RARE Monday Mailing Year 27 | Issue 13 14 December 2020 1.
Quote of the Week:
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“The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.” - Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Oregon Fast Fact Oregonian, Chris Klug, won the bronze medal in Giant Slalom in snowboarding in 2002 and became the first organ transplant recipient in history to win an Olympic medal. More info.
Anatomy of a Forest Project: Why Planning to Prevent Massive Wildfires Takes Years How Scientists Tracked Down a Mass Killer (of Salmon) (Abigail Blinn) Migration to Booming ‘Zoom Towns’ in Pacific Northwest Sends Home Prices into Overdrive (Katie McFall) The Latest COVID-19 Surge is Here, and Many Oregon Hospitals are Full (Katie McFall) Decolonizing the Settler City New American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates for the First Time Provide Data on Three Time Periods That Don’t Overlap Deadline to Spend COVID-19 Relief Funds has Tribal Nations on Edge Jennifer Rangel: Creating Bilingual Cartoons to Teach Zoning 101 DTNA Commits to Carbon Neutral Vehicle Production by 2025; Portland Truck Manufacturing Plant Will be First to Meet Target in 2020 Pandemic Benefits Local Ranchers
Anatomy of a Forest Project: Why Planning to Prevent Massive Wildfires Takes Years Capital Press The 16,000 acres of trees incinerated in the 2003 Davis Fire were a call to action for Deschutes National Forest managers. The wide-ranging destruction caused by the wildfire convinced them that if they were going to prevent a repeat in the future, they’d have to go big. That fire also destroyed more than 3,700 acres of Northern spotted owl habitat, highlighting a lethal hazard faced by the threatened species despite strict logging restrictions imposed on the “late successional reserve” stands, or LSR, commonly referred to as old growth forests.
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“The team realized that just doing a small area here and there won’t take care of the entire LSR,” said Joseph Bowles, a district silviculturist in the national forest. Read the full story.
2. How Scientists Tracked Down a Mass Killer (of Salmon) The New York Times The salmon were dying and nobody knew why. About 20 years ago, ambitious restoration projects had brought coho salmon back to urban creeks in the Seattle area. But after it rained, the fish would display strange behaviors: listing to one side, rolling over, swimming in circles. Within hours they would die — before spawning, taking the next generation with them. In some streams, up to 90 percent of coho salmon were lost. “To be running into these sick fish was fairly astonishing,” said Jenifer McIntyre, now a toxicologist and professor at Washington State University who is part of a team that, years later, has finally solved the mystery of the dying salmon around Puget Sound. “In those early years, we debated intensely, what could be the cause of this?” Read the full story.
3. Migration to Booming ‘Zoom Towns’ in Pacific Northwest Sends Home Prices into Overdrive Oregon Public Broadcasting You can add a new term to your lexicon: “Zoom towns.” These are scenic places experiencing a surge of house hunters. Booming demand comes from workers freed by the pandemic to work from home long term. One such place where the pandemic has super-charged an already hot real estate market is Bend, Oregon. "I think 'Zoom town' very accurately captures the experience that we're having right now," said Brian Ladd, a principal broker with Cascade Sotheby's International Realty in Bend. "For anyone that had interest in moving to a town like ours, that plan was greatly accelerated because of COVID," Ladd said in an interview over Zoom, of course. "When they were able to work remotely, or they were forced to work remotely, all of a sudden it became an option." Read the full story.
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4. The Latest COVID-19 Surge is Here, and Many Oregon Hospitals are Full Oregon Public Broadcasting For months, Oregon seemed to be a national outlier, spared the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. But in the past several weeks, a surge in seriously ill COVID-19 patients have arrived in emergency rooms from Portland to Medford to Bend, pushing hospital bed occupancy in some regions towards 90% and straining the health system. “For much of the last four months, we were oscillating between roughly two and eight patients requiring hospitalization with COVID-19 disease. Today we have 49 patients,” said Dr. Jeff Absalon, the chief physician executive for the St. Charles Health System, which operates four hospitals in the Bend region. “We honestly expect that the numbers are likely to go higher than they are, and this is by far the most number of patients we have seen in the pandemic.” Read the full story.
5. Decolonizing the Settler City Planetizen This year witnessed the timely launch, against the backdrop of dramatic anti-racism insurgencies, of a new journal: the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and the City (JREC). The journal's editors rightly identify race and ethnicity as concepts that are fundamental to understanding cities today. JREC is dedicated to exploring the complex relationships between race, ethnicity, and other identities as they are materially expressed in urban space. The journal aims to fully confront the "ugly realities" of discrimination, civil rights violations, and unequal access to opportunity in cities at home and abroad. Highlighting JREC’s inaugural issue is a very important review article by Janice Barry and Julian Agyeman about urban planning and placemaking in "settler-colonial" cities of the United States. Settler-colonial cities are those in which native or indigenous populations have been displaced, dispossessed, and effectively disappeared from processes of urban development. Colonialist (i.e., Eurocentric, monocultural) planning and design paradigms have rendered indigenous peoples invisible except where their histories are marked by street names, public art and imagery, and performances such as Indian markets and powwows. In other words, natives are typically reduced to subjects of display or "spectacle," often packaged for consumption by settler society. Barry and Agyeman argue that modern planners have been more focused on what cities can become than on who belongs in them. They usefully synthesize literature calling for the meaningful involvement of native peoples in "co-producing" the city. They urge "deepening the pot" of planning ideas that can make cities more equitable and inclusive. Most importantly, they highlight
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the critical need for urban spaces and places that facilitate expression of indigenous knowledges, practices, and relationships. Read the full story.
