"Blue skies, beautiful mountains -- snow capped beautiful mountains, a little too far away for my taste -- ocean, a little closer than I'm accustomed to, and ....... smokestacks? Regular stench that makes people ill? How can that be in a place that prides itself on the natural beauty? Cognitive dissonance on a grand enough scale, yet a small enough scale that one can poke at it to learn how it works.
How does it come to be that people can live in a beautiful place, be endlessly creative, work fearlessly and tirelessly as a community to fix the ills of the earth, and yet suffer (and complain about) noxious fumes as a given that cannot be changed without dire consequences to the entire existence of the town?
Is there a solution?
Probably -- why not? The journey has been to understand the relationship of a local paper mill to the community, learning how to separate out the history -- people's history -- from the present reality, to tease out threads to determine what can be changed; how to honor people's history, connections, and values; what the mechanisms are that keep anything from changing, where levers of change reside, and what good can come when you press them."
Source
http://cowbird.com/story/66634/Blue_Skies_Or_Not/?q=GretchenNomad
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