Monday Mailing December 28, 2020

RARE Monday Mailing Year 27 | Issue 15 28 December 2020

Quote of the Week: “For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.” ― Barry Lopez, About This Life

Oregon Fast Fact Oregon is home to the biggest mushroom on earth. Spanning approximately 2.4 miles in Oregon’s Blue Mountains, the enormous honey fungus is believed to be somewhere between 1900 and 8650 years old.

1. The Post-Pandemic Street 2. Ski Communities Are ‘Getting Crunched On All Sides’ 3. View from the West: A ULI Member Perspective on Wildfires and the Built Environment (Bree Cubrolivic) 4. Wyden, Merkley Keeping Oregon and 2021 in Sight (Katie Fields) 5. After Echo Mountain Complex Fire, Otis Leads Renewal With Small Hands And Huge Hearts 6. The Pandemic Created New Hunters. States Need to Keep Them (Grace Kaplowitz) 7. Cleaning Old Headstones – During Pandemic, Illinois Students Find a Hygienic Way to Study History 8. In Boost for Renewables, Grid-Scale Battery Storage Is on the Rise 9. Oregon Tech Teams Up With Tribes To Save Endangered Fish 10. WEBINAR: Virtual Volunteerism 1. The Post-Pandemic Street Planetizen When restaurant owner Mike Thompson tried to set up an outdoor dining kiosk at his business in Astoria, Queens this summer, he ran into a challenge. His restaurant did not have enough space in the street to accommodate all of his customers. Pedestrians crowded the sidewalk outside his business, sometimes flaunting social distancing requirements. Facing the uncertain future of his business, Mike joined forces with other restaurant owners on Ditmars Boulevard and came up with a plan to temporarily close two blocks over the weekends. To get the plan rolling, the group gathered support from elected officials and coordinated with the New York City's transportation department, fire chief, and transit agency to create more breathing room for both the businesses and residents of Astoria. With an application to the Open Streets: Restaurants program, the group's ground-up community initiative came to fruition, signaling a successful collaboration between city agencies, elected officials, and local stakeholders to quickly adapt to community needs during the pandemic.

Read the full story.

2. Ski Communities Are ‘Getting Crunched On All Sides’

High Country News Mammoth Mountain closed on a stormy day in mid-March last season, but this time it was not a weather-hold. Chairlifts stopped spinning and skiers went home. Though she didn’t know it yet, Rachel RARE AmeriCorps Program Monday Mailing | Page 1 of 5

Rainey had just worked her last shift at the restaurant that has supported her skiing lifestyle for the past 17 years. And that was just the beginning of the economic challenges she would face.

The World Health Organization had declared a global pandemic. The NBA canceled their season and Tom Hanks announced he had tested positive for the coronavirus. Places with ski resorts like Blaine County in Idaho and Gunnison County in Colorado were early hotspots. Most North American ski areas closed their operations indefinitely and in the days that followed, residents sheltered-in-place. Ski towns asked visitors to stay away. Small businesses shuttered.

Read the full story.

3. View from the West: A ULI Member Perspective on Wildfires and the Built Environment

Urban Land Institute Wildfires have always been a part of the U.S. landscape, particularly in the drier Western states. But 2020 stands out, as massive, destructive wildfires—fueled in part by extreme weather and changing climate conditions—have broken records across the region and raised important questions regarding how the real estate industry can help communities thrive despite repeated fires.

These questions, as well as solutions, are explored in Firebreak: Wildfire Resilience Strategies for Real Estate, a new report from the Urban Land Institute Firebreak, published with input over 50 ULI members including myself, plus outside experts as well with support from the Kresge Foundation, shows the increasing awareness among real estate developers, urban planners, and public leaders of the land use drivers of wildfires, their concern about the consequences of these fires, and how they are implementing asset- and community-scale resilience efforts.

Read the full story.

4. Wyden, Merkley Keeping Oregon and 2021 In Sight

Corvallis Advocate Oregon’s U.S. Senators Jeff Merkley—who serves on the Senate Appropriations Committee—and Ron Wyden today announced a wide range of investments that will benefit Oregon and are included in the fiscal year 2021 spending bill that has passed the Senate. The next step is for the president to sign the bill into law.

Taken together, the investments announced by the senators impact virtually all communities in every corner of the state, addressing some of Oregonians’ biggest challenges. The provisions highlighted include only a fraction of those in the omnibus package that benefit Oregon, including health care, education, science and conservation, and more.

“These bills include key investments to create jobs in the woods and reduce wildfire risk. They support stakeholders working on collaborative water solutions so family farms have the irrigation water they need to make it to the next generation. They will create new housing where it’s desperately needed, help modernize infrastructure without burdening ratepayers, support port dredging on the coast, and keep small airports open for business,” Merkley said. “Government is supposed to be how all of us—We RARE AmeriCorps Program Monday Mailing | Page 2 of 5

the People—come together to solve problems and build a better future, and I’m trying to make sure Oregonians’ voices and priorities are reflected in our investment decisions.”

Read the full story.

5. After Echo Mountain Complex Fire, Otis Leads Renewal With Small Hands And Huge Hearts

The Register Guard Ignore the piles of twisted metal and hulking orange-red skeletons of former RVs, and a new visitor to this coastal Lincoln County community may think it's the site of a new suburban neighborhood. Three months ago, this town on the incline up Echo Mountain bore a striking resemblance to fire-bombed European cities at the end of WWII.