6. New American Community Survey 5-Year Estimate for the First Time Provide Data and Three Time Periods That Don’t Overlap United States Census Bureau The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), launched in 2005, was designed to keep pace with the nation’s increasing demand for timely and relevant data about the U.S. population and housing characteristics. Today, the release of the 2015-2019 ACS 5-year estimates marks an important milestone. We now have three sets of 5-year estimates (2005-2009, 2010-2014, and 2015-2019) that do not overlap, which provide even more data for examining trends at the local level. This is another step in fulfilling the vision for the ACS to provide government, businesses and the general public with more frequent data than the once-a-decade decennial census. The ACS is an annual survey of about 3.5 million addresses that provides the United States and Puerto Rico with critical information on a wide range of over 40 topics every year. The ACS data cover social, economic, housing and demographic characteristics. They allow federal and state government, businesses, researchers, communities and others to understand changes in specific geographies and population groups. That, in turn, helps them plan for the future using current, reliable, and comparable data. Read the full story.
7. Deadline to Spend COVID-19 Relief Funds Has Tribal Nations on Edge Underscore While many people are waiting anxiously for 2020 – a year rife with disasters and vitriol – to finally end, Oregon’s tribal governments are anxious about what will happen to COVID19 relief funds when 2021 arrives. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Department of the Treasury has allocated $200 million in direct payments to Oregon tribal governments this year. That money came with conditions, one of the most pressing being that it must be spent by year’s end. With just weeks left before the Dec. 30 deadline, tribes are facing a dilemma. Should they hold onto their COVID-19 relief money to fund services after the new year and hope
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Congress grants an extension? Or should they spend the money now, as the law requires, and risk not being able to fund services in 2021? “Hopefully the date is going to be extended,” says Stephanie Watkins, acting CEO and director of human services for the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians. The small tribe received $11 million from the federal CARES Act of 2020 this year. Read the full story.
8. Jennifer Rangel: Creating Bilingual Cartoons to Teach Zoning 101 Salud America! “Ever wondered why your neighborhood looks how it does?” Jennifer Rangel once asked herself this question. To find an answer, Rangel got a master’s degree in urban planning. Along the way, this Latina planner learned that discriminatory urban planning practices, like the zoning of land, had been used for white advantage for over a century, segregating communities and forging inequities in health and wealth among Latinos and other people of color. Rangel wanted to share what she learned. So she helped create workshops─then bilingual animated videos─to train neighborhood leaders, social workers, and others about zoning and how to get involved in zoning changes. “Understanding zoning is a critical step for residents as they try to undo previous harms and to remedy policies and practices that perpetuate the harmful effects of discrimination and segregation” Rangel wrote on the Inclusive Communities Project website. Read the full story.
9. DTNA Commits to Carbon Neutral Vehicle Production by 2025; Portland Truck Manufacturing Plant will be First to Meet Target in 2020 Automotive World Daimler Trucks North America (DTNA) today announced that its Portland truck manufacturing plant is setting the course for the company’s “green” production in the U.S. by achieving carbon neutral production in 2020 with reduced energy consumption and the offset of on-site emissions. DTNA further plans to incorporate CO₂-neutral production at all of its remaining truck manufacturing plants by 2025. RARE AmeriCorps Program Monday Mailing | Page 5 of 6
The Portland plant will be the first vehicle manufacturing plant to achieve CO₂-neutral production in the global Daimler Trucks network. DTNA is making significant investment in the facility as it prepares for production of the Freightliner eCascadia and Freightliner eM2, the company’s first battery-electric medium- and heavy-duty trucks planned for the start of series production in 2022. Read the full story.
10. Pandemic Benefits Local Ranchers Oregon Business On April 1, Rick Martson, owner of Martson Farm in Molalla, had nine refrigerators full of beef destined for market. By the end of the month, he was sold out and already had a long waiting list. Martson has avoided the downward spiral affecting most meat manufacturers. The price of meat continues to rise as cases of COVID-19 increase worldwide. Loss of production for beef is estimated at around 25% compared to this time last year, according to the Research Triangle Institute. Meat industry employees are nearly twice as likely to contract COVID-19 than the national average. Moist and cold factory conditions are the likeliest culprit for the greater levels of exposure. More diverse plant-based options are also a source of meat industry woes. Now competitive with meat in terms of price, plant-based protein products have caused more buyers to try vegan flexitarian diets. More than one in seven households now incorporates plant-based protein into their weekly meals schedule, according to research from the Good Food Institute. Most critically, as restaurants close in record numbers, many meat producers have lost critical buyers. Read the full story.
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