Video created for the Long Island Index 2011 report showing the key problems facing the region.

The opening of a new medical school on Long Island is huge news. Not only is it a big step forward for our economy, it’s a good example of what Long Islanders can do when they set their minds to it.

“Greenhouse” gases: A pleasant-sounding name for the carbon-based gases that threaten to destroy ecosystems, play havoc with weather patterns, raise sea levels and inundate much of Long Island. We know we need to reduce these emissions. We even have a slew of programs designed to do so. State programs, county programs, town programs, programs from the utility companies. So, “how’re we doin’?”

Here’s a story of a little education program – the Parent-Home Child Program, started right here on Long Island some years ago – that succeeded where so many other school reforms failed.

A team of researchers went looking for land in all the right places … and found oodles of it. Enough to build a new, more prosperous Long Island. That’s the news contained in a study just released by the Long Island Index.

The New York Times

How the area can grow, what it will take to be economically viable going forward, as well as how much and what type of new development is possible and preferable, is the focus of the 2010 Long Island Index released last week.

This was the opening segment at the 2010 Long Island Index Launch.

Long Island used to be a land of movers and shakers. People saw opportunity and seized it.

Dr. Nancy Rauch Douzinas, President, Rauch Foundation speaks at the Launch of the Long Island Index 2009 at Hofstra University, January 30, 2009.

I often hear people say that Long Island can’t get anything done, that we can’t get out of our own way. There may be some truth to that. We need to break that habit and start doing. Here are some concrete steps that would get us going in the right direction.

It seems I was wrong. When we started the Long Island Index, we had a guiding principle: Good information about our region would lead to effective action. When it comes to Long Island’s calamitous brain drain, however, we have all the information we need, but hardly any action at all.

In the annals of Long Island folly, here’s a trend that stands out: We’re actually recycling less than we used to. Recycling rates peaked in 1997 and have declined ever since. From 2002 to 2004 they plummeted 27 percent. What are we thinking? We can’t afford that.

A Brentwood truck-rail freight facility proposed by the state Department of Transportation would take more than 5,000 trucks off Long Island’s roads daily, cut travel delays, lower emissions, improve air quality and reduce shipping costs. But it may never come to fruition. Many see it as a perfect example of Long Island’s inability to get things done.

Long Island has long needed a serious discussion about money, and its time may have finally arrived.

The New York Times

Ms. Douzinas has been busy examining the Island’s woes and the lack of “stickiness” that extends way beyond her own front door. The Island, Ms. Douzinas said, needs to be a place “that you want to return to and that sticks the young people.”