When the River Cities' Reader profiled Figge Art Museum Executive Director Sean O'Harrow in March 2008, he was, by virtue of having just seven months on the job, mostly talk. There wasn't much of a track record to cite, but he spoke with passion about enhancing the Figge's educational and community missions.

Ten months later, O'Harrow seems poised to deliver on many of his promises.

For example, a March exhibit of Michaelangelo sculptures will be the first time those have been seen outside of Florence, Italy, O'Harrow said.

More importantly, those Michaelangelo sculptures - newly cast in bronze from the fragile originals, which were scanned with a laser - can be touched, and O'Harrow is working to bring in sight-impaired people to feel them.

"Art museums normally ignore these communities," O'Harrow said in an interview Monday. "My view is: Bring everyone in sometime, somehow, for some reason. ...

"I'm really keen to have people experience things in different ways," he added. "No one living has ever been able to touch a Michaelangelo work."

The announcement on Friday that the Figge would be housing most of the University of Iowa Museum of Art collection (nearly all of which is being stored in Chicago following the summer flood in Iowa City) was further confirmation that O'Harrow is serious about education.

Now that the Davenport City Council has approved a March 3 referendum on the Davenport Promise proposal, one can be certain that the coalition that has been built over the past year-plus is being mobilized to demonstrate broad community support.

It will not be technically affiliated with any major community player, but it will include a lot of familiar names and faces behind the scenes. It will undoubtedly feature "real," everyday citizens, so voters won't feel like they're getting bullied by the heavy hitters. And the campaign will basically argue that there's no sensible reason to vote against the Promise, that there's no way the program could fail, and that the risk of voting the proposal down is too great.

That style of PR push was the successful approach of backers of River Renaissance in 2001. And the work in 2007 and 2008 of a Promise exploratory committee and a Promise task force has looked less like objective analysis than propaganda.

But don't mistake the marketing for unanimity.

It might seem like asking why the sun rises in the east, but: Is economic growth good?

The knee-jerk response is: Of course it is. And that's almost certainly correct broadly speaking.

But it's worth exploring why it's true, and when it's not. The assumption that economic growth is both good and essential drives much of our policy at the local, state, and national level. The news last week that the national economy shrank in the third quarter - confirming for many people that we're in a recession - underscores the importance we place on economic growth.

Colin Beavan's thought was hardly unusual. Most of us have wondered whether all our accumulated belongings and technology make our lives better.

"We're consuming way too much stuff as a civilization," Beavan said. "And we have an idea that's because we need all these things. When people tend to talk about living environmentally, they tend to think of depriving ourselves. The question became in our year: Would we be less happy or more happy? Would we actually find that there were some greater satisfactions than consuming resources to be had? And if that was the case - which it was in our case - might it be possible for our culture to design itself in such a way so that it uses fewer resources but also gives us happier lives?"