Scenic Character’s Leading Role in Sense of Place

Greensboro is the third largest city in North Carolina.  But according to friends, old and new, who live there, it is bent on mimicking the fourth largest city, Durham. 

Unfortunately, they are not mimicking Durham for its distinct sense of place.

Instead Greensboro seems drawn to mimic the corrosive influences that make communities the same, appealing, in the words of Dr. Scott Russell Sanders, only to those for whom “tourism is another form of shopping, treating the whole country as a gigantic mall.”

By this he is referring not only to shopping or malls per se, but to  generic attributes that make communities just one of many vs. distinct.

According to Sanders, in a speech I heard him deliver in 2006, the salvation for communities clutching to sense-of-place is neighborhood activism.  Durham bears Sanders out but only as long as it can withstand what he calls “Goliaths,” warning that:

“…Goliath never sleeps, never takes no for an answer, never runs out of money or political friends, and most of the time…gets its way.”

I witnessed the sacrifice of North Carolina’s distinctiveness on a cross-state road-trip last weekend.  Observing how commercial out-of-state billboard interests are sating their greed by destroying roadside trees and viewsheds caused me to think about my reading habits over the years and the pivotal role scenic character plays in appeal.

I’ve always been an avid reader, but it has been marked by streaks restricted to either fiction or non-fiction.  After law school in the mid-1970s, I couldn’t stand to read non-fiction.  In fact, I took a brief break from reading altogether.

During my near-decade in Alaska, I read mostly suspense and/or historical fiction such as written by Uris, Ludlum and Michener.  When I moved to Durham, I turned to non-fiction except for the latter 1990s when I delved into Swedish crime novellas written by Henning Mankell after they became available in English.

As a rule I avoid movies, especially made-for-television movies based on books that I have read and enjoyed, perhaps to dodge disappointment.

Ironically, this aversion proves strongest for adaptations of books such as Mankell’s where descriptions of landscape serve as a leading character vs. only as backdrop.

I have been drawn to three notable exceptions, spurred by the advent of streaming services.  The Jesse Stone series of TV-movies based on Robert Parker novels, the 2010 feature film Winter’s Bone based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, and most recently the Wallander series based on works by Mankell.

In each production, hauntingly dramatic landscapes play featured roles alongside superb acting by casts featuring Tom Selleck, Jennifer Lawrence (in her breakout role) and Kenneth Branaugh.  These adaptations live up to the novels and give distinctiveness to plots that might otherwise have seemed similar.

Of course, distinctive soundtracks also play a pivotal role including Nostalgia by Emily Barker for Wallander, Hardscrabble Elegy by Dickon Hinchliffe in Winter’s Bone and music by Jeff Beal for Jesse Stone.

All of this is to say that the distinctive sense of place for communities and states must also give a leading role to preservation of scenic character, lest they succumb to the corrosive influences of blight that relegate them as “monotonous, ephemeral, rootless and ugly,” appealing only a form of generic shopping.

Unfortunately, as in so many ways, my adopted home of North Carolina is headed in the wrong direction.

A Glimpse At Service Design

As I drove up to a resort in the mountains of North Carolina last weekend as the guest of a mutual friend, I pondered how difficult it must be to run a professional association such as the one for community organizations focused on visitor-centric economic development.

Of the 10 trends in that field that were recently highlighted for 2014 by one of its truly best and brightest, all but seven should have been engaged by members two decades ago and another over a decade ago.

The speed at which organizations such as this can propel members forward is lugged down by the inertia of old schoolers or worse, those so so eager to appear smart they don’t have time to get smart, which is now research-proven to be an either/or proposition.

Running associations is a tough job, perpetually hampered by the lowest or slowest common denominator.

To me, only one of trends noted, “service design,” qualifies as new, and even at that it is a nearly three-year-old concept or re-concepting of a concept that emerged from EU-funded research at the Management Center of Innsbruck, a very entrepreneurial institution of higher education.

As it somehow so often does, last year the tourism agency in Durham, where I live in retirement happened to not only be one of the first dozen destination marketing organizations in the U.S. to be exposed to “service design” but as is its culture, among the very first to start integrating it into action.

At the basis of this new way of thinking about service is mobile ethnography.

