One of the great values of summarizing stories into eight or 10 lines is that you have to read and absorb carefully. (I volunteer, along with many others, on a Service Space project called Karunavirus. It summarizes stories so that people who don’t want to read the whole thing can get the gist.)

This morning, this was a particularly good exercise, because I was summarizing a story from the Christian Science Monitor that does something important – tell a complex story through an individual person and place. In this case, it is a fascinating story about how ‘green’ growth is effectively making the ideologically-driven debate about climate change almost irrelevant, at least in many rural communities.

While I want to highlight a few points from the story, I wanted first to note that this is an example of ‘solutions journalism’. This story, especially, seems to demonstrate Amanda Ripley’s wise advice that the way to avoid what she calls ‘high conflict’ – an apparent binary choice that actually is only binary in the writer’s mind – is through complexity. And complexity comes when the writer is curious – as this one was.