Monday Mailing 010620

Monday Mailing

Year 26 • Issue 17 6 January 2020 1. The Rise of the Rural Creative Class (Emily Bradley) 2. Forest Service Wilderness Fee Plan Gets Negative Comments (Katie McFall) 3. Foraging, and Forging, Connections in Cities 4. Where Does ‘The West’ Begin?

5. In Rural Areas Without Pain Or Addiction Specialists, Family Doctors Fill In The Gaps (Katie McFall) 6. Proposed Clean Water Act Changes Will Mean Uncertainty, Loss Of Protections For Arizona Waterways 7. World’s Second-Largest Ferry Operator Switching From Diesel to Batteries 8. Oregon Coastal Towns Confront A Fate Tied To Antarctica's Melting Glaciers 9. Insights & Impact: Disaster Response - From Relief to Resiliency 10. WEBINAR – New Discoveries and New Work: Jeff Speck and Jarrett Walker Explore Lessons Learned from Walkable City and Human Transit

1. The Rise of the Rural Creative Class

Quote of the Week:

What a wonderful thought it is that some of the best days of our lives haven't even happened yet.

- Anne Frank

Oregon Fast Fact #20

In 1880 a sea cave was discovered near what is now known as Florence. Sea Lion Caves is known to be the largest sea cave in the world.

One of the most persistent myths in America today is that urban areas are innovative and rural areas are not. While it is overwhelmingly clear that innovation and creativity tend to cluster in a small number of cities and metropolitan areas, it’s a big mistake to think that they somehow skip over rural America.

A series of studies from Tim Wojan and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service documents the drivers of rural innovation. Their findings draw on a variety of data sets, including a large-scale survey that compares innovation in urban and rural areas called the Rural Establishment Innovation Survey (REIS). This is based on some 11,000 business establishments with at least five paid employees in tradable industries—that is, sectors that produce goods and services that are or could be traded internationally—in rural (or non-metro) and urban (metro) areas.

The survey divides businesses into three main groups. Roughly 30 percent of firms are substantive innovators, launching new products and services, making data-driven decisions, and creating intellectual property worth protecting; another 33 percent are nominal innovators who engage in more incremental improvement of their products and processes; and 38 percent show little or no evidence of innovation, so are considered to be non-innovators.

The first table below charts this breakdown for rural and urban areas. Establishments in urban areas are more innovative, but not

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by much. Roughly 20 percent of rural firms are substantive innovators, compared to 30 percent of firms in urban areas.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Forest Service Wilderness Fee Plan Gets Negative Comments

SALEM — A plan that would require purchasing a permit before entering three of Oregon’s most popular wilderness areas has received a largely negative response.

The Statesman-Journal reports that more than 13,700 comments were submitted on a proposal to charge $4 to $11 per day to enter the Three Sisters, Mount Jefferson and Mount Washington wilderness areas beginning in 2020.

The comments, which came from across the country, echo the idea that while action is needed to combat overcrowding and garbage on wilderness trails, the proposal is too costly and restrictive.

“There is something amiss when an American citizen has to pay a fee to hike on their lands, which are really our birthright, not a commodity to be ‘sold,'" said George Nickus, executive director of Wilderness Watch.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Foraging, and Forging, Connections in Cities

Wildfires, climate change, invasive species, poor air quality and hunger are big-picture structural issues that multiple cities contend with every day. At the community level are public-health challenges such as high rates of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease, especially among the underserved and historically marginalized.

Such a wide range of problems seems not to point to a single solution. Yet in cities across the U.S., and indeed around the world, people are successfully addressing these issues, to varying degrees, with a single, ancient practice: Foraging.

No matter where your ancestors came from, chances are they foraged for food up until 100 or 150 years ago. This shared heritage of foraging — the way people have sourced their food, all over the world, for millennia — has been nearly extinguished in just a few generations.

