Monday Mailing - October 27, 2020

RARE Monday Mailing Year 27 | Issue 06 26 October 2020 1.

Quote of the Week:

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“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”

- Henry David Thoreau

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What Happens When Loggers and Environmentalists Work Together?

Oregon Archaeology Highlight: Native American Ethnographic Basketry Digitization Project Farmers are Facing a Phosphorous Crisis. The Solution Starts with the Soil.

Newly Formed Research Group Declares Oregon Glacier Dead (Katie McFall) Minnesota Town opts for a Short-term Approach to its Long-term Climate Goals Oregon Rural Hospitals Worried About Having to Pay Back CARES Act Millions 20 Food Cooperatives Building Resilient Communities Citizens Work to Erase Racial Slurs from Oregon Maps RESOURCE: The New Ruralism Initiative – Sharing Stories of New Ruralism RESOURCE: Pandemic Toolkit: Manual for Rebuilding Community Health & Opportunity Post-COVID

What Happens When Loggers and Environmentalists Work Together?

Oregon Public Broadcast So, a logger and an environmentalist walk into a forest together…

Oregon Fast Fact Oregon was the last state where the jury need not be unanimous. The practice was ruled unconstitutional in April 2020.

More info.

It sounds like a joke, because, at least historically speaking, loggers and environmentalists didn’t go anywhere in Oregon together. If they crossed paths in the forest, it was because they were on opposite sides of a road blockade or logging protest.

But not in eastern Oregon’s Grant County. Here, loggers and environmentalists have been walking in the woods together for years.

“So did this pencil out?” environmental attorney Susan Jane Brown asked during a tour of different logging treatments in the Malheur National Forest in August 2019.

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“Yeah, easy logging,” responded Zach Williams, a forester for the company that cut the trees, Iron Triangle. “I don’t hesitate to say this was the best sale we’ve had in years.”

Brown and Williams are part of the forest collaborative group Blue Mountains Forest Partners. They’ve been so successful at finding common ground that environmentalists haven’t filed a single anti-logging lawsuit on the Malheur National Forest since 2003.

Read the full story.

2. Oregon Archaeology Highlight: Native American Ethnographic Basketry Digitization Project Oregon Heritage Exchange Basket weaving is a traditional craft with ancient roots in North America. Today, Indigenous People continue to make basketry for food gathering, preparation, and storage, clothing, baby cradles, carrying containers, use in ceremonies and celebrations, and as works of art. The Museum of Natural and Cultural History cares for an outstanding and unique collection of ethnographic baskets from the Far West, made by Native weavers from the Aleutians to New Mexico. While a number of items are on public display at the museum, much of this large and fragile collection is housed behind the scenes, in state-ofthe-art vaults that ensure their safety and long-term preservation.

Read the full story.

3. Farmers Are Facing a Phosphorous Crisis. The Solution Starts with the Soil.

National Geographic On an overcast day, Roger Sylvester-Bradley walks along a hawthorn hedge, collecting a thick rind of mud on his leather boots, before stepping into a gently sloping field of barley.

He stoops to pluck an ankle-high seedling from the ground and examines its healthy mop of fine white roots. Turning them in his hands, he says, “when you see a plant that’s deficient in phosphorus, it doesn’t look like this.”

That’s something of a surprise to Sylvester-Bradley, a crop scientist at ADAS, an agricultural consulting company in Cambridge, England. Phosphorus occurs naturally in soil and is a critical nutrient for plant growth. For centuries, farmers have added extra to their fields to boost harvests, but Sylvester-Bradley and his colleagues are studying ways to produce food using less of it.

Read the full story.

4. Newly Formed Research Group Declares Oregon Glacier Dead Oregon Public Broadcast Conditions deteriorated Sunday as wind roared in from the west atop South Sister in Central Oregon, turning back previously optimistic climbers.

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Among them were three people planning to pay last respects to Clark Glacier, which a newly formed research group has declared dead.

Aaron Hartz, who led Sunday’s climb, and Anders Carlson started the Oregon Glaciers Institute, or OGI, in May 2020. They spent the summer performing health checks on the state’s glaciated regions. An August survey of the Clark Glacier turned up no glacier at all.

“For something to be a glacier, the ice needs to be deforming and flowing under its own weight,” Hartz said. “When that ceases to happen, it’s really just like a dead ice body.”

Read the full story.

5. Minnesota Town opts for a Short-term Approach to its Long-term Climate Goals Energy News Network As cities debate ways to meet their long-term goals for emissions reductions, a Minnesota town’s new climate plan calls for fast action and quick results over the next five years.

