We at State of the Re:Union are so excited to announce five new shows for the fall season, which are set to be released beginning on Friday, September 16, 2011.

Here is a sneak peek at the episodes that will be about some unique challenges of community and how it brings people together:

Bronx, New York – The Bronx has symbolized America’s failings for a long time. It remains the poorest urban congressional district in the nation, and ask a New Yorker about the boroughs and they’ll usually tell you the Bronx is the one to avoid. Despite the area’s troubles, some citizens hailing from this region have resisted an exodus with the intentions of putting down roots and making the borough a better place to live. This episode will look at the hold-outs and the dreamers who have committed their lives and families to building community in the Bronx.

Gulf Coast of Mississippi - The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina forced the residents of the Mississippi Gulf Coast to band together to help the community get back on its feet. Just as the groove of life was returning to a normal level, the BP Deep Horizon disaster resulted in millions of barrels of oil being dumped into the water off their shores, once again having a debilitating impact on their everyday lives. These events have resulted in a lot of Gulf Coast residents becoming environmental aficionados, something they had never before imagined. SOTRU will bring you an hour of stories about how the fight for the natural world is uniting residents of the Gulf Coast, sometimes with unlikely partners–and how, in some instances, this environmental fight is exacting what this community has needed to survive.

Southern Wyoming – Wyoming is the least populated state in America. This is a sparsely occupied landscape where private property and self-sufficiency are prized, and the community that has been built tends to reflect the not-so-neighborly sentiment. The thought is slightly unsettling that distant neighbors might need to rely on another. For people to come together here, the reason must be good. This episode will take you to the towns of Laramie, Cheyenne and the surrounding landscape in Southern Wyoming. It will create a window, allowing a look into how the happenings in small towns of the rural United States’ countryside can set national changes into motion.

Cleveland, Ohio - From Rockefeller’s Standard Oil to GE’s first industrial park , the city of Cleveland was built from entrepreneurial spirit. This Ohio city was known for its success, until an infamous day in 1969 where the polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire, and has since become a bane in Cleveland’s existence. “The Mistake on the Lake” has become synonymous with the city and a moniker they have not been able to shake. Today, a new generation of entrepreneurs is embracing Cleveland. This episode will take the hour to explore how they are relying on their business sense in an effort to revitalize neighborhoods, cleanup the environment and improve education.

Sacramento, California - This is a company town, the caveat being that the company is government. Here, one in four households contains a government employee. There are many reasons that Sacramento citizens’ could have an ominous future outlook: the crippling state budget deficit, police loafs, fire engine brown-outs and park closures. However, these men and women believe that persistence is the key to getting through the murk and mire. Through the sheer determination, the residents and an enthusiastic mayor are keeping their major league basketball team for yet another year. Despite the Murphy’s Laws or Catch 22′s that the people of Sacramento have experienced, they refuse to become a gloomy statistical reference. The city’s number of chronically homeless people surviving on the streets actually went down this past year. This episode will uncover how the Sacramento residents are taking stock in their community. SOTRU will explore ways they are coping with this hard new economic reality, from volunteering to maintain city parks with Parks and Recreation budgets cuts, to creating clothing swaps and and home shares.

Go ahead, we know you’re a leader, so get the conversation started! State of the Re:Union would love to get your thoughts on the episodes when they are made available. Don’t stop there, we would also love your feedback on our newest documentaries, and on all things SOTRU and community related.

Fresh oysters at a Gulfport, MS restaurant

Crawfish etouffee. A shrimp po boy. Crabcakes. Oysters on the half shell, like a mouthful of the sea… All things I ate during the last week, reporting for SOTRU on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. All of which I enjoyed, and all of which feel as if they speak to something essential about life in this region: the melding of the sea with ritual, the way the Gulf is so intertwined with culture here that they’re impossible to separate—nor would you want to. Except that I ate all of those meals with hesitation, a hesitation shared by many locals. Why? Because of something that happened months ago, which now only barely surfaces in the mainstream news media: the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Now, you may have heard that’s all over: the seafood’s safe, the beaches are open, all is back to normal. For those of us that don’t live on the Gulf Coast, that might be fairly true. But for locals, the reality is considerably more complicated.

It comes down to who you believe: the federal government or the watchdog groups, the small restaurant owner or the woman daily taking pictures of dead fish and turtles she finds on the beach. The FDA has proclaimed Gulf shrimp and its ilk safe to eat, pointing to their rigorous and ongoing testing. But for some who live on the coast, the FDA’s statements offer no reassurance. Independent chemist (and McArthur Genius Award winner) Wilma Subra– along with environmental advocates, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade– have been doing their own testing of seafood. They come up with similar data to the FDA; where they differ is how to interpret it. What the FDA thinks is a reasonable amount of trace oil and dispersants in the seafood, Subra, the Bucket Brigade and others don’t buy. They’re skeptical of the samples taken, of the release of FDA data in complicated tables that most members of the public would be hard-pressed to decode, and of the math that claims the average Gulf Coast resident would be fine eating multiple meals of seafood, every day, month after month.

Shrimp for sale, Biloxi, MS

So: who do you believe? For many in this region, it boils down to a trust of the official word—or the complete lack thereof. For some who feel that their government failed them in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a government they see as having partnered with the culprit, BP, in the clean-up of the oil spill—why would you believe what you were being told by Washington D.C.? For others, the desire to get back to normal, to resume a life enriched by daily plates of shrimp and oysters, to see businesses dependent upon seafood flourish once again—that is enough to take the official word as truth. It comes down to an individual decision: to eat or not to eat? For communities all along the Gulf Coast, that is the question.