Instead of filling out comment cards or surveys, now in a way that is much much more useful and consistent than social media chatter or facility ratings, visitors with soon be empowered with an app that is now in the demo stage called “myServiceFellow.”

It empowers a traveler to rate service at every touchpoint of the entire travel experience and then upload it at the end of the trip where it can be accessed, aggregated and analyzed by individual businesses or organizations also concerned with the equally important service spaces between commercial interactions.

This goes far deeper and far broader than ratings apps and it will peel back a layer undetected by the businesses involved, but more importantly, it will be far more useful to those concerned with the entire travel experience spectrum such as community destination marketing organizations.

If I had remembered to download the app prior to my trip, or looked closely enough to see how easy it was to use the demo,  I could have noted:

• When we stopped for breakfast in Greensboro, the desecration of a sea of billboards on that stretch of I 85/40 and that my significant other’s hash browns weren’t crispy as requested.

 

• How sad it was to see on arrival that instead of celebrating foremost the iconic 100-year-old Grove Park brand as an Omni Resort, the chain sublimated the Inn’s identity below the chain name, a source of disgust overheard several times from other guests.

   

• How a misspelling made it problematic to retrieve my Jeep from valet parking.

 

• How cool it was that wait staff fastidiously and subtly substituted a black napkin for a white one to avoid napkin fuzzies on dark pants.

 

• How a plugged up drain marred the wonderful walk-in shower experience in the spa wing.

 

• How neglecting to wipe the windows of finger prints interrupted afternoon views of Asheville in the valley below.

 

• How the only one of many stores at the resort to carry batteries had apparently been out of AAAs for a couple of weeks.

 

• How irritating it was at a stop for gas and coffee that a convenience store stocked flavored half and half but offered only powdered creamer to customers wanting regular half and half.

 

• How arrogant Fairway Outdoor Advertising is to flaunt digital billboards, contrarian to Asheville’s unique sense of place.

 

• How phenomenally beautiful and billboard free major parts of I40 are through North Carolina, and how hideous parts that aren’t have become.

“Service design” is predicated upon a deeper, more empathy-based type of research.  It is determined to understand consumer motivation not just behavior and to understand actual specifics and patterns, not just general recall.

Unfortunately though, I suspect it will still show up on lists of “new” trends for decades to come.

Guess Who Didn't Get The Memo!

Something ironic struck me as I read this weekend that Phil Everly had passed away from an illness caused by a lifetime of smoking.

Phil was the high harmony behind his brother Don’s melodies, a duo that for many of us coming age in the ‘50s and ‘60s first fused country and rock music and inspired the Beatles, Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel and many performers popular today such as Norah Jones and Green Day’s Billie Jo Armstrong.

This coming spring, it will be 15 years since the order became effective for all tobacco advertising to be removed from roadside billboards, long after it had been banned on other types of advertising.

Tobacco companies shrugged because they were only spending 6% of their advertising dollars on billboards anyway.  The medium just wasn’t effective, especially compared to in-store ads.

It isn’t just tobacco companies that find roadside billboards useless. Today, studies show that fewer than 1-in-10 Americans, 1-in-25 marketing professionals and 1-in 33 small businesses find them interesting or useful.

Of course, only 31% of Americans enjoy any type of advertising.  In states such as North Carolina, billboard advertising in particular turns off nearly eight people for every one who finds them useful, because they are viewed as blight.

So what did the geniuses who wanted to mount an anti-smoking campaign do as part of the settlement to remove the tobacco ads from billboards?

They put up 3,700 billboards across the nation, obviously guided to do so by one of the few marketers still under the spell of the obsolete technology, to get their message out.

Or perhaps they were assuming they were better marketers than the tobacco companies, or maybe they fell victim to the campaign donation savvy of the billboard barons?

Regardless of why, over the five subsequent years, it was estimated that cigarette smoking alone continued to be responsible for $193 billion in annual health-related economic losses, half of that from lost productivity.

From 1950, when some tobacco companies marketed cigarettes as a way to prevent respiratory and other diseases, until 2010, the number of tobacco farms in the United States fell from half a million to just more than 9,000.

But guess who didn’t get the memo?

