Durango – Dirt may be cheap, but “Good Dirt” is free.
It’s a volunteer-run, not-for- profit producer of free public- radio programming that promises only good news all the time – green pioneers solving environmental problems in clever ways that anyone can replicate.
“Good things are happening. There is a way out of this mess,” says board member Tom Bartels. “People get beaten down by the constant negative messages in the media. If problems seem insurmountable, people get catatonic. We have a loss of individual responsibility.”
The point of Good Dirt Radio’s short stories is to give ordinary people the tools to make constructive changes in their communities.
“We skip the pros and go for the schmos,” Bartels says.
Good Dirt Radio founder Gary Lewin makes his living as a real estate broker, but his passion has always been music. He installed his own recording studio in his office. And about two years ago, he says, he decided to use his solar-powered studio to record inspiring news stories because he was tired of the relentless onslaught of bad news and cautionary tales. Then, he determined, Good Dirt Radio would give its stories away.
“People are doing amazing things,” Lewin says. “I wanted to be involved in positive change.”
Sometimes there is grant money for freelance writers, he says, but often the five unpaid board members create the stories themselves. Nobody has a salary.
The first Good Dirt story aired on tribally owned public radio station KSUT in Ignacio in early 2004. Since then, a number of rural radio stations in the Four Corners region have been carrying the stories.
In April, the University of Colorado’s Wirth Chair bestowed its electronic media award to Good Dirt for its outstanding work in 2005.
Beginning today, Boulder/ Denver’s KGNU will run two eight-week series of Good Dirt stories on Monday mornings. The Good Dirt board is trying to hook up with a national broadcaster.
The stories come from all over and run the gamut. There is the San Francisco Episcopal priest who started an eco-ministry, the Interfaith Power and Light Movement, “a religious response to global warming.”
An upcoming piece will focus on “green” cemeteries, which offer “respectful, natural burials” for people and pets who want to return to the earth without the trappings of conventional interment. Regular burials in this country annually require 30 million board feet of lumber, more than a hundred thousand tons of steel and about 828,000 gallons of embalming fluid, according to Good Dirt.
A favorite story of Lewin’s and Bartel’s is the simple one about a Fort Lewis College student who worked as a campus janitor. He took it upon himself to replace hot-burning, energy-wasting incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs that use less energy and last eight times longer.
The shelf life of one of their stories with news you can use is at least five years, Lewin says. If listeners miss the stories on the radio, they also can be found on the Web at gooddirtradio.org.
“There is no one big techno fix for environmental problems,” Bartels says. “It’s a lot of little answers – if everybody does something.”
Staff writer Electa Draper can be reached at 970-385-0917 or edraper@denverpost.com.
