Monday Mailing
Year 22 • Issue 18 25 January 2016 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
America’s Cities Are Still Too Afraid to Make Driving Unappealing Toolkit for Working with Rural Volunteers Gov. Brown Appeals to Obama for Resolution to Malheur Occupation Should Oregon Counties Be Allowed To Ban GMOs On Their Own? Farmers Push To Repeal 2013 Law. 5 Simple Exercises To Fix The Damage Your Desk Job Does The Dawn of System Leadership A New Metric for Community Resilience Oregon Transportation Safety Planning – Online Open House Bolivia's 2nd-Largest Lake Has Displaced Hundreds, If Not Thousands The Modern Built Environment Richest 62 People As Wealthy As Half of World’s Population, Says Oxfam
1. America’s Cities Are Still Too Afraid to Make Driving Unappealing The morning I wrote this I took public transportation to work. I hopped on the bus around the corner from my house, then the train for a few stops farther. I took mass transit because it was convenient, because my card was already preloaded with the cash that diverts from my paycheck, and because the ride gave me 20 minutes to start the day browsing Twitter.
Quote of the Week: "See every problem as an opportunity to exercise creative energy." ~Stephen R. Covey
Baked into this decision, however, were a number of other nearly subliminal calculations about the alternatives not taken. I did not drive the car (yes, my household has a car) because downtown Washington, D.C., is a hot mess at rush hour, and because parking near the office costs the equivalent of a fancy hamburger a day. I did not bike because it was snowing. (Again.) And I did not walk because the distance was too far. To access the full story, click here.
Oregon Fast Fact: Oregon’s state motto is “Alis volat propriis” (She flies with her own wings)
2. Toolkit for Working with Rural Volunteers This is a toolkit for little places, the ones that don’t have a Volunteer Coordinator or a Development Officer or even a full-time Director, the ones that depend almost exclusively on volunteers. These communities are the sum and substance of both the Appalachian Coal Country Team and the Western Hardrock Watershed Team and it was these rural communities that provided the research base for this project. You will find three basic sections, each of which can provide significant insight and ideas for rural volunteers. The first is Rural Volunteer Statistics, an extensive survey of the volunteers themselves— learn just who our rural volunteers are, what they do, where they associate and how best they can be reached.
Page 1 of 4
The second, Rural Volunteer Management Practices, summarizes 25 different volunteer practices that work. We know they work because we first identified practices that were working well in a rural community, transplanted those practices to 50 other places and then watched them for a year to see how they worked in a different context. Think of this section as a good idea catalogue, a collection of approaches to volunteer management that have been tested and documented, whether successful or unsuccessful. To access the toolkit, click here. 3. Gov. Brown Appeals to Obama for Resolution to Malheur Occupation Oregon Gov. Kate Brown is frustrated about the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon, according to two letters obtained by OPB. In a letter sent to President Barack Obama on Wednesday, Brown stressed her frustration and asked for help in convincing federal authorities to bring the nearly three week long occupation to a swift resolution. “I conveyed the harm that is being done to the citizens of Harney County by the occupation, and the necessity that this unlawful occupation end peacefully and without further delay from federal law enforcement,” she wrote of an earlier conversation with FBI Director James B. Comey. “On behalf of all Oregonians, I appreciate your consideration of our desire to see this situation come to a close, and I thank you for your timely attention to this matter.” To access this site, click here. 4. Should Oregon Counties Be Allowed To Ban GMOs On Their Own? Farmers Push To Repeal 2013 Law. Jackson County is two years into its ban on genetically-engineered crops. Elise Higley thinks it's going well. "People are excited about the ability to be able to grow in a safer environment and not have the risk of cross-pollination and contamination with GE crops," Higley said. Higley wants other counties to be able to do the same – a patchwork approach. But the Oregon Legislature passed a law in 2013 to stop that very thing from happening. The law barred local governments outside Jackson County from being able to decide their own rules on geneticallyengineered crops. To access the full story, click here. 5. 5 Simple Exercises To Fix The Damage Your Desk Job Does We go to work hoping our days spent at the office will challenge us professionally, but in reality, living the 9-to-5 (or 6 or 7) desk jockey life can be demanding on the health and wellness front, too. In fact, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, work-related musculoskeletal problems— from muscle strains to carpal tunnel syndrome—made up 32% of all worker injury and illness cases in 2014. Sure, many of those injuries were suffered by people working production lines or doing other physically taxing jobs. But sitting hunched over a computer, typing furiously and staring at screens all day, can also wreak havoc on the body.
