Rural/Urban Development

What can I do?

• Participate in community discussions about the impact of development on farming and other land use. Join the local Land Trust (see section on Resources).
  
  
• Encourage city and county leadership to evaluate tax benefits and disadvantages of development. Services (such as fire, schools, and police) for homes outside planned communities increase service costs.
  
  
• Before buying property, do the math. Determine whether the cost of services exceeds the community’s financial or resource ability to provide them. Very often the cost of providing services to homes distant from the main community exceeds the gain in tax base.
  
  
• Evaluate the design of your home (house and yard) and your community. Does the design add value and improve the quality of life for you and your neighbors?
  
  
• As a class, offer to plant and maintain a year-round flower or butterfly garden at your school.  Choose a spot with some shade and select plants that will survive during hot summers. 

Think about:

• Careful water use. Just enough to promote plant growth.
  
  
• Whether the fertilizers that you choose will be safe, as well as sanitary, for the garden. Make sure they are not overused and running into local drainage channels and creeks.
  
• How you might carefully use pesticides or organic control methods to protect your plants.

Keep a weekly journal about the plants and soil around your home. 

• Can you suggest ways to prevent soil erosion by planting small shrubs or through some other method?
  
  
• Can you suggest ways to maintain existing plants by protecting them from damage from dry summers or bugs? 
  
  
• Can you suggest ways to protect these plants without using chemicals?
  
  
• Share your journal with someone who works at a local plant nursery.  Does that person have further suggestions about how to care for the plants and the soil?

Read labels for pesticides, insecticides, and household cleaning products:

• Labels tell you how to use a product safely, tell you how to store it safely, provide first aid instructions, and provide telephone numbers or web sites for more information.  It is very important to keep the labels.  Don’t store these products in soda or juice bottles as toddlers might think they are something to drink. 
  
  
• If you find your little cousin drinking from a juice bottle with a pesticide in it, what are the first steps you would take?  How could this situation be prevented? How could having the original container help you?
  
  
• Pesticides, insecticides, and cleaning products can damage the water supply.  They can kill fish and birds and make the water dangerous to drink.  They can come into contact with the local water supply when used in a place where they could run into a creek or are poured down the drain in your home.
  
  
• If your mother asks you to dump some water that has been used to clean the carpet, where will you dump it?  Where in your community could you call to decide the best way to dump the unhealthy water?  How can having the original container help you?
  
  
• If you are using fertilizers, insecticides or fungicides and other garden chemicals, stick strictly with the instructions, do not use excess. Some of these materials have long lasting impacts if larger quantities than necessary are used.
  
  
• The same is true of chemicals in the house. Read the instructions carefully and stick with them.

Teachers

Print the photographs that we provide for you and discuss how each one might impact the major regions of North Carolina: the Mountains, the Piedmont, and the Coastal Plains.

• Bulldozer moving a lot of dirt with much demolished forest in the background.
  
  
• Power plant on a river.
  
  
• Huge mansion and grounds on a coastal sound.