Monday Mailing - January 4, 2021

RARE Monday Mailing Year 27 | Issue 16 04 January 2021 1.

Quote of the Week:

2.

“In 2021, resiliency, character, and engagement will all matter more than ever. Throw in courage, cleverness, caring, a commitment to justice for all people, and an eagerness to engage with the unclear and indefinite and then, folks, we’ll be getting somewhere.”

- Paul Michelman

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

1.

Oregon Fast Fact There are about 463 glaciers or perennial snowfields in Oregon (35 of them named), covering an area of about 42.5 square kilometers.

More info.

Rural Connections: Maupin’s Publicly Owned Fiber-Optic Network Has Made COVID-19 Challenges More Manageable Getting COVID-19 Vaccines to Rural Americans is Harder Than it Looks – But There Are Ways to Lift the Barriers For the First Time in Years, Chinook Salmon Spawn in Upper Columbia River System Could Spotted Owls Benefit from Forest Fires?

Nine Leadership Lessons 2020 Gave Us Single-Issue Decisions Are Over. Let’s Bring Water and Land Back Together.

Timber Tax Cuts Cost Oregon Towns Millions. Then ClearCuts Polluted Their Water and Drove Up Its Price Filling the Void: The Growth of Wind and Solar Industries Brings Critical Source of Revenue and Jobs to Rural Counties Gov. Kate Brown Wants Oregon Kids Back on Campus Feb. 15, but Many Teachers Won’t Be Vaccinated By Then (Katie McFall) PODCAST: No, Revitalizing Rural America Isn’t a Lost Cause. But the Way You’re Thinking About It Might Be. (Lydia Ivanovic)

Rural Connections: Maupin’s Publicly Owned Fiber-Optic Network Has Made COVID-19 Challenges More Manageable Oregon Business Lynne Ewing, mayor of the 430-resident town of Maupin, saw a lot more faces this year than usual. Located by the Deschutes River in Central Oregon, Maupin is known for summer sports like fishing and whitewater rafting. Nearly one in three residences are vacation homes, though they were mostly full this year as workers fled the cities – something that would not have been possible without the town’s new, publicly owned fiber-optic internet connection.

The network is the result of a four-year collaboration between the city, telecommunications company LS Networks, Hood River internet provider Gorge.net, QLife, a RARE AmeriCorps Program Monday Mailing | Page 1 of 6

government agency that promotes fiber-optic network solutions, Google and the Gorge Health Council.

It was not all smooth sailing. The state had to contribute nearly $1 million to the project, double its projected investment, after the initial contribution proved insufficient. Now Maupin has one of the fastest, most financially competitive internet speeds in the state.

Read the full story.

2. Getting COVID-19 Vaccines to Rural Americans is Harder Than it Looks – But There Are Ways to Lift the Barriers The Conversation The enormous job of vaccinating the nation is underway, but for rural Americans, getting a COVID-19 vaccine becomes harder the farther they are from urban centers.

The current vaccines’ cold storage requirements and shipping rules mean many rural hospitals can’t serve as vaccination distribution hubs. That can leave rural residents – about 20% of the U.S. population in all – traveling long distances, if they’re able to travel at all.

Getting the word to rural residents about when they can be vaccinated isn’t easy either, and the extraordinary amount of misinformation downplaying the risk of the coronavirus this past year has had an impact on rural residents’ willingness to get the vaccine.

Read the full story.

3. For First Time in Years, Chinook Salmon Spawn in Upper Columbia River System The Oregonian For the first time in more than a generation, chinook salmon have spawned in the upper Columbia River system.

Colville Tribal biologists counted 36 redds, a gravely nest where female salmon lay eggs, along an 8-mile stretch of the Sanpoil River, a tributary of the Columbia, in September, the Spokesman Review-Journal reported.

“I was shocked at first, then I was just overcome with complete joy,” said Crystal Conant, a Colville Tribal member from the Arrow Lakes and SanPoil bands. “I don’t know that I have the right words to even explain the happiness and the healing.”

Read the full story.

4. Could Spotted Owls Benefit from Forest Fires?

Penn State It may seem counterintuitive, but forest fires are actually beneficial to spotted owls, according to Penn State biologist Derek Lee. RARE AmeriCorps Program Monday Mailing | Page 2 of 6

Lee analyzed the results from every published scientific study about the effects of wildfire on the threatened birds, summarizing his results in a paper published in 2018 in the journal Ecosphere. His results have important implications for management of forests inhabited by spotted owls, which assumes that fire is a major threat to the owls.

In a follow-up paper published this week in Ecosphere, Lee, an associate research professor of biology, responded to several criticisms of his 2018 paper. After reanalyzing the data according to suggestions, he came to the same conclusions: Wildfires either have no effect or a positive effect on most parameters that researchers have studied, suggesting that current conservation forest management practices critically need to be updated.

Read the full story.

5. Nine Leadership Lessons 2020 Gave Us MIT Sloan Management Review As we approach these final days of 2020, a year that has tested our society like few others in recent memory, it’s safe to say that many people are looking forward to putting this year behind them. However, 2020 has also shed light on so many systemic issues facing individuals and companies across the globe that we would be remiss if we didn’t reflect on the lessons that we can take into the future.

With that in mind, we reached out to MIT Sloan Management Review contributors who study leadership up close with the following question: What lessons can managers take from 2020 and put into practice in the coming year?

Given their diverse research experience and backgrounds, our authors were able to offer numerous insights for how leaders at all levels in an organization can commit to caring, foster supportive work cultures, and forge new paths in 2021.

Read the full story.