In mid-September, a spark ignited at the top of Echo Mountain and Otis was set ablaze. Residents fled, grabbing what personal items they could, as 50 mph coastal gales quickly spread flames. In the end, the Echo Mountain Complex fire was a small, 2,500-acre blip in a massive fire season that saw 1.1 million Oregon acres burn. Even so, it destroyed about half of Otis's 1,241 structures, with 288 homes and 339 structures lost, according to Oregon Emergency Management.

This evisceration destroyed decades of lives in days. Recovery will take years with destruction permanently altering Otis's construction, culture and populace.

Read the full story.

6. The Pandemic Created New Hunters. States Need to Keep Them

The Daily Yonder Conservationists and wildlife officials have spent years trying to stave off the decline of hunting in America. In 2020, they finally saw a glimmer of hope.

“I’ve been working on this issue for 15 years,” said Matt Dunfee, the director of special programs at the Wildlife Management Institute, a national conservation nonprofit that focuses on restoring wildlife populations. “All I needed was a pandemic.”

For decades, the number of hunters—who are mostly older, white males—has steadily dwindled. That’s led to a loss of conservation funding at state wildlife agencies, which largely rely on license sales to support their budgets. But now, unexpectedly, officials in nearly every state are reporting a moderateto-massive spike in hunting in 2020.

“I’d say that the pandemic definitely played a role in getting me out in the woods,” said Senna Redin, a Minnesota resident who harvested a deer this year after hunting for the first time in 2019.

Redin, 20, said he took up duck hunting this fall to fill the free time created by the pandemic, and he was also able to use some time to travel to his family’s old farm in Michigan to hunt deer. He is a college student, but his classes have moved online.

Read the full story.

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7. Cleaning Old Headstones – During Pandemic, Illinois Students Find a Hygienic Way to Study History The Daily Yonder Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, teachers across the country have struggled to provide their students with a quality education while ensuring a safe and healthy learning environment.

In rural Seneca, Illinois, an innovative education program has allowed students to have a safe learning environment while bringing the stories of early pioneers of the community “back to life.”

Agriculture teacher and National Future Farmers of America Organization (FFA) advisor Jeff Maierhofer developed a far-reaching education and community service project for the two 10-member senior agriculture classes at Seneca High School in north-central Illinois. It’s called “Extreme Makeover: Gravestone Edition,” and Maierhofer openly admits this program wouldn’t have happened without the necessity for Covid-19 education restrictions.

While only 70 miles southwest of Chicago, Seneca, with a population of only 2,300 is rural. Located on the Illinois River, Seneca’s early settlers were farmers and Irish immigrants hired to dig the IllinoisMichigan Canal, which connected Lake Michigan with the Mississippi River. The canal and faster railways provided ways to get grain to markets and created a boom to the agrarian community.

Read the full story.

8. In Boost for Renewables, Grid-Scale Battery Storage Is on the Rise

Yale Environment 360 The twin smokestacks of the Moss Landing Power Plant tower over Monterey Bay. Visible for miles along this picturesque stretch of the Northern California coast, the 500-foot-tall pillars crown what was once California’s largest electric power station — a behemoth natural gas-fired generator. Today, as California steadily moves to decarbonize its economy, those stacks are idle and the plant is largely mothballed.

Instead, the site is about to begin a new life as the world’s largest battery, storing excess energy when solar panels and wind farms are producing electricity and feeding it back into the grid when they’re not.

Inside a cavernous turbine building, a 300-megawatt lithium-ion battery is currently being readied for operation, with another 100-megawatt battery to come online in 2021. Together, they will be able to discharge enough electricity to power roughly 300,000 California homes for four hours during evenings, heatwaves, and other times when energy demand outstrips supply, according to project developer Vistra Energy.

Read the full story.

9. Oregon Tech Teams Up With Tribes To Save Endangered Fish

The Other Oregon Oregon Institute of Technology is coordinating with the Klamath Tribes to try to save endangered Lost River and shortnose suckers while using energy efficiencies to power the process.

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Through a partnership with the Klamath Tribes, the school’s Renewable Energy Engineering program has placed two floating “islands” equipped with solar-powered aerators on Upper Klamath Lake, in hopes of generating increased dissolved oxygen in the lake to help the species thrive.

REE graduate student Juan Villarreal, a 27-year-old native of Bakersfield, Calif., has been working on the project since it started in August 2019.

Juvenile suckers are not making it to adulthood, and the project is one of multiple attempts at finding a way to solve that.

“We’ve got these fish out on the lake, they’re very important to the Klamath Tribes,” said Mason Terry, director of the Oregon Renewable Energy Center at Oregon Tech and associate professor of the Electrical Engineering and Renewable Engineering (EERE) programs.

Read the full story.

10. WEBINAR – Virtual Volunteerism

Nonprofit Association of Oregon During this time of limited occasions to engage your dedicated volunteers in person, we’re given an opportunity to think differently and consider ways in which to keep our volunteers active virtually.

In this short webinar, we’ll cover: Are Virtual Volunteers right for your organization?

What kinds of things can they do virtually?

How can you successfully manage volunteers that aren’t on site?

Sign up for the webinar.

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