Page 2 of 4
In general, the blame lies squarely on how long you sit working at your desk. "The issue that we’re really up against is that we’re not made to sit—certainly not for extended periods of time," says Michael Fredericson, sports medicine physiatrist at Stanford Health Care. But when your office job calls for you to sit at a desk for hours on end, "You tend to hunch forward, and your neck protrudes, and there’s eye strain. It’s stress that goes through your whole body." To access the full story, click here. 6. The Dawn of System Leadership With the passing of Nelson Mandela in late 2013, the world celebrated a remarkable life. But the spotlight on Mandela’s accomplishments relegated to the shadows much of the reason that he has had such a lasting impact, in South Africa and beyond. Above all, Mandela embodied a system leader, someone able to bring forth collective leadership. In countless ways, large and small, he undertook interventions aimed at bringing together the remnants of a divided country to face their common challenges collectively and build a new nation In the four delicate years between Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 and the first open election, he supported a scenario process that brought together the formerly banned black political parties to work through their alternative visions for the future of South Africa. Exploring their different ideologies and their implications openly and together resulted in the moderating of potentially divisive differences that could have ripped the nation apart, such as whether or not to nationalize critical industries. To access the full story, click here. 7. A New Metric for Community Resilience As recognition of communities as complex systems becomes increasingly widespread and established in the planning profession, the concept of resilience is emerging as a major topic of interest and discussion among planners. So far, attention has focused on how the concept of resilience, as it has been characterized for non-human systems, can be translated for application to human systems (e.g., Pendall et al. 2009). Here, I present a new index for measuring the progress of communities in becoming more resilient. Resilience is generally recognized as the ability of a complex system to adapt to change. This definition can be further refined as the ability of a complex system to maintain its integrity by responding successfully to threatening disturbances—either in the form of singular shocks or ongoing stresses. To access the full story, click here. 8. Oregon Transportation Safety Planning – Online Open House ODOT’s Transportation Development Division now has an on-line Open House up and running that includes background information on the statewide Transportation Safety Action Plan update process. The online Open House offers Oregon residents like YOU the opportunity to share input on local safety issues and what needs to be done in the near term to address safety risks. To access the online Open House, click here. 9. Bolivia's 2nd-Largest Lake Has Displaced Hundreds, If Not Thousands UNTAVI, Bolivia (AP) — Overturned fishing skiffs lie abandoned on the shores of what was Bolivia's second-largest lake. Beetles dine on bird carcasses and gulls fight for scraps under a glaring sun in what marshes remain. Page 3 of 4
Lake Poopo was officially declared evaporated last month. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people have lost their livelihoods and gone. High on Bolivia's semi-arid Andean plains at 3,700 meters (more than 12,000 feet) and long subject to climatic whims, the shallow saline lake has essentially dried up before only to rebound to twice the area of Los Angeles. But recovery may no longer be possible, scientists say. "This is a picture of the future of climate change," says Dirk Hoffman, a German glaciologist who studies how rising temperatures from the burning of fossil fuels has accelerated glacial melting in Bolivia. For more information about this event, click here. 10. The Modern Built Environment What’s on your top-10 list of threats to modern civilization? Climate change; overpopulation; nuclear war; environmental degradation; religious fundamentalism; unchecked consumerism; unintended technological consequences; global pandemics; GMOs; the Kardashian obsession? Balderdash! How about the modern built environment! Surprised? I am not joking nor entirely delusional. As preposterous as it may sound, I am about to make a case that IT - our built environment - constitutes the freeway for us becoming an archeological footnote in some far away world. We in the U.S. are now living through the 3rd generation that has grown up in the soulless landscape of sprawl capitalism, epitomized by 7-11s, McDs, parking lots and flattened ugliness in general - a condition that occasionally yields a snide remark from some elitist intellectual but otherwise is understood as the face of progress, an expression of freedom - the free market system at work. To access the full story, click here. 11. Richest 62 People As Wealthy As Half of World’s Population, Says Oxfam The vast and growing gap between rich and poor has been laid bare in a new Oxfam report showing that the 62 richest billionaires own as much wealth as the poorer half of the world’s population. Timed to coincide with this week’s gathering of many of the super-rich at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, the report calls for urgent action to deal with a trend showing that 1% of people own more wealth than the other 99% combined. Oxfam said that the wealth of the poorest 50% dropped by 41% between 2010 and 2015, despite an increase in the global population of 400m. In the same period, the wealth of the richest 62 people increased by $500bn (£350bn) to $1.76tn. Number of female billionaires increases sevenfold in 20 years Read more The charity said that, in 2010, the 388 richest people owned the same wealth as the poorest 50%. This dropped to 80 in 2014 before falling again in 2015. To access the full story, click here.
Page 4 of 4