Tree Recovery

     After reading about Governor Bentley asking FEMA to write kinder rejection letters to Alabamians hurt by the tornado outbreak in April, I got thinking about how the state itself is...and can...help them.

     Then a longtime friend who lives in Pleasant Grove just outside Birmingham described the hundreds of trees lost in his area, and the two thoughts merged.

     How about the Alabama Forestry Commission teams up with the Alabama Nursery and Landscaping Association and the Forest Owners Association to replace some of the wooded areas of communities like Pleasant Grove as a Public Service project?

    I know it's easy for me to sit here and suggest volunteer work for them, but there is a certain synergy to it. Maybe the Alabama Trucking Association can provide trucks to carry saplings from one place to another...in fact the Business Council of Alabama could coordinate the whole thing.  And let's not forget the great horticulture school at Auburn University!

 

     I realize there are bigger problems for residents to tackle right now...like rebuilding places to live and going through the grieving process for those who were lost...but none of what I'm proposing would need to be a tomorrow or next week event...Fall is the best time to transplant trees anyway. How about The Great Alabama Fall Tree Replanting as a name?

     If you like this idea, send a link to this posting to people you know in the associations I mentioned, or in government, or cut and paste it, and re distribute it. Who knows?

Reporting on Suicide

     The blogger at The Legal Schnauzer is questioning the lack of reporting on the recent death of The

Business Council of Alabama's Ralph Stacey, and quotes an (unpublished) letter to Montgomery Advertiser Editor Wanda Lloyd  questioning the cause of death and asking why there was no follow up coverage.

     There is a longstanding policy in most newsrooms to avoid reporting suicides, period. There are exceptions...when the death occurs in a public place or in a spectacular way, or when the suicide victim is a public figure.

     While Stacey's death was in an office building as opposed to a home, it's still not quite the old House Chamber in the State Capitol or the center of Dexter Avenue. And while he was known to people in the media and corporate world, he hardly qualified as a public figure.

     At WAKA we reported the death, but not the suicide aspect of it. I saw the Advertiser story and also felt it was oddly written.

     Journalists are people too, and suicide is such a guilt-ridden kind of death that we sometimes do everything we can to avoid adding to the hurt the victim's family is already feeling.