By MARK GILCHRIST
Chief photographer

There’s good news for those of us who breathe; our air is a whole lot cleaner these days.

I remember when I first arrived here about seven years ago after spending more than a decade in Orlando. I stepped into a supermarket one day and was a bit bewildered when I saw a guy with a lit cigarette in the store.

I wasn’t annoyed, but I had recently traveled extensively around the country, in big cities and small towns, and the notion that struck me when I saw someone smoking in a grocery store, honestly, was “backwater.”

So, with smoke-free policies sweeping the nation and the world, it is encouraging to see Columbus County keeping pace – we are not a backwater area.

We do have a long heritage of raising quality tobacco here, and that is something of which we should be proud. It has been good, hard, honest work. But we cannot afford to impose our pride on others, and in this ever-shrinking world, we are constantly inviting strangers from around the country to come visit us, and we compete with thousands of other communities to get people to live and work here.

The winner of this daily competition will be decided because of three factors. People will come here to live and work and be a part of our community either for more pay, for a better quality of life, or because they’re losers and they can’t get jobs elsewhere.

We can’t afford to out-salary everyone else, so we will attract either good people seeking a better quality of life, or we’ll get the losers – this is inevitable. There is, of course, a whole lot more to the quality of life than clean air, but being able to breathe when and where we want is surprisingly important to a lot of people.

About a year ago, I was so impressed with the movement toward air quality in this county that I initiated a survey of businesses, churches and other organizations. With a stipend from Healthy Carolinians, data assistance from the Greater Whiteville Chamber of Commerce, and a lot of hard work from volunteers with the Retired Senior Volunteer Program, we created the Breathe Easy Registry.

Visit the registry through a link at Dropaton.org and you can scroll through the list in four ways. You can sort the registry by organization name, tobacco policy, category or city. It’s very simple to use, so don’t look for a search function or complicated sorting options.

For example, if you really want, say, a smoke-free place to eat in Chadbourn, you would click on “Sorted by City” and scroll through the Chadbourn listings, and…

Okay, wait. You’ll have to bring your own bag, as we don’t seem to have a smoke-free restaurant listed in Chadbourn, yet. But you could bring your snack to the town hall and enjoy clean air in that smoke-free building.

RSVP volunteers made more than a thousand telephone calls to compile a registry of more than 500 locations throughout the county. The calls were not always easy, I can attest, as I made several myself, and was sometimes met with confusion, and even umbrage.

The obvious goal of the registry is to offer free information on tobacco policies. Anyone can use the site to explore where to shop, pray, work, recreate, or obtain healthcare or other services. Certainly, an underlying goal was to promote healthful, clean air, but we are not pressuring people to make their public areas smoke free.

I always felt that the registry would work both ways. Some owners still allow smoking anywhere in their businesses because they likely believe their customers prefer it that way. So, logically, it would be to their benefit to let everyone know. For example, if you need some paint, and you would like to light up as you survey all the colors, than a quick check of the registry will show you which paint or hardware stores allow smoking.

Did we miss anything? If we got the tobacco policy wrong for your business or organization, or if yours was not included in the registry, please let us know by clicking on the Feedback link. Also, a limited number of “Breathe Easy” door stickers are available at the chamber. Get one for free and use it to invite your customers into your clean-air environment.

The results of the survey should be pleasing to those who enjoy breathing clean air. Just look at these numbers.

Of the 545 locations listed, 74 ban smoking anywhere on the property and 324 ban it in the building, so that means that at 72 percent of the listed places in Columbus County, you can breathe easily.

Another 63 locations have restricted areas, which brings the total up to 84 percent of the places where you’ll have a fighting chance at fresh air.

Non-smoking bans have proved successful around the world for two reasons. First, those who are initially opposed soon find that not being able to smoke during every waking hour is not as bad as they thought it would be. Second, when people become used to breathing clean air, they expect it everywhere, and when they walk into a building filled with smoke, they notice it. In today’s world, that building is fairly alone – about one out of nine – and it makes one think “backwater.”

Only 84 locations reported having no tobacco policy, and given the trend against second-hand smoke, your chances are pretty good that you’ll be able to breathe easy in most of your travels in Columbus County, which is an appealing reason for people to want to visit and live here.