Monday Mailing 112519

Monday Mailing

Year 26 • Issue 12 25 November 2019 1.

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Wine Moguls Destroy Land And Pay Small Fines As Cost Of Business, Say Activists (Katie McFall) A Coffee Crisis Is Brewing And It Could Make Your Morning Joe Less Tasty Why The World Is Running Out Of Sand (Katie McFall) Oregon Population Grows By 41,000, Pushing The State’s Total To Over 4.2 Million People (Katie McFall) The U.S. Natural Gas Boom Is Fueling A Global Plastics Boom A Champion Of The Unplugged, Earth-Conscious Life, Wendell Berry Is Still Ahead Of Us These Girl Scouts Are Saving Wild Bees, One ‘Hotel’ At A Time Think Small, Start Small: Effective Community Planning Strategies Visualizing Place vs. Non-Place WEBINAR – Perfect City: Lessons, Challenges and Pitfalls of the World’s Greatest Cities

1. Wine Moguls Destroy Land And Pay Small Fines As Cost Of Business, Say Activists

Quote of the Week:

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched — they must be felt with the heart."

- Helen Keller

Oregon Fast Fact #50

The Seaside Aquarium was the first facility in the world to successfully breed harbor seals in captivity.

After California wine industry mogul Hugh Reimers illegally destroyed at least 140 acres of forest, meadow and stream in part to make way for new vineyards sometime last winter, according to a report from state investigators, state officials ordered the Krasilsa Pacific Farms manager to repair and mitigate the damage where possible. Sonoma County officials also suggested a $131,060 fine.

But for environmental activists watching the investigation, fines and restoration attempts aren't going to cut it; they want Reimers — an experienced captain of industry whom they say knew better — to face a criminal prosecution, which could lead to a jail sentence.

"We want him to be an example of what you can't do here," says Anna Ransome, founder of a small organization called Friends of Atascadero Wetlands. In August, the group sent a letter to Sonoma County District Attorney Jill Ravich, asking that she prosecute Reimers.

"If winemakers can figure into their budget paying fines and doing minimal restoration work, then what's to stop the next guy from doing the same thing?" Ransome says.

The D.A.'s office did not return requests for comment. Multiple efforts to reach Reimers for comment were unsuccessful. On Nov. 13, a sign posted outside of an address listed for him that appears to be a residence read "Media Keep Out." To access the full story, click here.

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2. A Coffee Crisis Is Brewing And It Could Make Your Morning Joe Less Tasty

Whether it’s a quickly chugged-down morning cup, a lukewarm afternoon jolt from the coffee machine at work, a pumpkin spiced latte in the fall or a specialty cold brew in the summer, coffee has cemented itself as an important ritual in the lives of many Americans.

But what the latest generation of coffee lovers may not know is that the coffee industry is in crisis. Even as we get used to what seems like an ever-expanding range of coffees, this diversity of taste and flavor could disappear. Poverty, the impact of climate change and the spread of disease are driving small coffee farmers out of business ― and leaving your morning brew in the hands of mass producers.

Once diversity is gone, it won’t be replenished. Earlier this year, researchers revealed that 60% of all wild coffee species are under threat of extinction due to deforestation, climate change, and the increasing severity of fungal pathogens and pests.

The result will be consumers waking up in the morning to far less choice, warned Peter Kettler, a senior coffee manager at Fairtrade International, which works to protect the interests of farmers in lower-income countries. That would be a loss, he said. “I think there’s a lot of people today who are looking to coffee for more than just a caffeine delivery service.”

To access the full story, click here.

3. Why The World Is Running Out Of Sand

South African entrepreneur shot dead in September. Two Indian villagers killed in a gun battle in August. A Mexican environmental activist murdered in June.

Though separated by thousands of miles, these killings share an unlikely cause. They are some of the latest casualties in a growing wave of violence sparked by the struggle for one of the 21st Century’s most important, but least appreciated, commodities: ordinary sand.

