Swain County is drafting a set of road standards that will serve its citizens well on two levels. First, the proposed ordinances would require developers to build roads that emergency vehicles can access, thereby providing protection for property and lives; secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Swain’s relatively new planning board is getting its feet wet by learning what it takes to develop land-use regulations and turn them into law.

By Michael Beadle

World wars, civil wars, the Crusades, wars of rebellion and independence. Why does humanity continue to go to war when the cost of destruction and loss of human life end up becoming more than we can possibly imagine?

Money and politics. Right now in the mountains, we can add real estate to that equation.

By Michael Rey

I would like to offer some words of support for those Emergency Department Nurses at Haywood Regional Medical Center who were brave enough to contribute to the debate over recent changes there (I am referring to the article that appeared in The Smoky Mountain News on April 24). Even speaking anonymously, they have all put their jobs on the line.

By Kathryn Stripling Byer

Soon school will be over for the year. Students will leave their classrooms and bound out into a summer day, feeling free, at least for a little while. But free to do what?

With President Bush’s veto of the Democrats’ bill to set a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, the stage is now set for a showdown. Lacking the votes for an override, will the Democrats now roll over and risk losing the momentum they have been building since before the mid-term elections last year, or will they challenge Bush by threatening to cut off further funding for a war that most Americans — according to the polls — no longer support?

Dark clouds were rolling in on Saturday as I sat in our Sylva office while Western North Carolina’s original environmental festival — Greening Up the Mountains — was in full swing on the streets below. With me were two idealists, people who want to change the way we think about transportation.

Imagine how this scenario could work, if it was a reality: a state Department of Transportation in lockstep with the wishes of the state’s citizenry, an organization that went to great lengths to work with towns, counties and other entities to try to help reduce congestion by managing traffic with an eye toward quality of life instead of simply moving more cars.

By Dawn Gilchrist Young

“ ... and all day I turn over my own best thoughts,

each one as heavy and slow to flow

as a stone in a field full of wet and tossing flowers.”

— Mary Oliver

“Writing keeps me company living here by myself.”

— Zora Walker

What does a woman of 74 do with her spare time when her husband dies and her grown children all have lives of their own?

The same popular culture that some have alleged to produce yet another mass murderer wasted no time in trying to explain him to us in the hours and days following the massacre at Virginia Tech last week.