RARE Monday Mailing Year 27 | Issue 05 19 October 2020 1.
Quote of the Week:
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“Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass. It's about learning how to dance in the rain.” - Vivian Greene
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
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States That Share Columbia River Basin Will Work Together to Save Salmon and Steelhead (Katie McFall) UN: Climate Change Means More Weather Disasters Every Year (Katie McFall) How Engagement and Design Won Over Wary Neighbors Boardman Generating Station Powers Down Permanently Despite Less Funding, Rural Arts Groups Push On. These 4 Groups Show How It Can Be Done. How Hops Became the Star of American Brewing USDA Invests $110,000 to Fuel Economic Recovery in 5 Rural Oregon and Washington Counties Solar Array Makes Hermiston RV Park First of Its Kind The Measurement of Tourism in the Post-COVID Era A Bipartisan Case for Mass Timber – Combating Wildfires and Developing Local Economies
States That Share Columbia River Basin Will Work Together to Save Salmon and Steelhead
Oregon Public Broadcasting Four states that share the Columbia River Basin have agreed to work together to rebuild the river’s salmon and steelhead stocks.
Oregon Fast Fact The Owyhee River is a 280-mile-long river in SE Oregon named after three men from “Owyhee” (former English spelling of Hawai’i) who were lost during a fur trapping expedition in 1819. More info.
Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana announced Friday they have committed to a unified public process to find solutions to key issues for recovering the imperiled fish. The process will include federal agencies, stakeholders and the region’s tribes — including recognition of their treaty and cultural rights and their co-management of natural resources. Read the full story.
2. UN: Climate Change Means More Weather Disasters Every Year Oregon Public Broadcasting In the wake of heat waves, global warming, forest fires, storms, droughts and a rising number of hurricanes, the U.N. RARE AmeriCorps Program Monday Mailing | Page 1 of 5
weather agency warned Tuesday that the number of people who need international humanitarian help could rise 50% by 2030 compared to the 108 million who needed it worldwide in 2018. In a new report released with partners, the World Meteorological Agency says more disasters attributed to weather are taking place each year. It said over 11,000 disasters have been attributed to weather, climate and phenomena like tsunamis that are related to water over the last 50 years — causing 2 million deaths and racking up $3.6 trillion worth of economic costs. Read the full story.
3. How Engagement and Design Won Over Wary Neighbors Shelterforce Moore Village is a low-income development nestled in a high-income neighborhood in the college town of Davis, California. When it was first proposed in 2001, Moore Village looked like it might never get built. In October 2001 about 100 angry neighbors showed up for a tense neighborhood meeting at the Wildhorse Golf Club to discuss plans for a vacant 5-acre site. It was at that citysponsored public meeting that homeowners of the upscale Wildhorse area in north Davis learned that 59 low-income apartments were to be built in the middle of their community, only 300 feet away from the golf course. The apartments would specifically be rented to extremely low, very low, and low-income households. Accusations flew, tempers rose, and distrust was rampant. Of the seven low-income projects that Neighborhood Partners LLC has developed in Davis, this was the project with by far the most opposition. Read the full story.
4. Boardman Generating Station Powers Down Permanently East Oregonian Boardman Generating Station went offline for good on Thursday, Oct. 15, marking an end to Oregon’s coal-burning era. The plant, located just south of Boardman and run by Portland General Electric, was the last coal-fired generating plant in the state and could burn as much as 8,000 tons of coal per day. According to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, it was the largest single source of greenhouse emissions in Oregon. “Our customers are counting on us to deliver a clean energy future,” PGE President and CEO Maria Pope said in a statement. “PGE’s Boardman closure is a major step on our path
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to meeting Oregon’s greenhouse gas emission reduction goals and transforming our system to reliably serve our customers with a cleaner, more sustainable energy mix.” Read the full story. 5. Despite Less Funding, Rural Arts Groups Push On. These 4 Groups Show How it Can
Be Done.
The Daily Yonder In Kyle, South Dakota, a new structure is under construction that will be a focal point for indigenous arts and culture on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The 8,500 square foot Oglala Lakota Arts Center will provide critically needed room for individual and group studio space, technology for electronic marketplace access, classroom and gallery space, and a recording and sound studio. With ample space for collaboration, it will be a hub connecting arts and cultural activities across the geographically vast reservation. The center is a partnership among Artspace, a non-profit arts facilities developer; First Peoples Fund, a non-profit Native artist collaborative; and Lakota Funds, a Community Development Financial Institution on Pine Ridge. The facility was designed by Encompass Architects, whose president, Tammy Eagle Bull (Oglala Lakota) is the first Native woman to become a licensed architect. Lakota knowledge of the stars informed the design of the building, making it both support and reflect the artistry of the community. Read the full story.