Trivial though it may seem, sand is a critical ingredient of our lives. It is the primary raw material that modern cities are made from. The concrete used to construct shopping malls, offices, and apartment blocks, along with the asphalt we use to build roads connecting them, are largely just sand and gravel glued together. The glass in every window, windshield, and smart phone screen is made of melted-down sand. And even the silicon chips inside our phones and computers – along with virtually every other piece of electronic equipment in your home – are made from sand.

And where is the problem with that, you might ask? Our planet is covered in it. Huge deserts from the Sahara to Arizona have billowing dunes of the stuff. Beaches on coastlines around the world are lined with sand. We can even buy bags of it at our local hardware shop for a fistful of small change.

To access the full story, click here.

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4. Oregon Population Grows By 41,000, Pushing The State’s Total To Over 4.2 Million People

Oregon seems to remain popular with out-of-towners as new residents fuel the Beaver State’s population growth.

The latest annual population estimate from Portland State University shows 41,000 more people now live in Oregon than last year, bringing the total population to over 4.2 million.

Of those tens of thousands of new Oregonians, 86%, or about 35,000, moved here from somewhere else. That’s far more than the people who entered the state fresh from the womb.

Oregon’s population is aging, the university’s Population Research Center said in a Friday announcement, and birth rates are declining. Only 6,000 more people were born over the last year than died.

The numbers are preliminary and won’t finalized until Dec. 15.

Unsurprisingly, much of the population growth happened in Oregon’s three largest counties – Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas, with 18,000 new people in total. The next three counties on the list were Deschutes, which grew by about 4,000 residents, and Lane and Marion counties, which grew by about 3,800 and 3,700 residents, respectively.

To access the full story, click here.

5. The U.S. Natural Gas Boom Is Fueling A Global Plastics Boom

On a quiet street overlooking Scotland's largest refinery and chemical plant, Kevin Ross surveys the newest outgrowth of the American oil and gas boom.

Since 2016, natural gas from the U.S. has been feeding the Grangemouth petrochemical plant, a vast complex of cooling towers, flaring towers and pipelines. The gas is originally harvested in Western Pennsylvania, sent through a pipeline to Philadelphia, and put on ships across the Atlantic.

"It comes here, is taken off the ships, put into large storage tanks," explains Ross, who's president of the Scottish Plastics and Rubber Association and runs a local plastics testing company.

Natural gas is mostly used for heating homes or fueling power plants. But when it comes out of the ground it contains another key ingredient — ethane, a building block of plastics — that is now fueling another booming industry.

America is producing so much ethane that more than 300 new petrochemical and plastics plants are either planned or are under construction around the U.S. President Trump has touted the economic benefits of this, recently telling workers at a Shell ethane plant in Pennsylvania that "we are reclaiming our noble heritage as a nation of builders."

To access the full story, click here.

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6. A Champion Of The Unplugged, Earth-Conscious Life, Wendell Berry Is Still Ahead Of Us PORT ROYAL, Kentucky — Wendell Berry doesn’t like screens. The 85-year-old writer doesn’t own a TV, computer, or cellphone. If you call the landline at his country home in Port Royal, you won’t reach an answering machine. When he reads this profile, it will be because someone else printed it out. And, if his general approach to life is any indication, he will probably take his time.

It’s virtually impossible to imagine life in the modern world without our technological accessories, but Berry has consistently presented this spartan circumstance as a compelling proposition: An unplugged life, rooted in nature, he has argued, is the key to fulfillment.

As urban farms and tiny homes and movements to unplug proliferate, it’s clear that Wendell Berry is, once again, ahead of us.

Perhaps most known for his 1977 bestselling book, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, the writer and farmer has served as a moral beacon to Americans for half a century, warning of the dangers of consumerism, industrial agriculture, and the dissolution of rural communities. Now, as we face the greatest environmental crisis in history and grapple with deep polarization, his impassioned arguments on subjects ranging from industrial farming to technology have taken on a new urgency.

To access the full story, click here.

7. These Girl Scouts Are Saving Wild Bees, One ‘Hotel’ At A Time

Last month, millions of youth activists around the world took to the streets to fight for their right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and not have to suffer the wrath of the climate crisis.

