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Monday Mailing

Year 22 • Issue 11 30 November 2015 1. U.S. Forest Service Releases Ten-Year Urban Forestry Action Plan 2. Researchers Create Tool to Forecast Pedestrian Demand 3. Join Us For The Next Transportation Seminar: Cargo Cycles for Local and Last Mile Delivery: Lessons from New York City - Friday, December 4, 2015 4. Why Are Organic Cranberries So Hard to Find?

5. The Fat City That Declared War On Obesity 6. Oregon's Land Use Planning Program Online Training 7. Engaging the Whole Community - Breaking Down Barriers in Our Public Process 8. Why Understanding These Four Types of Mistakes Can Help Us Learn 9. Is It O.K. to Kill Cyclists?

10. The Curious Case of the Antidepressant, Anti-Anxiety Backyard Garden 11. The Biggest And Boldest Ideas For How To Stop Rising Inequality 1. U.S. Forest Service Releases Ten-Year Urban Forestry Action Plan Washington, DC (November 17, 2015) — A U.S. Forest Service federal council has released a plan that identifies specific goals, actions, and recommendations for improving the status of urban and community forestry for the U.S. and its territories. The plan serves as a framework for awarding nearly $1 million in U.S. Forest Service grants to organizations, including grassroots nonprofits, academic researchers, private practitioners and local and state governments.

Quote of the Week: “We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson Oregon Fast Fact Some of the earliest rhinoceros fossils in the world were found in the John Day fossil beds.

“We appreciate the time, effort, and hard work by the council to develop this new plan,” said James Hubbard, deputy chief for the Forest Service State and Private Forestry. “This plan supports the agency’s strategic plan. Urban forests provide critical social and environmental benefits for 83 percent of the US population living among 136 million acres of urban forest land.”

To access the full story, click here.

2. Researchers Create Tool to Forecast Pedestrian Demand A new NITC project has developed a robust pedestrian demand estimation tool, the first of its kind in the country.

The research was completed in partnership with Oregon Metro, and will allow Metro to allocate infrastructure based on pedestrian demand in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area.

In a previous project completed last year as part of the same partnership, the lead investigator, Kelly Clifton, developed a way to collect data about the pedestrian environment on a small, neighborhood scale that made sense for walk trips. For more about how that works, click here to read our news coverage of that project.

For more information, click here.

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3. Join Us For The Next Transportation Seminar: Cargo Cycles for Local and Last Mile Delivery: Lessons from New York City - Friday, December 4, 2015 Cities depend on safe and efficient goods movement to support community livability and a healthy economy. However, delivery of goods in an urban environment presents a tremendous challenge.

Traditional motorized vehicles used for goods movement – ranging from cargo vans to box trucks are inherently incompatible with (1) the multimodal street environments of modern cities, with clean, quiet conditions preferred by residents, and (2) larger environmental sustainability goals. As freight flows continue to grow with the demands of global trade, new urban freight and city logistics solutions are needed.

Cargo cycles – human powered cycles equipped with freight carrying capacity – offer a potential alternative to reduce freight externalities. This presentation will discuss the results of the recently completed “Freight Tricycles in New York City (NYC)” project, which aimed to evaluate the potential for cargo cycles as a local and last-mile freight transportation mode and to understand the traffic performance and externalities of cargo cycles compared to motorized delivery modes in NYC conditions.

For more information and to register for this event, click here.

4. Why Are Organic Cranberries So Hard to Find?

As the holidays approach, fresh cranberries are once again appearing in grocery displays across the country. But if you’re hoping to score some organic cranberries, you might find yourself beating the bushes to find them.

While cranberries, in general, are considered a specialty crop in the U.S., organic cranberries are truly niche. Of the 40,000 acres of commercially managed cranberry bogs in this country, just a sliver— roughly 200 to 300 acres—are organic. All the organic cranberry beds in the U.S. could be squeezed into an area about one-third the size of New York’s Central Park.

Touted by dieticians for their nutritional value and prized by foodies for their culinary versatility, these tiny fruit are notoriously difficult to farm. Cranberries grow slowly. Many varieties are biennial bearing—it takes them two seasons to bear fruit. Cranberries grow on vines in sunken beds called bogs. Some growers dry- harvest the berries. Others flood the bogs and corral the cranberries, which float. Weeds, insects, and pathogenic fungi thrive in the boggy, wetland conditions needed to cultivate cranberries. And organic growers have few tools to fight these pests.

To access the full story, click here.

5. The Fat City That Declared War On Obesity When Velveth Monterroso arrived in the USA from her hometown in Guatemala, she weighed exactly 140 pounds. But after a decade of living in Oklahoma, she was more than 40 pounds heavier and fighting diabetes at the age of 34. This friendly woman, a mother of two children, is a living embodiment of the obesity culture cursing the world’s wealthiest country. “In Guatemala it is rare to see people who are very overweight, but it could not be more different here,” she said. “I saw this when I came here.”

As soon as she arrived in the USA she started piling on pounds – an average of seven pounds each year. In Guatemala she ate lots of vegetables because meat was expensive. But working from eight in the morning until eleven at night as a cook in an Oklahoma City diner, she would skip breakfast and lunch while snacking all day on bits of burger and pizza. Driving home she would often resort to fast food because she was hungry and exhausted after a 15-hour day slaving over a hot grill. If she and

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her husband Diego – also a cook – made it back without stopping, they would often gorge on whatever was available rather than wait to cook a decent meal.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Oregon's Land Use Planning Program Online Training Welcome to the Oregon land use planning online training, an overview of planning principles and practices in Oregon. The purpose of this program is to help you…citizens and decisionmakers…have a greater understanding of Oregon’s Statewide Planning and Coastal Management programs and how they relate to your local government planning efforts.

