Down to the WIRE

I really should read my e-mail more often . . .

Via Janet Miller's District 6 weekly e-mail to citizens in her district (which I received Monday and I'm just now reading (I am a bad citizen)), I learned more about something I'd heard news about on the radio, the Wichita Initiative to Renew the Environment (WIRE), sponsored by the KU School of Medicine and incorporating the involvement of numerous citizens' groups around town. WIRE is asking people to do some reading and see some videos addressing various environmental concerns in the area--not just the familiar ones of waste, air and water but also land-use concerns. For each of these, there's a survey which asks participants to prioritize these issues as concerns and their interest in addressing them.

There's some urgency to completing the survey: WIRE wants to have your--yes, your--input on this survey by the end of January so that it can submit its findings to the EPA in March as part of a grant application. On the one hand, this is very short notice, I know. On the other, it's supposed to be damned cold this weekend. So, since you're probably going to be staying inside, filling out an online survey which gauges your concern and interest in local environmental issues strikes me as a decent way to spend a part of your weekend.