Kudos for Shifting Ground

    "Outstanding original research, excellent personalization of the stories, excellent use of natural sound, and interesting interviews to clarify each story ... Exactly what enterprising radio journalism should be ... Each piece was entertaining and together formed a series on land-use conflicts not often reported on by the media." Those are the words of high praise for David Baron and the National Public Radio series Shifting Ground, an exploration of land use in America, which won the first-place award for best in-depth radio reporting in the 2008-2009 Society of Environmental Journalists Awards for Reporting on the Environment, according to the SEJ awards announcement. In the series, which the Lincoln Institute supported, Baron, the independent producer for NPR 's All Things Considered, looks at conflicts and tensions concernign land use, growth, and development, but also relates stories of innovation and progress: a Nevada community rallying to preserve its rural character in the face of suburban sprawl, a tussle over conservation easements in Wyoming, the local perspective on a large wind farm in upstate New York, erosion on the Texas coastline, and what the public sees on the land beside the road in Florida. The Lincoln Institute provided support for the series and made resources on land use available, through the Department of Planning and Urban Form. The series was also made possible by support from The Orton Family Foundation, based in Middlebury, Vermont. The Society of Environmental Journalists Awards for Reporting on the Environment is the world's largest and most comprehensive awards program for journalism on environmental topics. Pollution near schools, longwall mining, biological invaders, climate change, environment and heredity, predator tagging, and tar sands were among the topics being recognized, in 31 entries in 11 categories. Reporters, editors and journalism educators who served as contest judges reviewed over 187 entries to choose the finalists representing the best environmental reporting in print and on television, radio, the Internet and in student publications.

Lincoln-Loeb ties

The 2009-2010 Loeb Fellows include three mid-career professionals with connections to the Lincoln Institute. Julie Campoli, landscape architect and principal of Terra Firma based in Burlington, Vermont, is author of the Lincoln Institute book Visualizing Density, and plans to explore how greater density can be combined with renewable energy and local food production for a more sustainable urban infrastructure. Gil Kelley, former city planner for Portland, Oregon, has been a longtime particpant in the Big City Planners program in partnership with the American Planning Association and Harvard's Graduate School of Design, appears in the documentary film Portland: Quest for the Livable City, and is the Lincoln-Loeb Fellow for 2009-2010. And Jose de Fillippi Jr., former mayor of Diadema, Brazil, is well known in the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean for his engagement on crime, housing, and urban land development, and was featured in this Land Lines article in 2005.

HUD eyes metro regions

        President Obama’s Office of Urban Affairs is up and running, but for those tracking a new relationship between the federal government and metropolitan regions, there has been equal ferment at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, under Secretary Shaun Donovan. HUD has been forging new partnerships with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy, and a key player moved to Washington recently to help set the administration’s sustainability agenda: Ron Sims, former executive of Washington’s King County.
      “Our idea is to sync things up,” Sims said at a gathering of the Citistates Associates, led by Neal Peirce of the Washington Post Writers Group, for three days of brainstorming on regional initiatives on climate, energy, infrastructure, and transportation at Bridgewater, New Hampshire at the end of June. “I have never seen people moving more directionally on sustainability livability.”
     Sims said the aim is to change the culture of HUD, and turn it back into an activist community development agency. “We must stop losing the opportunity to have an impact,” he said, not just by focusing on cities but broader regions.
     The new policy pathways are numerous, and they are all happening now: the $787 billion stimulus package and its implications for infrastructure, recently analyzed by SmartGrowthAmerica and the New York Times; the evolving cap-and-trade Markey-Waxman climate bill; and reauthorization of federal transportation spending.The Citistates group called for a “recalibration” based on the recognition that metropolitan regions are population centers that are hubs of innovation in the new green economy, requiring new ways of thinking of how they function most efficiently – and competitively -- in the US economy. Currently states and individual cities compete for funds and conduct planning more like individual fiefdoms.
     “We need a new narrative,” said Bill Shutkin, director of the Initiative for Sustainable Development at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado. “The question is, can we respond to feedback, can we read the signals? Do we have the capacity to recalibrate and recover? We are at critical moment,” he said, citing Jared Diamond’s Collapse.
     Regional initiatives on climate and transportation show signs of promise. But the group was guarded and pessimistic, and continued to look to Washington to seize the moment.