g. tornados and earthquakes.

Hurricanes, droughts, forest fires and floods may change due to global warming/climate change but the amount hasn’t been established.

There is a link established to increased heat waves and coastal flooding.

New research also shows that global warming is not only reducing snow pack where water has historically been stored until released into rivers and reservoirs each spring, the means by which 1-in-6 people worldwide receive fresh drinking water.

But paradoxically, the resulting switchover to rainfall also means these water ways are less full in part because it is held in place by soil instead.

Sitting idle, we are likely to see much more rainfall but much less available for human use for drinking water.  This also mean less available for electrical power and agriculture.

Of course the use of climate science has been outlawed for the time being by the legislature in North Carolina because it was inconvenient for a few coastal land developers.

And some members of Congress are trying to do the same regarding military research which over the last 60 years has been the foundation of nearly all of the technological changes driving American innovation.

Fortunately, corporations are paying no heed and building the price of reversing global warming into strategic plans. Nor are many states.

Nine northeast states which banded together to cap emissions in 2009 have seen their economies grow faster than the other states while reducing greenhouse gas emissions nearly five times quicker.

A similar combine of five western states and two Canadian provinces fell apart after conservatives seized control in 2010.  But British Columbia in 2010 and California last year moved ahead.

Regressives such as those banning the use of studies on global warming and other research are easy to spot.

Even those who make it onto the governing boards of much smaller organizations where research is a core value are obvious by using every opportunity to demean it and to starve it of resources and focus.

All conservatives are not regressives, nor are all regressives conservatives. What they have in common is a disdain for research and resistance to progress.

In the words of the famous Brooklyn Dodgers then Yankees announcer Red Barber, “back, back, back, back (smile.)”

Regressives in the North Carolina General Assembly today are failing to head the warnings in that landmark 2002 research for Republicans, because that would, uh, be using scientific research.

It warns that while conservative attempts to negatively brand environmentalists had been successful by 2002, Americans as a whole remain overwhelmingly sensitive about the environment.

They just prefer instead labels such as pro-environment and conservationist.

The memo warns that “when we [Republicans] talk about ‘rolling back regulations’ involving the environment, we [Republicans] are sending a message Americans don’t support” and when it comes to regulations, Americans are “most comfortable with local oversight.”

The last part is lost on North Carolina regressives seeking every means possible to strip local governments of any oversight while demonizing science and regulations meant in the publics interest.

Not all narcissists in high office (found in greater proportion and much further up the spectrum than the general populace) are regressives, but uber narcissism among regressives may explain their claim “we don’t give a damn how many people this hurts.”

Oops, I hear someone banging on my door but keep the faith.  Whoever it is that thinks I’m part of a conspiracy probably won’t remember long.

Environmental Injustice

I felt slightly better when I rode the Harley Cross Bones again past the devastation I wrote about last week.  It had already been reforested by acres of loblolly pine seedlings.

This pine plantation will never replace the mixed forest that was clear cut, including hardwoods that had been growing there for a hundred or more years, but pines grow fast and will be timbered again before long.

A church owns the property and used the sale of the timber to earn funds.  To its credit, the congregation retained a consulting forester as well as receiving a management plan from state foresters assigned to each county.

All foresters aren’t abreast of the benefits of holistic approach to urban forestry that meticulous research by the U.S. Forest Service has so thoroughly documented over the last 25 years.

Those educated earlier still view trees only as commodities to be harvested and urban forest as merely street trees.

Ironic, that in a state for whom trees are pivotal to its brand, tax incentives drive property owners to deforest rather than retain forests.

Likely aided or enabled by some old school foresters not up to speed on the science behind urban forests, a few “regressives” in the state legislature now want to also take away the ability of communities to foster retention of urban forest canopy.  .

Science, public health and local resident values be damned.

Still, foresters assigned to each county usually do their best, for now, to abide by local ordinances and to be respectful of local values.

The fact that these huge areas were completely denuded of all trees and vegetation reflects that Durham tree, soil and watershed ordinances in both the city and county are far from adequate.

I’m sure the property owner in this case was advised on the option of selective harvesting which, if done properly, would leave a mix of mature and growing species and still leave room for reseeding pines.

In the end, in their own interest, but not the community’s, it was the owner’s choice to be so drastic, mitigated by immediate if not biodiverse reforestation.

This example, along with one a few months earlier down on New Hope Creek (where replanting apparently was never contemplated) confirm that Durham doesn’t even require something county-wide as simple as retention of a few feet of token tree buffer along all roadways.