While public health agencies are desperately trying to reduce tobacco use, the largest healthcare provider in the nation, the U.S. Military, includes the purchase of $85 million in tobacco products in its budget.

That’s nearly 60% more than taxpayers spent that same year on a campaign - including some advertisements including some on billboards - that a follow-up study reports helped encourage 100,000 people quit using tobacco products.

Even if the average of 6% are successful long-term, taxpayers should recoup some of the costs of the CDC campaign in healthcare savings.  But the meager result illustrates why studies now show advertising to have a negative return on investment

Granted, the campaign involved much more than advertising and the term billboards included more out-of-home advertising than just roadside billboards.

But one wonders why the CDC has fallen for the logic that it can successfully use advertising mediums such as billboards to discourage tobacco use when the tobacco companies found them ineffective to encourage tobacco use?

It was noted that the tobacco industry spends more in three days than the CDC campaign does in a year.  But if I were targeting that campaign, I would forgo billboards and evaluate more credible marketing tactics than advertising and/or carefully study and mimic the tactics of tobacco companies.  Just sayin’.

So it isn’t just private companies that fail to connect the dots for their marketing initiatives when it come to sustainability.

Of even more irony is that in 2014 and 2015 we celebrate two 50th anniversaries of events that took place as the Everly Brothers remarkable string of hit singles came to an end in 1964 and 1965.

One is the first Surgeon General’s Report on the dangers of smoking to health which led the following year to the division of CDC conducting the anti-smoking campaigns.

The other is the Highway Beautification Act which was intended to forever limit billboards to industrial areas.

Maybe the observances will help various federal and state agencies begin to connect the dots.

The Fast Approaching End To Time Slots

According to a Harris poll released last Thanksgiving, 52% of American adults subscribe to cable and another 25% subscribe to satellite television including those who have both.  I don’t subscribe to either, having pulled the plug nearly a year ago.

Still, I would have thought those percentages would be much higher.  By comparison 52% have smartphones and 36% have tablets.  And, incredibly, 25% subscribe to Netflix, 13% to Amazon Prime and 4% to Hulu to stream content.

Netflix now has more than 32 million streaming subscribers in the U.S. and as of a year ago Netflix alone was responsible for 33% of downstream internet traffic.

As a percentage of American adults overall, streaming services are used by nearly half.  The future of television is reflected by those age 18-36, where the 68% who are streaming subscribers now outnumber the 60% subscribing via cable or satellite.

An excellent article published December 4th in “The New Republic” magazine explains why this transition is so significant.  It was penned by Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor and author of the new book entitled The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.

Professor Wu’s book is a history of repeated media invention, domination and then succession in America, giving a broader, cyclical view of the changes we’re witnessing today.

His report about Netflix in “The New Republic” which chronicles the company’s incredible transformation of culture is summarized by his conclusion that:

“Instead of feeding a collective identity with broadly appealing content, the streamers imagine a culture united by shared tastes rather than arbitrary time slots.”

I’ve never watched Duck Dynasty, but a few days after I read Wu’s comment above, a controversy erupted when the show was suspended for a brief time after one of the performers was disrespectful to LGBT Americans in an interview published this month in “GQ” magazine.

Boycotts and petitions ensued but if Wu is correct, as I believe he is, as Americans are increasingly aligned by shared tastes rather than time slots, we’ll be less and less disturbed and more and more ignorant about what is being exhibited in silos where we don’t share a taste.

Who am I to dispute conservative columnist George Will, who in a humorous column this week bends an argument to fit his unrelenting mantra for smaller government?  But he makes an excellent point that:

“The problem of ignorance is unlikely to be ameliorated by increasing voter knowledge because demand for information, not the supply of it, is the constraint on political knowledge’”

In my opinion, the cultural shift away from a shared culture to shared interests as noted by Wu may have the unintended consequence of shrinking even further the demand for information and understanding about other viewpoints.

But if history is any guide, a new information technology may come along to bring us full circle again.  But maybe just not soon enough.

The Only Increasing Natural Resource

My mom is about to turn 85 years of age in a few weeks. Recently, she illuminated one of my earliest fragments of memory with a story I had never heard before.

It took place deep in the winter of my third year.

Next month, three generations of descendants will gather in the Pacific Northwest to honor this remarkable woman and to celebrate, give thanks and marvel.

