Every place where people work started with an idea. And the people who come up with ideas about businesses are studied and lauded in our society. We begin a new regular feature on The Exchange, "The Ground Floor," visiting with entrepreneurs in our region about how they got started and how they overcame obstacles. Up first: Matthew Bernard, the current CEO of Darex , the Ashland-based maker of sharpening equipment. He is the fourth generation involved in the running of the company.

Congress is moving quickly toward votes on changing the country's tax system... some reorganizing and some cutting of rates, especially corporate taxes. There are goals in this and any tax plan that go beyond just money... like stimulating certain KINDS of economic activity. One kind of activity that could help many communities would be more building of housing for people who don't make much money; the lack of such housing is a factor in homelessness. The National Low-Income Housing Coalition

Plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions often focus directly on the emission sites themselves. But there's a whole world full of places that can potentially serve as carbon "sinks," absorbing CO2 to keep it out of the atmosphere. So land conservation and ecosystem management can also be strategies to curb climate change. A recent study lays out the effects; two of the authors are from the Nature Conservancy in California.

Placing a bunch of solar panels in a rural area is often referred to as a "solar farm." But it's not like actual farming can go on around the solar arrays, and that's what troubles 1000 Friends of Oregon . The land-use group works to make sure property owners and planners comply with Oregon land-use law. And the group took exception to a solar farm approved for use on farmland near Medford, appealing the approval and getting it overturned.

The customary over-eating of the holiday season is upon us. So we figured it was a good time to talk to someone who successfully got his weight under control. Ted Spiker, journalist and professor, details his efforts in the book Down Size .

Maybe you've seen the "Cultural Trust" Oregon license plates and never quite knew what they were about. They're about a program around for 15 years now, helping boost cultural organizations and activities around the state. The Oregon Cultural Trust has handed out more than $18 Million grants over the years, supporting a wide variety of programs.

"Midlife crisis" comes with a stock photo in America, and usually one question: Corvette or Mustang? Or some other red sports car? Kieran Setiya offers another choice: Aristotle or Schopenhauer? Those are not sports cars, as you might have detected. Kieran Setiya is a professor of philosophy at MIT, and he offers up the wisdom of the ancients (and some more recent thinkers) in his book Midlife: A Philosophical Guide .

Suicide is on the rise in the United States, up in a steady trend since the beginning of the century. Rogue Valley resident Shoshana Alexander experienced it in her own life; her sister committed suicide. Alexander put that experience and others into an original play, "Taking Our Life: Suicide, Ecocide and Daring to Live." Alexander and other actors will perform the play this weekend (Nov. 17-19) in Ashland.

Urban dwellers get understandably upset when their homes are invaded by rats or bedbugs or other unwelcome creatures. But hardly anybody stops to think that the animals are there BECAUSE the city is there. And that is very likely the case... many creatures evolved differently because of urban environments. Marc Johnson at the University of Toronto just published a paper in Science detailing some of the evolutionary changes apparently forced by urban environments.

The story of "exclusion laws" is well-known in Oregon. The state skirted the slave-vs-free question at its birth by just banning all black people from living within its borders. But what about people who lived here BEFORE it was a state? There are examples, including the shipwrecked black sailor James D. Saules, who arrived before many white settlers. His story is told in the book Dangerous Subjects: James D. Saules and the Rise of Black Exclusion in Oregon .