6. Single-Issue Decisions Are Over. Let’s Bring Water and Land Back Together.

Water Foundation Water planning and land use planning in the US have too often been separate activities for local, state, and federal governments. In a climate crisis that is hitting people of color first and worst, we are living with the consequences of bureaucratic systems based in structural inequity and decision-making that has little practice in cross-issue collaboration.

In the western US, more dangerous wildfires are scorching the ground and destroying vegetation that keeps soil in place. Without this natural erosion control, rivers – the largest source of US drinking water – are facing decades of pollution problems.

RARE AmeriCorps Program Monday Mailing | Page 3 of 6

In Texas, Hilton Kelley, whose organization is currently on the frontlines of Hurricane Laura response, explains why Black communities are more likely to live in flood-prone areas: “The only options that were left for us when it comes to residence and where we could live, were those low lying areas. That’s where we were forced to live, because all the other communities were basically marginalized and pushing us away by various means, through violence, through racial intimidation, and through the KKK organization.”

In Madera, CA, a family recently shared with the Fresno Bee their shock at seeing a brand new irrigation well and almond orchard in the middle of the state’s record-setting drought.

Next door to the orchard, residents’ drinking water wells dried up.

Read the full story.

7. Timber Tax Cuts Cost Oregon Towns Millions. Then Clear-Cuts Polluted Their Water and Drove Up Its Price.

Oregon Public Broadcasting On a damp night in November 2019, dozens of residents packed into the local firehouse in Corbett, a town about 30 miles outside of Portland. Water manager Jeff Busto told the crowd that logging had devastated a creek that provided part of the town’s drinking water supply.

A timber company had clear-cut thousands of trees along the creek, leaving only a thin strip standing between the town’s drinking water and recently flattened land strewn with debris. A single row of trees was left on either side to protect it from mud, herbicides and summer sun. After many of those trees were bowled over by wind, the creek flow dropped so low that the town could no longer get water.

As a result, Corbett now had only one creek supplying drinking water for more than 3,000 residents. If a wildfire or more logging compromised the remaining creek, the town’s taps could run dry in as little as three days, Busto said.

“I’m really seriously concerned about the future of this community,” Busto told the crowd.

“There are places all over the world that lose their water source and they lose their town. If you guys don’t have water coming out of your tap, you’re not going to be able to live here.”

Read the full story.

8. Filling the Void: The Growth of Wind and Solar Industries Brings Critical Source of Revenue and Jobs to Rural Counties Oregon Business Driving south on Highway 19 from Arlington on the Columbia River, the road climbs steadily through rolling hills. After only a few miles, the road reaches the Columbia plateau, where dryland wheat farms stretch as far as the eye can see.

RARE AmeriCorps Program Monday Mailing | Page 4 of 6

Marion Weatherford owns a wheat farm on the plateau close to where his family has been farming for five generations. “Our great-great-grandfather came over on the Oregon Trail when he was 16, in 1860,” Weatherford says. In 1881 he started farming wheat.

Weatherford and his two brothers still grow wheat. “It’s arid with very little rainfall. About the only thing you can grow out here is dryland wheat, or raise livestock,” Weatherford says.

All three of them have off-farm jobs to pay the bills and keep the farm going. “It takes a lot of land to be profitable enough to support a family,” he says.

But now he and his brothers have a new source of income. In 2019 Avangrid Renewables brought the 201-megawatt Montague wind farm online, and 13 of the project’s wind turbines are located on Weatherford’s land. He is not sure how much he will earn in royalties just yet, but he and his brothers hope the wind project will pay them enough to allow one of them to return to farming full-time.

Read the full story.

9. Gov. Kate Brown Wants Oregon Kids Back on Campus Feb. 15, but Many Teachers Won’t Be Vaccinated By Then Oregon Public Broadcasting Two days before Christmas, Gov. Kate Brown pressed state agencies and school leaders to prioritize restoring in-person learning for more school children in the first several weeks of 2021. She called reducing the spread of COVID-19 and a safe return to campuses “the greatest gift we can give to Oregon’s children this holiday season.”

As she spelled out several new policies, including changing mandatory COVID-19 metrics into advice districts could consider rather than adhere to, Brown set a Feb. 15 goal for schools “to return students to in-person instruction, especially elementary students.”

But schools that meet that target date will likely reopen before teachers and other key campus staff have been vaccinated against the virus.

That reality is causing debate among educators and local leaders and more uncertainty for parents and students.

Read the full story.

RARE AmeriCorps Program Monday Mailing | Page 5 of 6

10. PODCAST – No, Revitalizing Rural American Isn’t a Lost Cause. But the Way You’re Thinking About It Might Be. Upzoned “There are powerful forces behind the relative and in some cases absolute economic decline of rural America — and the truth is that nobody knows how to reverse those forces.”

That’s the main takeaway (and the single biggest bummer-sentence) of a recent New York Times column from Paul Krugman, entitled “Getting Real About Rural America.” And in many ways, he’s exactly right.

When it comes to their economic prospects, at least, rural towns have been left behind, not just by global economic trends that have made food production a global enterprise, but by state and local leaders who struggle to figure out what to do with their agrarian and former-farming communities. Jobs are scarce, but no global company wants to set up shop in the middle of a corn field. That collaborative spark that creates enduring home-grown businesses can be a challenge when neighbors, by design, live acres apart from one another, and when even county seats often don’t have the population to support universities and other hubs of innovation. We could pump federal resources into these places, but as Krugman points out, comparable programs in other countries have failed, even with universal healthcare, childcare, and robust infrastructure funding a virtual nonissue.

Listen to the full story.

RARE AmeriCorps Program Monday Mailing | Page 6 of 6