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Monday Mailing

Year 24 • Issue 03 25 September 2017 1. Juniper Mill Illustrates ‘New Natural Resource Economy’ 2. Oregon Fire Sparks Changes to Tourism Planning 3. Resource - New Tactical Urbanism Guide Helps Cities do Community-Led Placemaking 4. Resource - Running a Food Hub: A Business Operations Guide 5. Why Oregon’s Beaches Are Open to Everyone 6. America’s Rural Opportunity 7. Study Says New River Management Would Help Economy and Environment 8. Poll Reveals What Americans Don’t Know About Food: A Lot 9. Resource - New Research Resource for Urbanists 10. The Weeds: The Problem With The National Flood Insurance Program 11. Solar is Now So Cheap in The US it Beat Government Goals By Three Years 1. Juniper Mill Illustrates ‘New Natural Resource Economy’ Like much of the high desert landscape across central and Eastern Oregon, the community of Ritter in rural Grant County is dealing with a scourge of unwanted Western juniper trees, crowding out native vegetation for wildlife and livestock.

In response, a collaborative group of landowners known as the Ritter Land Management Team recently purchased a small portable sawmill to turn the pesky plants into valuable lumber, while also providing much-needed jobs for the area.

Quote of the Week: "The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others" ~Gandhi Oregon Fast Fact: Oregon grows 98 percent of the hazelnuts in the United States. There are more than 3,755,000 hazelnut trees in Oregon, worth $49.5 million, grown on 30,000 acres, mostly in western Oregon.

The first juniper logs were milled at Ritter last week, and the team expects to sell the finished product to Sustainable Northwest Wood, a Portland lumberyard owned by the nonprofit Sustainable Northwest where juniper sales have jumped to 50 percent annually.

Patti Hudson, executive director of the Ritter Land Management Team, said harvesting juniper will not only help ranchers keep their land healthy and productive, but may revitalize the local timber industry in a new way.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Oregon Fire Sparks Changes to Tourism Planning PORTLAND, Ore. — More than a dozen cars lined the parking lot at the Ramona Falls Trailhead in the Mt. Hood National Forest before 8 a.m.

Saturday, just 30 miles or so south of where the Eagle Creek fire continues to burn nearly 50,000 acres of the Columbia Gorge area between Oregon and Washington.

Despite the smoke and spreading flames, being outdoors is a way of life for many in the Beaver State.

A smoky haze wafted through the crisp morning air as hikers and campers shared updates on the blaze and concern for the area. Similar chatter has woven its way into conversations across the Portland metro area since the Page 1 of 5

fire started Sept. 2, when a teenager allegedly caused the fire by setting fireworks off in a dry gorge.

The teen, like many who visit the gorge, was local. But a rise in tourism in recent years has brought more uneducated explorers into the area than ever before - and with them, some say, a need for new strategies to manage the area.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Resource - New Tactical Urbanism Guide Helps Cities do Community-Led Placemaking This summer, the city of Fayetteville, AR took the remarkable step of actually encouraging its residents to construct and lead tactical urbanism projects. While tactical urbanism activities like pop-up bike lanes and homemade curb bump-outs typically face uphill battles in terms of permitting and many are outright illegal, Fayetteville has taken the opposite approach.

As the Fayetteville Flyer reported in July, "Officials [...] announced the creation of a new permit process to encourage residents to experiment with traffic and bike safety theories that could lead to permanent infrastructure improvements." Several projects have already taken place in Fayetteville and more are in the works. You can read a report on one of their projects—a temporary roundabout—here.

In addition to this permit process, Fayetteville also produced a tactical urbanism guide to community-led placemaking projects. And much of it applies far beyond the Arkansas town.

The guide begins with an introduction to tactical urbanism basics, offers advice for planning and applying for a permit, and walks you through how to install a successful project.

To access the full story and guide, click here.

4. Resource - Running a Food Hub: A Business Operations Guide The USDA report, Running a Food Hub: A Business Operations Guide, provides ample resources to the ins and outs of food hub operations. The second report in a 3-part series, this 'how to' guide provides in-depth guidance on starting and running a food hub enterprise, including classifications, operations, marketing, products and servicing, and risks.

To access the report, click here.

5. Why Oregon’s Beaches Are Open to Everyone Tad McCall was a young man when his father, former Oregon Governor Tom McCall, swooped onto Cannon Beach by helicopter to lobby for the Oregon Beach Bill on May 13, 1967.

Tad McCall didn’t know then that his father would change the course of history. A motel owner in Cannon Beach had closed off part of the beach, and a quiet fight was underway in the Oregon legislature between developers and conservation-minded lawmakers. Both sides wanted the rights to control the dry-sand portion of the beach, where we now build sandcastles, fly kites and take long beach walks to our heart’s content.

To access the full story, click here.

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6. America’s Rural Opportunity America’s Rural Opportunity is a six-part series of panel conversations that invites policymakers, economic and community development practitioners, and business and philanthropic leaders to engage in real dialogue around advancing a rural opportunity agenda.