Today, children are taught little about their natural environment, let alone how to forage for food. What has replaced it? How to get good deals at the supermarket. What holidays are best for buying which consumer goods. In Detroit, for example, children commonly ask each other, “Which gas station does your mommy shop at?” when it comes to food shopping. Kids elsewhere might learn where to find the best pizzeria or sushi restaurant. In other communities, lining up at a local food pantry or soup kitchen, or learning how to apply for SNAP benefits, may be the rite of passage.

To access the full story, click here.

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4. Where Does ‘The West’ Begin?

On a warm Saturday afternoon in Fort Worth, Texas, half a dozen cowboys got ready to shoot each other. The Brodies, a bank-robbing gang on the lam from the Waco jail, had returned to Fort Worth’s historic Stockyards to exact revenge on the folks that put them away: the town marshal and his dim-witted deputy. It was four against two, and the gunfighters stood a few yards apart, ready to draw.

“Marshal, I think they all want to know what you have planned to do about this,” squealed the deputy.

“Me?” replied the marshal. “We — as in me and you — are going to honor the Code of the West.”

The men squared up and reached for their revolvers. The leather on their gloves creaked as they tightened their grips on their guns. Their spurs tinkled as they dug their heels into the brick.

“Wait a minute!” cried the deputy – marking the sixth time the shoot-out paused for comic relief. “Code of the West? Is that the one where I gotta die with my boots off? Or die with my boots on?”

“Boots on, boots off, it don’t matter to us,” said one of the Brodies. “Either way: You gotta die.”

To access the full story, click here.

5. In Rural Areas Without Pain Or Addiction Specialists, Family Doctors Fill In The Gaps Dr. Angela Gatzke-Plamann didn't fully grasp her community's opioid crisis until one desperate patient called on a Friday afternoon in 2016.

"He was in complete crisis because he was admitting to me that he had lost control of his use of opioids," recalls Gatzke-Plamann.

The patient had used opioids for several years for what Gatzke-Plamann calls "a very painful condition." But a urine screening one week earlier had revealed heroin and morphine in his system as well. He denied any misuse that day. Now he was not only admitting it, but asking for help.

Gatzke-Plamann is the only full-time family physician in the central Wisconsin village of Necedah, population 916. She wanted to help but had no resources to offer. She and the patient started searching the Internet while still on the phone, trying to find somewhere nearby that could help. No luck.

Here was a patient with a family and job who spiraled into addiction because of doctorprescribed pain pills, yet the community's bare-bones health system left him on his own to find treatment — which he later did, 65 miles away. If that situation was going to change in Necedah, it was up to Gatzke-Plamann.

To access the full story, click here.

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6. Proposed Clean Water Act Changes Will Mean Uncertainty, Loss Of Protections For Arizona Waterways Since 1972, the Clean Water Act has been one the nation's bedrock environmental laws intended to protect common resources — like water, air, and wildlife.

"The Clean Water Act basically says if you're going to pollute water subject to jurisdiction you have to get one kind of permit, and if you're going to fill it, you have to get another kind of permit," said Justin Pidot, an environmental law professor at the University of Arizona.

He said litigation over jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act — essentially which waters the regulations apply to — has been going on for years.

"No one thinks that the bird bath or swimming pool is a waterway that is subject to federal jurisdiction, everyone agrees that the Mississippi River is, and where do we draw the line in between?" Pidot said.

And in Arizona, most of our waterways fall into that gray area.

To access the full story, click here.

7. World’s Second-Largest Ferry Operator Switching From Diesel to Batteries

Washington State Ferries, which runs the second-largest ferry system in the world, is switching from diesel to batteries amid a growing trend toward electrification in shipping.

Ian Sterling, public information officer for Washington State Ferries, said the move would cut the cost and pollution caused by the current annual consumption of almost 20 million gallons of diesel across a fleet of 22 vessels ferrying 25 million people a year.

The government-owned ferry operator’s annual fuel consumption is on par with that of a "midsize airline,” he said, making it the state’s biggest diesel polluter.

Washington State Ferries is among the bodies mandated to strive for zero emissions under legislation introduced by state governor Jay Inslee, said Sterling. But the switch to batteries is "not just because the governor said [to do] it."