6. How Hops Became the Star of American Brewing Outside The 2019 American Hop Convention, held in January in Monterey, California, was part agriculture conference and part old-home week. Almost all of the nation’s beer hops—and roughly 40 percent of all hops in the world—are grown by about 75 farms in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, many of them owned by families who have farmed hops for four or five generations. At the convention, everybody seemed to know everybody. This gave a loose feel to the proceedings, which recognize and celebrate the fact that only one thing can be done with the crop the conventioneers produce: mix it with malt and water, ferment the liquid, and drink the beer you’ll get after a few weeks. During afternoon coffee breaks, everybody cracked a cold one. That wasn’t the only reason for the festive mood. The past 15 years have witnessed a spectacular surge in craft brewing in the United States; more than 85 percent of Americans now live within ten miles of a brewery. U.S. beer culture, once a punchline, has become the most vibrant on earth. The hop industry has been a beneficiary and driver of this renaissance. Hops once were considered a drab ingredient, tossed in mainly to preserve the beer, thanks to antibacterial RARE AmeriCorps Program Monday Mailing | Page 3 of 5
properties of the resins found in hop flowers, which are also called cones. Today, hops are the star of American brewing. Read the full story.
7. USDA Invests $110,000 to Fuel Economic Recovery in 5 Rural Oregon and Washington Counties Argus Observer The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development is investing $110,000 to help the nonprofit Rural Development Initiatives (RDI) fuel the economic recovery in rural Oregon and Washington communities, announced State Director John Huffman today. “Rural Development is committed to working with our partners to help rural areas recover from the economic downturn spurred by the pandemic,” said Huffman. “With this grant, we are supporting a local nonprofit’s efforts to increase economic vitality in the rural Pacific Northwest.” Read the full story.
8. Solar Array Makes Hermiston RV Park First of Its Kind East Oregonian The new Panelview RV Park near Hermiston is the first of its kind to provide solar shade canopy solar arrays, meaning on a sunny day more energy could be produced than a motorhome can use. The 147-kilowatt solar array system will generate an estimated 226,357 kilowatt-hours of renewable electricity per year, which is enough to power 27 typical U.S. homes. Overall, the solar array will help the RV park reduce its utility bill by $19,020 per year. “We named the park Panelview RV Park due to the fact that our guests are surrounded by solar panels and the park runs entirely on renewable energy,” said Kent Madison, Panelview RV Park owner. Read the full story.
9. The Measurement of Tourism in the Post-COVID Era Oregon Business When the impact of COVID-19 hit the Oregon Coast like a never-ending tsunami, it shut down restaurants, lodging, most retail, fishing charters, performance venues – in other words, it stopped tourism. Even six-plus months into the pandemic, most businesses are at half-capacity in order to meet state safety guidelines. Reaction by businesses owners was quick but not without fear: how do you keep community, employees and customers safe, yet survive as a business? RARE AmeriCorps Program Monday Mailing | Page 4 of 5
The Great Recession of 12 years ago provided valuable lessons. “In 2008, we did not respond quickly enough, not realizing the downturn would extend into a deep recession,” said Jim Prinzing, CEO of Pelican Brewing and Kiwanda Hospitality, located in Pacific City. “When COVID-19 happened, we took immediate steps to protect the community, employees and families, and resources for the financial support of our businesses.” Read the full story.
10. A Bipartisan Case for Mass Timber – Combating Wildfires and Developing Local Economies Planetizen The West Coast is on fire, with blazes burning uncontained across multiple states. The thick haze of smoke brought dark days and plunging air quality that left three major west coast cities—Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco—with the worst air quality in the world. Temperatures are rising, and increasingly severe natural disasters are the new norm across our country. We need to start taking the necessary steps to drastically reduce our impact on the environment. We need to reimagine how our economy works, a sustainable economy designed around our future that doesn’t degrade our beautiful natural resources, or leave communities bereft of economic opportunity. Mass timber can help. Read the full story.
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