The curriculum has nine chapters. You may follow at your own pace and access the program at any point. Listen and watch. You may also read the content on your screen as we go along. Confirm your understanding by reviewing the scenarios that follow each chapter. For further information about how to use this site, please click the "Using This Site" button on the site index column on the left side of the screen.

For more information about Oregon’s Statewide Planning or Coastal Management Programs, contact us at (503) 373-0050 or online at www.lcd.state.or.us.

To access this online training program, click here.

7. Engaging the Whole Community - Breaking Down Barriers in Our Public Process This City of Salem sponsored video discusses methods on how to break down barriers in the public process that will allow public entities to engage with diverse populations.

To access the video, click here.

8. Why Understanding These Four Types of Mistakes Can Help Us Learn We can deepen our own and our students’ understanding of mistakes, which are not all created equal, and are not always desirable. After all, our ability to manage and learn from mistakes is not fixed. We can improve it.

Here are two quotes about mistakes that I like and use, but that can also lead to confusion if we don’t further clarify what we mean: “A life spent making mistakes is not only most honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing” – George Bernard Shaw “It is well to cultivate a friendly feeling towards error, to treat it as a companion inseparable from our lives, as something having a purpose which it truly has.” – Maria Montessori These constructive quotes communicate that mistakes are desirable, which is a positive message and part of what we want students to learn. An appreciation of mistakes helps us overcome our fear of making them, enabling us to take risks. But we also want students to understand what kinds of mistakes are most useful and how to most learn from them.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Is It O.K. to Kill Cyclists?

EVERYBODY who knows me knows that I love cycling and that I’m also completely freaked out by it. I got into the sport for middle-aged reasons: fat; creaky knees; the delusional vanity of tight shorts.

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Registering for a triathlon, I took my first ride in decades. Wind in my hair, smile on my face, I decided instantly that I would bike everywhere like all those beautiful hipster kids on fixies. Within minutes, however, I watched an S.U.V. hit another cyclist, and then I got my own front wheel stuck in a streetcar track, sending me to the pavement.

I made it home alive and bought a stationary bike trainer and workout DVDs with the ex-pro Robbie Ventura guiding virtual rides on Wisconsin farm roads, so that I could sweat safely in my California basement. Then I called my buddy Russ, one of 13,500 daily bike commuters in Washington, D.C. Russ swore cycling was harmless but confessed to awakening recently in a Level 4 trauma center, having been hit by a car he could not remember. Still, Russ insisted I could avoid harm by assuming that every driver was “a mouth-breathing drug addict with a murderous hatred for cyclists.”

To access the full story, click here.

10. The Curious Case of the Antidepressant, Anti-Anxiety Backyard Garden Gardening is my Prozac. The time I dedicate to training tomato vines or hacking at berry bushes seems to help me stave off feelings of sadness or dread and calm the chatter in my mind. My vegetable beds have even buoyed me through more acute stressors, such as my medical internship, my daughter’s departure for college, and a loved one’s cancer treatment. I’m not alone in appreciating the antidepressant and anti-anxiety effects of gardening—countless blogs are dedicated to this very subject, and a rash of new studies has documented that spending time around greenery can lead to improved mental health.

The idea that microbes in our environment might impact our health was not new to me. It’s wellestablished that the microbes in soil enhance the nutritional value of food and, as found in studies of farm children in Bavaria and among the Indiana Amish, improve immune function. (Researchers were finding that exposure to a diversity of microbes early in life led to fewer allergies.) But garden microbes acting as mood enhancers—well, this was news to me.“How does this work?” I asked Jill Litt several years ago when I first became interested in what I call gardening’s “bio-euphoric” effect and was wondering whether to prescribe this activity to my depressed patients. Litt, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Public Health, was studying gardening’s impact on a variety of health outcomes—including mood disorders. She rattled off a list of possible explanations, including that gardens create community, encourage physical activity, offer a bounty of nutrient-rich food, and expose one to Vitamin D-producing sunshine, which helps regulate serotonin, the “happiness” neurotransmitter. But then Litt surprised me by adding, “Also there are the microbes themselves. We have no idea what they are doing.”

To access the full story, click here.

11. The Biggest And Boldest Ideas For How To Stop Rising Inequality As inequality has grown over the last several decades, the United States has become a nation where a few are making it, and the many are being left behind. Poverty and elite wealth are in. The working middle class is out. From Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter to the improbable celebrity of economist Thomas Piketty and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, there’s a deepening consensus that this trend isn’t sustainable—not if America is to stay a thriving, democratic, and globally-competitive nation. President Obama calls growing inequality "defining challenge of our time."

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Talk about the problem of rising inequality is getting louder, but at Co.Exist, we like to focus mostly on what can be done about it. This week, we’re presenting stories that, taken together, offer an indepth discussion of how to achieve a more fair society, one in which a person born at the bottom isn’t doomed there for life. These ideas cover topics such as how college can be made more affordable and neighborhoods can be less segregated, and more radical ideas, like a universal basic income for all.

To access the full story, click here.

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