We will also kid mom unmercifully and I will add this recovered memory to the stories we’ll tell and retell about her being as she often says, “a tough old bird.”

The coldest spot in Idaho happens to be where she and my dad ranched ancestral lands along the Idaho side of the Teton Mountains up in the nook between Montana and Wyoming.

It snows about 80 inches a year - much of it in blizzards - that back then buried the roads and any sign of fence lines.

Different than farming, ranching is year-round.  No matter the weather, horses and cattle - especially cattle - rely on human being to get through the winter.  It is a matter of life and death.

Several times a week during the winter and after the chores were done, my parents would bundle up me and my baby sister (my youngest sister wasn’t born yet) and load us on a piece of sheet metal my dad had fashioned as a sled.

Then my parents would don snow shoes and pull us a couple of miles up to the Reynolds's place.  There they would play card games such as canasta, pinochle and hearts with their friends Bert and Vera before pulling us back down Snow Creek to our ranch house.

My memory is of bouncing along on a moonlit night behind my parents and listening to them laugh, something they did often when I was growing up, no matter how tough or tense things got.

At the time of this trek, my mom was just turning 22 years of age.

Death is something you see often growing up on a ranch but my mom has always been comfortable “talking” about death, beginning when I was just five when she lifted me up to see, touch and say goodbye to Mrs. Cordingly (her friend Vera’s mother) at the viewing prior to her funeral service.

That’s why I wasn’t surprised a few years ago when mom quipped while undergoing shots for pain from a spine injury, that “people live too long these days.”  Even with her characteristic twinkle, I could tell she was serious.

Even though her eyesight was claimed more two decades ago, my mom remained as independent, determined, spry and quick-witted as ever.  She has also lived much of that time alone, first as a caregiver to another spouse with severe Alzheimer’s, and then for many years in her own apartment.

Although mom has decided to give up her apartment this spring, she seems as resilient and joyful as ever.  She’s just comfortable with the idea of death and she would like to go on her own terms.

Of course, she has prepared all of the necessary documents.

At 85, mom is only a few years older than the average lifespan now for females, which is 81.  According to a Pew survey, she is five years away from the ideal median life span for Americans, 90.

The percentage of Americans preferring instead a life span of 78 or younger shrinks from 19% to 6% as we age. What people consider to be the ideal life span doesn’t vary according to education level or gender, but it does fluctuate by ethnicity, views on aging and religious culture.

A year ago, there was a fascinating report in “The New Republic” magazine by science editor Judith Shulevitz who also authored the book The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.  She notes that scientists now believe the human body was designed to last about 72 years.

The report also notes that by 2060, when my grandsons will be in their 50s and my daughter will be about my mom’s age now, 1-in-5 Americans will be over the age of 65.

Hopefully by then, those bent on cutting Medicare and those trying to defend it will have come to terms with the fact that today, 30% of all spending in that program takes place in the last year of life, much of that in the last few months.

As noted by the author of a new book entitled Knocking On Heaven’s Door: The Path To A Better Way Of Death,  we’ve designed a system for curing but not caring.  Going forward, learning to do the latter is imperative and not just to accommodate deficit hawks.

But it is also wrong-headed to view people over 65 as a burden.  As an example of the fact that this age group is the only natural resource on the increase, “The New Republic” report cites research that at-risk children “read better and get sent to the principal less often in classrooms where seniors are present for at least 15 hours a week.”

Half way through my 65th year now and writing this, my 1,113th essay(nearly 800,000 words) posted in the 1,462 days since I retired,  may have something to do with the topic in addition to thinking back to my mom’s remarkable life and the life she and my dad gave me and my sisters.

Awe comes much more easily to me now.  Time is measured not so much by pressure and achievement but by availability and gratitude for each moment of life.

Every interaction with my significant other or my daughter and my grandsons gives me the same warmth I felt as a three-year-old bundled up and listening to my parents laugh as my sister and I were pulled across the snow drifts on a moonlit night.

Thanks to her willingness to talk about death at a very early age and the warmth I will still soak up when I see my mom next month and on more frequent phone calls will sustain me when she is gone.

Until then, she is indeed a phenomenal natural resource.