Coming Friday on the editorial/op-ed pages

The Star's editorial board is weighing in Friday on two widely different-but-important issues -- the effect of the Southern drought and the effect of air and water pollution in China.

On the drought, The Star's edit board writes:

In years past much has been written about the family farm and how it must be saved. The family farm is an endangered species, made that way by the rise of agribusiness and the governmental policies that promote bigness. But of all the farmers hurt by this summer’s drought, the family farmer has been hurt worse, for those folks have fewer resources to survive the hard times nature has handed them.
This legislation will help. It needs to pass.

On China's pollution and its relation to America's environment, The Star's board writes:

Clearly, we have not done everything we can to protect our environment. It’s too easy to cite similar instances in the United States which industries have polluted waterways and our air, where cancer rates have been linked to industrial carcinogens, where Americans have suffered and died because of environmental mismanagement.
China displays the importance of governmental and environmental watchdogs and the need for requiring our politicians to make these issues a priority. Anything less is deadly and unacceptable. Just ask the Chinese people.

On the op-ed page, I'm taking a stab at the Anniston-Oxford football that's not being played this year because of the shootings that have taken place at past games:

But we owe it to ourselves and to the students of both schools — students who, like the county’s residents as a whole, may have heard the occasional bigot slather this incident in the hue of their racial dogma — to use this game as proof that Calhoun County’s largest cities can coexist in some form of harmony. And it’s absolutely incomprehensible to me that Oxford and Anniston, rivals forever linked by miles of common borders, can’t come together once a year without violence and fear.

And Paul Rilling, The Star's media critic, is curious if we're doing the right thing by limiting the number of stories that begin on our front page:

In an era of smaller pages and shrinking space, is The Star making the best use of its front page, with so much duplication of stories, out front and inside?

We'll have much more. Check it out Friday.