“This is a good idea because it quiets the boats [while] obviously removing tons of diesel fuel emissions. But even if you’re not an environmentalist, this is a good idea for the taxpayer because we expect it to pay for itself relatively quickly, based on the price of fuel. It saves millions of dollars annually.”

Washington State Ferries had looked at using hybrid or liquid natural-gas-powered vessels as far back as around 2012, said Sterling, but found the technology wasn’t mature enough. Now, improvements in battery technology coming out of the automotive sector are prompting a second look.

To access the full story, click here.

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8. Oregon Coastal Towns Confront A Fate Tied To Antarctica's Melting Glaciers

For marina owner Jim Nielson, occasional floods are the price you pay for shorefront property on the Oregon Coast.

His shop, the Wheeler Marina, sits in an estuary where the Nehalem River opens into the eponymous bay. It’s sheltered from Pacific waves by a narrow spit of sand dunes. Stacks of colorful kayaks border the dirt parking lot. An aging black lab greets visitors’ pets before escorting them up the stairs to the boat rental and tackle shop, which takes up the second floor of the old wooden building.

Nielson has owned and operated the shop with his wife Margie for 40 years. He thinks it’s the most low-lying property in Wheeler, and for a long time, flooding was a way of life.

“The wife and I would get out of bed, put on our waders, and start our day,” he said.

After a particularly devastating flood hit the region, the couple used money provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to raise their building by four feet. Now it doesn’t flood anymore. But in the coming decades, that might change.

Human-produced greenhouses gases like carbon dioxide are wrapping the earth in a heattrapping blanket, causing the earth – and its oceans – to warm. And scientists agree that it’s making sea levels rise. The question is: How much is it going to rise, and how fast?

To access the full story, click here.

9. Insights & Impact: Disaster Response - From Relief to Resiliency

At Common Impact, we believe that a company's strongest philanthropic asset is the talents, know-how and passions of its people. Through our nearly 20 years of experience, we have had a front-row seat to the swiftly changing corporate social responsibility landscape. We’ve watched companies move from viewing community engagement as a compliance function to what is now a mandate for businesses to be true, integrated community actors. In response to this changing landscape, we are launching Insights & Impact, a new annual report that seeks to translate big ideas into action through skilled volunteerism.

Our inaugural report focuses on an issue that is increasingly devastating our communities: natural and man-made disasters.

2017 brought the highest costs on record for U.S. weather and climate disasters, exceeding $306 billion. Man-made disasters such as mass shootings, the expanding lead water crises, the detention of immigrant communities on the southern U.S. border and the deepening polarization of our political climate further demonstrate the acute need for communities to respond immediately and collaboratively.

The impact of these crises increasingly demands the private sector’s attention. Still, companies are struggling to understand the best role they can play as they respond to the acute needs brought on by environmental and man-made catastrophe. This past year we spoke with dozens of disaster experts to understand how skills-based volunteerism can best support communities in preparing for and recovering from the escalating risks of these crises.

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Common Impact's report Insights & Impact: Disaster Response - From Relief to Resiliency outlines how companies can leverage skills-based volunteerism to help communities recover from and prepare for the next disaster more effectively.

For those inspired to take action, Common Impact also supports companies in designing, launching and scaling their pro bono disaster resiliency programming.

To access the full report, click here.

10. WEBINAR – New Discoveries and New Work: Jeff Speck and Jarrett Walker Explore

Lessons Learned from Walkable City and Human Transit (Friday, January 17th 10 AM PST to 11:30 AM PST)

Walkable City and Human Transit, both published in 2012, are two of the most important planning books of the past decade. A lot has happened since 2012, however, and authors Jeff Speck and Jarrett Walker have had ample opportunities since then to put their ideas to work, evaluate the outcomes and refine their positions.

Join the Smart Growth Network and the Maryland Department of Planning at 10 AM Friday, January 17 as they share their recent insights, projects on the boards, and take part in what promises to be a lively conversation with each other and webinar participants. Have your questions ready!

To register for the webinar, click here.

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