Northern Hoosier State Tour / Summer '05 

•      While in Northern Indiana, we learned about a group of farmers who are volunteering to farm a common plot of land.  Called the "Common Ground Growing Project," this is a Christian initiative to get money to poorer farmers in 25 Third World countries.  I told the Advance News newspaper in Nappanee, Indiana, that our platform calls for dramatically stepped up programs -- like this one -- to help the Third World.
•      In South Bend, Indiana, I talked with professor Margie Pfeil.  She teaches Moral Theology and Social Ethics at Notre Dame University.  She said the "elite" of the world are accumulating more and more land, material goods, and so on... while the poor, basically, get poorer.  Professor Pfeil said there must be a grassroots paradigm shift where people start developing more of a "spirit of compassion" to move them to share more resources, food and land.
•      While in South Bend, I also interviewed Jonah Smith for a position paper I was working on about the environment.  Smith majored in Ecology at Rutgers University.  He said farm runoff (toxic pesticides, herbicides, artificial fertilizers...) in the Mississippi River watershed Region is being transported down to the Gulf of Mexico at an alarming rate -- creating a gigantic "dead zone" in that body of water.  Smith's answer: organic farming.