The series will help:   

Uncover the complex reality and diversity of America’s rural places, economies, businesses, development intermediaries – and people.

Raise understanding about what works in Rural America by exploring enterprising economic development approaches that tap a range of opportunities to build wider and more enduring prosperity – and strengthen productive rural/urban connections.

Identify what the private, public and philanthropic sectors can do differently to improve rural prospects.

To access the six-part series, click here.

7. Study Says New River Management Would Help Economy and Environment The Columbia River and its tributaries could generate an additional $1.5 billion a year in economic activity if U. S. and Canadian agencies change the way they manage the numerous dams and reservoirs in the Pacific Northwest, a new study shows.

The study calls for releasing more water during the spring and summer to more closely mimic natural flows before dams were built.

Hydro-generated electricity would decline if the changes were enacted. But the $69 million decrease in power revenues would be more than offset by more spending from outdoor recreation activities, commercial fishing, and improved economies for tribal communities. The added economic benefits are derived from larger fish populations, expanding wetlands, and increasing forest size and health, the report says.

Conducted by Earth Economics, the study was commissioned by a consortium of Native American tribes interested in changing Columbia River management as they re-negotiate the Columbia River Treaty. Participating tribes and organizations include the Upper Columbia United Tribes, Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission, Pacific Rivers, Save Our Wild Salmon, and WaterWatch of Oregon among other groups.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Poll Reveals What Americans Don’t Know About Food: A Lot More than one-third of Americans do not know that foods with no genetically modified ingredients contain genes, according to the new nationally representative Food Literacy and Engagement Poll we recently conducted at Michigan State University. For the record, all foods contain genes, and so do all people.

The majority of respondents who answered this question incorrectly were young and affluent, and also more likely than their peers to describe themselves as having a higher-than-average understanding of the global food system. The full survey revealed that much of the U.S. public remains disengaged or misinformed about food. These findings are problematic because food shapes our lives on a personal level, while consumer choices and agricultural practices set the course for our collective future in a number of ways, from food production impacts to public health.

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Informing Food Discussions The Food Literacy and Engagement Poll, which we plan to conduct annually, is part of Food@MSU, a new initiative based in Michigan State University’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Food@MSU’s mission is to listen to consumers, promote dialogue and help the public make more informed choices about food.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Resource - New Research Resource for Urbanists In the hard-slogging world of the practicing architect, planner, or developer, academic research might seem remote, or even irrelevant. While not all academic research on urbanism is (or even should be) immediately actionable and directed at practitioners, I’ve always thought that there needs to be a better connection between researchers and practitioners—researchers need to hear from practitioners what kinds of research questions they need answered; practitioners should make use of scholarly research. A lot of academic research might be helpful to practitioners.

With my team at the University of Chicago, we’re trying to keep track of urbanism-related research.

As a start, we scanned the output of 64 academic peer-reviewed journals over the past 5 years (journals that we judged would be the most likely to publish urbanism-related material), searching for articles related to urbanism. We had two goals. First, to get a sense of the kind and quantity of urbanism-related research going on; and second, to figure out what was missing from this body of scholarship. What do we need to know that is not being covered?

All of this research has been summarized into short take-aways on the website urbanism.uchicago.edu (see “Research Summaries” on the home page). In our initial survey we identified 65 articles that we thought were most relevant to urbanists. We sorted these articles into 8 categories: Community & Place-Making, Crime & Safety, Diversity & Equity, Economic Development, Governance & Policy, Housing, Metrics & Methodology, and Transportation (articles can be in more than one category) To access the full story, click here.

10. The Weeds: The Problem With The National Flood Insurance Program In the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, one thing has already become clear: The US federal flood insurance program is massively underfunded.

On the August 23 episode of The Weeds, Matthew Yglesias and Sarah Kliff discuss flood insurance policy in light of Hurricane Harvey, the future of the single-payer health care debate, and a white paper on delaying kids’ entry to kindergarten.

The national flood insurance program was created in the 1960s to deter people from building in flood prone areas. But, says Sarah, it has actually done the opposite. She compares the program to health insurance: To access the full story, click here.

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11. Solar is Now So Cheap in The US it Beat Government Goals By Three Years Though US president Donald Trump has promised many times that he will bring back coal, he really can’t do much to fight the forces of good old economics.

On Tuesday (Sept. 12), the US Department of Energy announced that utility-grade solar panels have hit 2020 cost targets three years early. Utility-scale solar now averages around $1 per watt (the cost of the hardware’s electricity generation capacity) and $0.06 per kilowatt-hour (the cost of the electricity consumed), targets set in 2001 by the DOE’s SunShot Initiative.

The steady decline in the price of solar power is largely due to falling costs of photovoltaic hardware, driven by market competition, as well as improvements in efficiency, in part stimulated by DOEfunded research, according to a report released by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory on the same day. “Soft” costs like labor have also fallen, but at a slower rate.

To access the full story, click here.

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