Monday Mailing - Sept 28, 2020

RARE Monday Mailing Year 27 | Issue 02

28 September 2020 1.

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“Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.”

- Abigail Adams

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Oregon Fast Fact In 1885, Oregon housed the second and third largest Chinatowns in the country, in Portland and John Day. To this day, Kam Wah Chung & Co. in John Day is the world’s largest intact collection of Chinese medicine and formulas from the frontier.

Repairing Humanity’s Relationship With the Planet Will Be Cheaper Than Continuing to Let It Slide (Alexandra Corvello) A Pastor, a School Bus and a Trip Through a Scorched Oregon Town Oregon Fires Exacerbate COVID-19 Impact on Farmworkers (Abigail Blinn) New “Rural Resilience” Course Addresses Mental Health Among Farmers (Emily Whittier) How to Prevent Killing Your Community’s Character How Portland’s Mutual Aid Supports Local Indigenous Communities Congress Acknowledges 155-year-old Betrayal of Warm Springs and Wasco Tribes (Eva Kahn) Cancellation of Pendleton Round-Up Hurts Local Economy Are Zoom Towns Coming to Rural Oregon?

RESOURCE: Rural Youth Futures PODCAST: Planners Are Helping Small Businesses Become Resilient Amidst the Pandemic

Repairing Humanity’s Relationship With the Planet Will Be Cheaper Than Continuing to Let It Slide

Foreign Policy All around, on the land and in the ocean, nature’s alarm bells are ringing. Wildfires rage in California as hotter, drier conditions make such events more frequent and more severe.

One of the worst Atlantic hurricane seasons on record threatens coastal communities. And a coronavirus that jumped from animals to people late last year continues to drive a global pandemic that is responsible for nearly 1 million deaths so far and a global recession. All this seems like a new normal in what scientists refer to as the Anthropocene, the current geologic period dominated by human influence on the planet.

Now we can add another data point to the growing chronicle of humanity’s broken relationship with nature. According to the newly released 2020 Living Planet Report, produced by the

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WWF, where one of us is CEO, population sizes of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians declined globally by an average of 68 percent between 1970 and 2016. Such loss of nature is driven by unsustainable forms of food and energy production and consumption—the same factors that have fanned climate change and provoked public health crises, such as COVID-19.

Read the full story.

2. A Pastor, a School Bus and a Trip Through a Scorched Oregon Town The New York Times In a season that has seen fast-moving fires lay waste to millions of acres along the West Coast, perhaps no town has seen the destructive fury that leveled parts of Phoenix, Ore. In the span of a few hours on Sept. 8, the Almeda Fire burned through large parts of not only Phoenix but the neighboring town of Talent, together home to 11,000 people. Local officials estimated that the fire destroyed nearly 1,800 homes and businesses.

The ruin was so widespread that a week later, the authorities still would not allow residents to return home to see what was left. For days, many of the displaced were forced to scrutinize bits of aerial footage for clues, while others hiked for miles to get around roadblocks.

Read the full story.

3. Oregon Fires Exacerbate COVID-19 Impact on Farmworkers COVID-19 Farmworker Study The Oregon COVID-19 Farmworker Study Team (a consortium of 11 farmworker-serving organizations and academics from Portland State University, University of Oregon, and Oregon State University) announces the preliminary survey findings from more than 200 farmworkers living across all of Oregon. The initial findings provide unique insights into the conditions of these essential workers during the pandemic that are now exacerbated by historic wildfires. Preliminary results from this unique study—the only statewide survey to gather data directly from farmworkers currently working through COVID—will be released at a virtual press conference on September 22nd, 2020 at 11 am PST. The results, also to be included in an accompanying research data brief, provide critical missing information on worksite conditions and farmworkers' abilities to protect themselves while continuing to harvest the food that feeds Oregonians and consumers nationwide and globally.

Read the full story.

4. New “Rural Resilience” Course Addresses Mental Health Among Farmers foodtank Rural Resilience is a new online course designed to make mental health care more accessible for farmers and rural communities in the United States.

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Created by both the Michigan and Illinois State University Extension Programs, the Rural Resilience curriculum helps participants learn to recognize signs of stress, identify effective coping strategies, respond to suicidal behavior, and connect with appropriate resources.

“We are working to destigmatize the illness, and let [farmers] know that resources are available,” says Eric Karbowski, a behavioral health specialist from Michigan State University (MSU) Extension.

Read the full story.

5. How to Prevent Killing Your Community’s Character Proud Places As someone who has spent their entire career in one sector of economic development or another, from industrial recruitment to downtown redevelopment, I’ve had the good fortune to see communities do some really astonishing things. Many have been outstanding, but many more have been awful.

Economic development is one of the most broad and misused terms that has been bent to mean a lot of different things over the years. At its core, economic development is (or should be) about building local wealth. But somewhere along the way it became bastardized to mean “business friendly at all costs” to many local leaders.

Read the full story.