But that’s not the only way kids are taking climate action into their own hands. In Colorado, the task of saving bees from the consequences of climate change has fallen to the girls who sell us the best cookies. Yes, you heard that right. Over the summer, at a Girl Scout day camp in Denver, Girl Scout troops fashioned tiny homes for wild bees called “bee hotels” to fight the depopulation of bees across the country.

Bee hotels are like birdhouses for wild bees. Since wild bees don’t make honey, they don’t live in hives, but they’re always in need of a suitable habitat. Out in the wild, these bees often nest in holes in fallen logs, dead trees, and broken branches of bushes. But natural habitats can be hard to come by in developed areas, which is where bee hotels come in.

The troops repurposed cardboard boxes, old paper straws, toilet paper rolls, and other materials to create homes for bees in their local community. The project is part of a new initiative called Think Like A Citizen Scientist Journey, in which girls from grades 6 through 12 develop real-world sustainable projects to create change. After some brainstorming and research, the scouts at the day camp chose saving the bees.

To access the full story, click here.

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8. Think Small, Start Small: Effective Community Planning Strategies

In many communities, it can be tough for citizens to map out their desired utopia in planning scenarios. It’s often difficult to see beyond the issues that are at hand.

That’s according to Andrew Howard of Team Better Block, who was recently featured in Episode 304 of our Transforming Cities Podcast. Thinking on a large, grandiose scale when it comes to urban planning can be problematic. Talking about a large trail system to connect the city is great, but what about people who just want a crosswalk in front of their house?

Those challenges are what made Howard’s focal point grow smaller as his career matured.

Rather than looking at entire regions, his view became more granular.

“We started to slowly realize that it's not just making the place but it's how you make it. And that people want to be involved in the creation of place,” he said on the podcast.

Organizations like Team Better Block are using alternatives to the typical design and defend urban planning methods of the past in order to better their communities and make residents a part of those improvements. In many cases, these collaborative community processes do more than traditional planning methods.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Visualizing Place vs. Non-Place

It started with an actual, attention-grabbing point. Then, as is the way of all things Internet, it became a snarky meme. As is also the way of all things Internet, the meme has more to it than meets the eye.

A few years ago, our good friend Steve Mouzon (author of The Original Green) shared this graphic on his blog: a juxtaposition of the Renaissance-era core of Florence, Italy with a single freeway interchange in Atlanta, Georgia. It has made the rounds repeatedly in various urbanist and transportation circles ever since.

Mouzon’s graphic is intended to make a point about the gargantuan amount of land consumed by automobile infrastructure, particularly when it’s intended for high-speed driving. Speed requires wider turn radii, wider lanes, wider medians and shoulders, and buffer space to separate people and buildings from that fast, deadly traffic. The result: the same land area that could accommodate a bustling urban district of tens of thousands (Florence in 1425 had an estimated population of 60,000) is easily consumed by a single interchange.

Supersize that to the scale of a metro area like Atlanta’s, with all of its similar freeways and subsidiary feeder stroads, and you have a place where the actual destinations people want to get to are pushed so far apart by all this road space that it becomes inconceivable to travel between them without a car—necessitating even more land-hogging car infrastructure, in a vicious cycle.

To access the full story, click here.

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10. WEBINAR – Perfect City: Lessons, Challenges and Pitfalls of the World’s Greatest

Cities (Wednesday, December 4, 2019 10:00am-11:30am PST)

How do we maintain a vigorous urban economy? Develop necessary transit systems in real time? Practically address affordable housing? Moderate seemingly ever-widening income gaps?

What kind of a machine, really, is a city? And how can planners create answers to the questions these issues pose?

Join the Smart Growth Network at 10 a.m. Dec. 4, as Joe Berridge, author of Perfect City and a partner at Urban Strategies in Toronto, summarizes a career’s worth of experiences as an urban planner in many of the world’s greatest cities.

In his new book, Berridge focuses on the cities in which he has worked – big cities facing the challenges of modernity and rapid growth such as New York, London, Shanghai, Toronto and Sydney. His conclusions suggest the need for some re-balancing on the relative status accorded by planners to the advice provided by those conflicting demi-gods of urban thinking, Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. And the necessity above all, to enjoy the richness and delight – and the food – of a great city.

To register for the webinar, click here.

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