The City Council in Red Wing unanimously approved a five-year climate action plan in August and its members anticipate boosting current programs and starting new initiatives within the next few months. The short time horizon contrasts with climate plans in other cities rolled out over a 20-year span.

Red Wing, a historic river town of 16,000 just outside the Twin Cities, is the first community to take advantage of a Great Plains Institute program that creates a five-year window for achieving measurable results on climate change. The city paid Great Plains Institute nearly $15,000 to create the climate action plan, with roughly $3,000 of that paid by a grant. The city would have had to pay Great Plains a higher fee for a plan covering more years.

Read the full story.

6. Oregon Rural Hospitals Worried About Having to Pay Back CARES Act Millions KGW Rural hospitals in Oregon have faced several headaches during the pandemic. The most recent one is caused not by the virus but by the federal government.

Many hospitals applied for and received federal money under the CARES Act. The funds were meant to help keep them afloat as they staffed up and geared up for a surge of patients and at the same time stopped all elective or non-life saving surgeries.

But a change in accounting rules in late September meant that many hospitals might have to pay back some or all of that money.

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In Curry County, along Oregon’s southwest coast, CEO Ginny Williams is concerned. Her hospital got nearly $5 million.

Read the full story.

7. 20 Food Cooperatives Building Resilient Communities Food Tank Food cooperative or co-op models can provide communities with locally sourced, affordable, equitable, and ecologically sound food.

According to economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard from Yale University, communities often create cooperatives in response to racial and cultural inequities. As consumers and farmers reject traditional food systems, community members can pool their resources, address inequities, and develop resilience in the food system.

Food co-ops do 2.5 times more business with local farms and producers than conventional grocers and spend 19 percent of their revenue on local wages and benefits, says Cooperatives For a Better World.

“It’s very clear from day one that there isn’t someone else extracting value out of the food system in a cooperative model,” Narendra Varma, founder of Our Table Cooperative, tells Food Tank.

Read the full story.

8. Citizens Work to Erase Racial Slurs from Oregon Maps Capital Press It started as a comedian's global online challenge. Fifteen months later, proposals to rename two Southern Oregon mountains inch closer to approval.

Wilsonville's Margo Schembre wants to change the name of Negro Ben Mountain in Jackson County. Her proposal is expected to get a green light Saturday afternoon, when Oregon's Geographic Names Board meets online.

Schembre asked the board in July 2019 to change the name to Ben Johnson Mountain to honor the Black man who operated a blacksmith shop near Ruch, Ore., along the Applegate River.

Read the full story.

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9. RESOURCE – The New Ruralism Initiative – Sharing Stories of New Ruralism American Planning Association, Northern New England Chapter Remember the New Ruralism Initiative, a project of the American Planning Association’s Northern New England Chapter? Since 2015 MAP has been part of this inspiring project.

The project, which started by featuring efforts in Northern New England, expanded to feature grassroots initiatives from Alaska to New York to Alabama which are reinventing local markets and developing grassroots driven programs to meet the needs of their rural residents. And now the New Ruralism Report is out!

The New Ruralism Initiative now has a downloadable report to share. This report celebrates the rural renaissance in the making with twenty case studies of successful local initiatives in a wide variety of areas such as local foods, housing, energy, new approaches to cooperatives, community services and more. The report shares the lessons local leaders shared with us to help other small-town initiatives get off the ground and succeed. We hope the stories and lessons provide inspiration and guidance for local leaders and volunteers seeking to apply creative solutions to improve everyday life for rural residents.

Access the report.

10. RESOURCE – Pandemic Toolkit: Manual for Rebuilding Community Health & Opportunity Post-COVID Placemakers What’s likely to linger in the aftermath of the global COVID crisis are the impacts on local and regional governments that provide the services citizens experience most directly in their daily lives. Faced with budget shortfalls, growing to-do lists for routine tasks delayed by the emergency, and general uncertainty about a “new normal,” how might governments address the uncertainty and respond effectively to the challenges?

That’s the goal of our Pandemic Toolkit.

We’ve spent the last eight months observing and contributing to best practices and have distilled those interventions in an easy-to-use format. Our hope is that the toolkit helps rebuild municipal budgets quickly, by supporting local businesses and reducing the bureaucratic process. The Toolkit is available as a free, interactive document.

Each of its 22 actions includes the regulatory or policy tool needed to implement the action, along with methods, key points, and interventions required to see it through. For each action, different methods are highlighted that may help.

Access the toolkit.

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