6. How Portland’s Mutual Aid Supports Local Indigenous Communities High Country News Since the pandemic started, Jason Umtuch, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Indians, has been hauling truckloads of water and supplies to his tribe’s community. But he isn’t putting in these eight-to-12-hour days just because he wants to.

Umtuch has to.

COVID-19 hit the Warm Springs community hard; out of the 3,400 members living on the reservation, at least 330 tested positive. To further complicate matters, in June, a pipe burst in the community’s water system, leaving 60% of residents without water for almost two months. A temporary fix restored water for most, but during those weeks without it, many tribal members faced an increased risk for spreading the coronavirus disease. This dire situation was repeated throughout Indian Country, including on the Navajo Nation.

Read the full story.

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7. Congress Acknowledges 155-year-old Betrayal of Warm Springs and Wasco Tribes OPB Their compromise created the state of Oregon.

Faced with the threat of forced removal or worse, in 1855 leaders of the Warm Springs and Wasco Tribes forfeited their claim to roughly ten million acres, and moved to a reservation.

In exchange for land to offer white settlers, brokers for the United States government made promises. Among those: Tribal members would not be stopped from traveling off the reservation to hunt, fish and forage, as they had done for millennia.

But just ten years later, in 1865, a U.S. official betrayed the agreement, drawing up a socalled “supplemental treaty” that prohibited Tribal members from leaving the reservation without permission.

This week Congress voted by unanimous consent to nullify that 155-year-old document, in an acknowledgment that Tribal leaders and elected officials from Oregon have sought for decades. The 1865 Treaty Nullification Act now heads to President Trump’s desk for his signature.

Read the full story.

8. Cancellation of Pendleton Round-Up Hurts Local Economy OPB In a normal year, the 17,000-person town of Pendleton in Eastern Oregon would be swelling with tens of thousands of visitors for the annual Round-Up, the city’s signature rodeo.

The streets would be filled with horseback-mounted bands and parades of rodeo competitors and representatives of Native tribes.

But this year, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the rodeo was canceled for the first time since 1943, in the middle of World War II. Steve Chrisman, Pendleton’s economic development director, told OPB’s “Think Out Loud" that the community always looked forward to the rodeo.

“The air is electric,” he said. “There are horses and pens covering just about every inch of the city, RVs everywhere — there’s just an energy that’s hard to describe unless you’ve been to it.”

Read the full story.

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9. Are Zoom Towns Coming to Rural Oregon?

The Other Oregon The economists, ivy tower types and, ahem, journalists, who think about this sort of thing refer to the potential phenomenon of a “pandemic migration” resulting in “Zoom towns.”

With COVID-19 preventing so many people from going into the office, the question naturally emerges: If you can or must work from home, why not live somewhere cool?

Instead of commuting through Portland traffic to sit in a cubicle, why not amble downstairs in your bathrobe, sip your coffee, gaze at the Wallowa Mountains and login from Joseph?

The “Zoom town” expression comes from the Zoom app that allows workers to attend meetings and make presentations remotely on their phones or computers.

The imagined scenario has hordes of white-collar “knowledge” workers leaving crowded, costly urban areas and moving to cheaper, quieter, smaller communities such as Manzanita, Mosier, Mitchell and Maupin.

The newcomers bring their job, money, taste, expectations and politics with them. The growth results in Zoom towns, if not exactly boom towns.

Read the full story.

10. RESOURCE – Rural Youth Futures University of Oregon Ecosystem Workforce Program As rural communities face changes in local economies, populations, and workforce needs, what does the next generation of residents and workers value and want? That question was the motivation for the Rural Youth Futures project. Researchers and extension agents from several universities joined forces with local non-profits to find out what middle and high schoolers think in two forest-dependent regions: Coos County in Oregon and Piscataquis/Northern Somerset Counties in Maine.

Access the fact sheets.

11. PODCAST – Planners Are Helping Small Businesses Become Resilient Amidst the Pandemic American Planning Association When the coronavirus pandemic dramatically halted normal economic activity in March, many knew small business owners and their employees would not come away unscathed.

But small businesses are critical to our communities, making up 44 percent of all economic activity in the United States. Thankfully, community planners are stepping up in big ways to find relief for these businesses — the lifeblood of their localities.

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In this episode of the podcast, APA public affairs manager Emily Pasi talks with Angela Cleveland, AICP, director of community and economic development for the City of Amesbury, Massachusetts, and Matthew Coogan, AICP, chief of staff for the City of Newburyport, Massachusetts. Amesbury and Newburyport — the former boasting a thriving restaurant scene, the latter an engine largely fueled by tourism — were each awarded $400,000 in emergency Community Development Block Grant funding via the CARES Act. Angie and Matt outline the serious need they saw in their communities’ small businesses before the funding was delivered, as well as the ways various city departments came together to lift up struggling enterprises and help them innovate. They provide advice for planners who want to help their communities not just stay solvent, but recover stronger.

Listen to the full story.

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