This would not just be for scenic preservation and visitor-centric appeal, but more importantly, to slow storm runoff, cleanse and sequester air pollutants and inhibit particulates.  It would also protect the reforested seedlings.

The soil erosion ordinances also seem less than adequate.  It will take decades now before trees will be able to safeguard the earth.  If you take this lightly, look again at what clear cutting caused in Oso last month.

Both clear cutting and selective cutting are legitimate techniques but must be done judiciously with a full awareness to mitigate any harm to others or the environment and the preservation of groves.  In an urban area clear cutting just has too many downsides.

Of course, even if Durham’s ordinances were “best practice,” any outcome would be totally reliant on how the passion and energy with which they were communicated and enforced, something found far too lacking among most of today’s public servants.

Regulations protect the public as well as guide property owners to mitigate actions shown to be harmful to others.  This at the very nexus of liberty and individual rights laid out at the dawn of this nation by John Stuart Mill.

Environmental justice is an important issue today in urban forestry, “an ethical principle that environmental benefits and burdens should be equitably distributed across society.”

This includes tree-planting programs such as the joint city-county initiative “Trees Across Durham.”  A new study sheds light on why a few in the legislature seem bent on deforesting all of North Carolina, beginning a few years ago with roadsides and now honed in on the urban forests of cities and counties.

A review of campaign contributions for these individuals recently reveals the outsized influence of special interests, including out-of-state billboard companies, formula or chain restaurants and power companies who begrudge communities struggling to preserve the vestiges of sense of place and appeal.

These special interests “vote” each and every day as they buttonhole legislators in the hallways of the people’s chamber while the “people” are limited to voting every few years.

Whenever I try to understand lawmakers bent on destroying forests and North Carolina’s sense of place I am reminded of insight given by the author of “The True Believer”:

"A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business."

The reason Eric Hoffer’s pocket size book is still popular more than six decades after it was published is that it provides keen insight into movements such as the regressives who control North Carolina today.

He sheds light on why this movement was able to seize power by playing rural North Carolinians against its cities, which over the span since The True Believer was first published, had turned the state’s image around.

Noted in Hoffer’s book is also why the less affluent and educated fall victim to movements such as the one bent on dramatically reversing North Carolina’s image as a place to live, visitor or do business to one as backward.

Recent research by foresters even found this phenomena present in a study of volunteers who tree-plant in urban forests.  They found that “a volunteer tree-planting program has more success in areas of higher socioeconomic status which already tend to have more, and better maintained, environmental amenities.”

As happened to so many parts of North Carolina, the benefits from decades of progress were unevenly distributed.  But rather than emulate the places propelled forward, their emissaries now seek to pull everyone in the entire state back several decades.  And what better way than to wreak havoc on the environment?

There is no evidence that those at the state level seeking to improve North Carolina’s brand mean more than just switching out a superficial logo and tagline, more a change of clothes than marketing.

But regardless, their efforts have already been made nil, undermined especially along roadsides which make the state’s first and last impressions on visitors, including the prospective deliverers of new jobs.

Of course this desecration is in violation of state and federal law as well as an amendment voters overwhelmingly approved to the state constitution more than four decades ago.

Special interests such as billboard companies have made any enforcement mute, if not lethargic, by hamstringing executive action and pushing lawmakers of all persuasions with financial incentives over that same span to apply what experts call “legal corruption.”

But even if federal law, which limits placement of billboards to areas deemed commercial in the mid-1960s were enforced, you would find them creating environmental injustice to those with lower socioeconomic status.

Even as barriers to Civil Rights were being taken down back then, urban housing policies began re-segregating the poor, stranding them in “out of sight, out of mind” tree, food and transportation deserts.

The current news media fixation is on gentrification as the culprits, but this fails to understand what housing policy expert and “City Notes” blogger Daniel Hertz describes, which is that it is impossible not to be a gentrifier today.

While racially segregated when they were created, historic neighborhoods in Durham like the one where I live were otherwise and purposefully a far better mix of poor, middle and moneyed classes.  As racial barriers dissolved, underlying policies re-segregated them using social economics.

Durham, which is highly regarded for its ethic and socioeconomic diversity, may have been no exception.  Its first “poor neighborhood” created by a mill closing in the early 1930s was a “white neighborhood.”

Today it is still poor, but integrated.  It is also the site of a billboard and deforestation recently enabled by the state legislature.

But judging by resistance to tree-planting efforts there, we can’t rely on poor people to always see through this environmental injustice or to get through the manipulation by regressives.”