On July 1, journalist Bill Moyers gave a reading from his new book Moyers on Democracy at Barnes & Noble in New York City’s Union Square. Bloomington Alternative editor Steven Higgs was on hand for the event and asked Moyers during the question-and-answer segment about the Interstate 69/NAFTA Highway and the role of resistance and civil disobedience in effecting change in America today.

What follows is a transcript of Higgs’ question and Moyers’ response. An audio clip of Moyers' reading will soon be available.

The day after John McCain flew to Canada to glorify the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 73-year-old Rosie Edwards repeatedly laughed about her flood-ravaged home in Martinsville.

"I've cried all I can cry," the grandmother of 55 grand and great-grandchildren said on June 21 in her moldy, now-gutted home of six years. "I've lost everything."

Just across State Road 37, which Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels and his Democratic opponent Jill Long Thompson envision as an extension of the Interstate 69 NAFTA Highway, Bill Bergman likewise chuckled. He became a minor media star after painting "Mitch, Make Me an Offer?" on the side of his home and signed it "I-69 Backer."

"If I don't hear from him soon, it's going to be 'Ditch Mitch' on the roof," said Bergman, who sees I-69 as "part of progress."

When it comes to respect from their constituents, state and national politicians fail miserably in Indiana, according to a poll released June 24 by the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics in Fort Wayne.

Poll results also show Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels and November challenger Democrat Jill Long Thompson in a tie if the election were held today.

After three-and-a-half years in office, Daniels received the equivalent of an F on constituent respect, an average of 5.7 on a scale where 10 meant "you have the highest possible respect for the person." Long Thompson averaged 4.8.

Identifying the most astonishing figure in a folder full of state government documents on Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) in Hartford City is a daunting task.

For example, the East-Central Indiana community of 7,000 has 17 combined-sewage "overflow points" on four small creeks, according to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM). Only Kokomo and Muncie have more, with 30 and 23, respectively.

But, discharge reports from March 2002 indicate that untreated sewage flowed into Little Lick Creek, Moore Prong, Mud Run and Big Lick Creek on 239 occasions in 2001. The combined durations of these releases equaled 58 days of continuous sewage flow a year, 26.75 hours every week.

Still, city, state and federal officials identified Hartford City's CSO pollution as needing remediation 35 years ago.

Anyone who has read a word I've written these past 30-plus years had better be firmly planted if he or she plans on reading any further.

Let me just get it out there. The Barack Obama phenomenon has persuaded me that Americans may be catching on. The nation's Great Black Hope and the national Democratic Party, dare I say it out loud, have given me some hope.

I've not felt this way since the June 1968 morning I sat in my 1962 Chevrolet Impala convertible before school waiting on my girlfriend to emerge from her apartment. It was there, in the Kingston Square parking lot on Indianapolis' east side, that I heard on the radio that Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated.

Coming less than five years after John Kennedy's and two months after Martin Luther King's murders, it was hard to put too much hope into any one individual after that. It didn't seem like the good died young, as the song Abraham, Martin and John said. They died, regardless of their ages.

When officials at the Community Kitchen opened a satellite meal service on West 11th Street in 2001, they anticipated a decrease in the number of meals served out of their South Rogers Street kitchen, perhaps as much as 30 percent.

They had been providing free meals, no questions asked, to anyone who came in the door since Thanksgiving 1992. Logic and anecdotal evidence suggested that many of the hungry were finding their ways down to Rogers from “The Hill,” as the West 11th section of town is also known.

But Executive Director Vicki Pierce, who wasn’t there in 2001, said the conventional wisdom had to be re-evaluated after the Community Kitchen Express opened on The Hill.

“What happened is that our service numbers almost doubled in a period of a couple years,” she said.

Anyone familiar with Bloomington knows that we operate on a different calendar here. In college communities like ours, summer arrives early, just about the time the redbuds bloom and tomato plants hit the soil in South-Central Indiana.

Consistent with that academic calendar, summer has arrived in Bloomington. And just a little more than a week into it, I can tell you that 2008 is going to be a good one.

For example, Alternative summer always means that a new group of aspiring young journalism students, eager to learn more about craft and community, join our cause. Already this year, three of my former students and I have begun reporting a project we're calling The Other Bloomington, which will be an in-depth, journalistic exploration of poverty in Bloomington.

We're launching the project in this issue with "Hunger spikes in Bloomington" by Jaclyn Baker and "Food bank reaches warehouse deals" by Audree Notoras, and we have a still-evolving, ambitious agenda of stories and angles to pursue over the summer.

Kathy Starks-Dyer and Phil Eskew could be understandably smug about the resounding Monroe County Public Library (MCPL) employee vote on Earth Day to unionize. The “business-model” types whose management philosophy has dominated decision making at the community institution in recent years were anything but subtle in their anti-union sentiments.

Former MCPL Board of Trustees President Stephen Moberly expressed dismay back in the winter that the resignation of former director Cindy Gray didn’t end the union movement. He thought the staff would be so enamored with Interim Director Sara Laughlin that all from the contentious Gray era would be forgotten, and they would drop the idea.

The board went so far as to post notice of a behind-closed-door session during which, three days before the April 22 union vote, they would discuss making Laughlin’s appointment permanent. Under President John Walsh and Vice President Fred Risinger, the board learned from their attorneys that they did not meet the 48-hour notification requirement for a closed meeting and canceled it.

So, following a 62-35 vote to join the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), union organizing committee members like Eskew and Starks-Dyer could easily gloat. But they’re not. They’re looking ahead.

The Bloomington Police Department wouldn't issue a parade march to opponents of Interstate 69, but that didn't stop protesters from taking over downtown Bloomington streets on Saturday, April 19 -- accompanied all the way by the Bloomington Police Department.

The parade was sponsored by Roadblock EarthFirst! and was endorsed by the Indiana Forest Alliance, NoSweat!, the I-69 Listening Project and Indiana Students Against War.

Roadblock Earth First! said in an e-mail that the march kicked off a reinvigorated campaign against the road that is sure to last well into the future.

When we decided to launch the "Indiana Environment Revisited" (IER) project, I knew it would be an emotional journey. As an Indiana-based environmental journalist for the past 27 years, I'm intimately familiar with the anger and frustration that comes from being victimized by our state's extreme brand of environmental neglect.

I expected to encounter a long list of fevered citizens, like Rex Jones from Henry County, who would tell us, "My honest opinion of IDEM? ... They are a big joke." I mean, I couldn't disagree with him or any of the other rural Hoosiers we've interviewed in the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) series, all of whom echoed Jones's sentiment.

But because I spent four years working inside IDEM with the Media and Communications Services team, getting to know and, on more than a few occasions, befriending the men and women who are legislatively charged with protecting Indiana citizens from air, water and land pollution, I knew I was venturing onto sensitive new terrain.