Photographer Melissa Lyttle explores interesting lives and tells Floridians' untold stories with black and white photography. View audio slideshows in the ongoing photojournalism column. Send Melissa your story ideas for the series.
LIVING GREENLiving Green is a photo column by Lara Cerri that explores the lives of those making conscious efforts to better the planet. Recycling, planting native species, and organic gardening are just some of the ways in which people contribute to helping the environment. Water and electricity conservation also reduces the impact on our earth. In this column, we meet people who are pitching in to make green living a part of their lives.
ONE is an effort to tell individual stories of people who are a small part of a larger statistic. The hope is to humanize the kind numbers we report about all the time in the paper. Often they are overwhelming, and the personal impact they measure gets lost.
Kelley Benham, who edits the stories, and I (John Pendygraft) were talking about what we should be looking for, and why. She remembered a passage from Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov. "One never sees or hears those who suffer, and all the horror of life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is quiet, peaceful, and against it all there is only the silent protest of mute statistics."We are intentionally targeting those statistics, and giving them a voice.
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENTFlorida has supposedly embraced comprehensive planning since the mid 1980s when the legislature passed the state’s Growth Management Act. The law requires all of “Florida’s 67 counties and 410 municipalities to adopt comprehensive plans that guide future growth and development,” according to the Department of Community Affairs’ Web site. Despite this, development has devoured thousands of acres of green space at an unsustainable pace, leaving Florida to repeat the boom and bust cycle that dates back to before the Great Depression era.
From Chris Zuppa- The idea for Arrested Development originated from a desire to show how the built environment intersects with the natural environment. Prior to the our current Great Recession, smart growth advocates, environmentalists, and others warned that development was not guided by comprehensive planning mandated by state law, a fact that has since inspired the controversial Hometown Democracy movement of taking growth management decisions away from politicians and putting it into the voters’ hands. Growth is stalled now because of the Recession, and lawmakers have a brief reprieve to reconsider what the state’s future should be. It’s doubtful, though, that policy makers will take advantage of this time to reevaluate what has worked and what hasn’t, which would enable Florida to develop within a sensible framework. It is instead likely that in another generation from now, folks will have this same conversation of why we altered everything natural, all in the name of progress.
MUSIC THERAPYMeryl Barns is All Children's Hospital's lone board-certified music therapist in a program which works with about 90 to 100 children each month. "Music therapy helps... decrease their pain, helps decrease their anxiety in the hospital," says Barns. "A lot of kids have trouble coping."
Florida in words and videos
