Lakeville Journal Editorial

"It’s a climate change problem, of course, because all that trash needs a whole lot of fuel to move it. It’s a social justice problem, because the trash ends up in poorer communities, and it’s an economic and financial problem because it’s expensive to move all that stuff. The good news is, there is something we can do about it.”

Earlier this month at Indian  Mountain School in Lakeville students conducted a trash audit to see what was thrown away over the course of a few days. Of course, the sorting of garbage and refuse revealed a lot of plastic waste, including one-time food items in permanent plastic wrapping.

Last week this newspaper reported that our state representatives had made some progress in their efforts in getting state and town officials together with the Housatonic Railroad to discuss its herbicide spraying along the train tracks that pass through Northwest Corner towns.

The local newspaper can be greater than the sum of its parts. Today, people can find out what will happen with the weather by reaching for the phone in their pocket.

It’s that time of year when March Madness descends on all of us and when we begin to make big plans for what we’ll do outdoors as the landscape warms up and the days get longer. It’s also the time when college students begin to think about their summer plans, and start to consider an internship.

Last Saturday Lakeville residents came to the town Grove to brainstorm ways to make the village a better place.

The initiative is part of a plan that was hatched last year by town planners to address ongoing concerns and arrive at some larger scale planning for the village.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identifies a Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) as a systematic, comprehensive data collection and analysis that provides benefits such as improved organizational and community coordination and collaboration, better knowledge about public health and the ways it connects with other activities.

Last week ground was broken on a $5.3 million project to create a new health care center in North Canaan that will serve all Northwest Corner residents with a range of services, including primary care and behavioral health services.