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Monday Mailing

Year 22 • Issue 19 01 February 2016 1. Crater Lake Saw Record Number of Visitors in 2015 2. Woodburn UGB Proposal Approved by State 3. Timber Oligarchs Transform Into Beef Barons in Harney County and the Oregon High Desert 4. Plan for Former Mill Complex to Bring New Life to ‘Ghost Town’ 5. Voter's Guide: Compare Candidates on Climate and Energy 6. Uncle Sam Makes It Easier for Your SNAP Benefits to Go Toward a CSA Share 7. A Map Of The Carbon Footprint Of All 31,000 ZIP Codes In The U.S. 8. Winners of The Best Photo of 2015 Contest 9. The Endangered Female Farmer 10. Google is Offering a Free Online Class About Deep Learning 11. Infinite Earth Radio Has Launched!

1. Crater Lake Saw Record Number of Visitors in 2015 It might have been all the newcomers to Oregon, or possibly the unseasonably warm winter that greeted us last year – whatever the reason, a record number of people visited Crater Lake National Park in 2015.

Quote of the Week: "The next time your mind wanders, follow it around for a while." ~Jessica Masterson

Oregon Fast Fact: There are nine lighthouses standing along the coastline. Five are still being used; the others are designated historic monuments.

The official number is 664,000 people, according to park officials, a whopping 13.5 percent increase over 2014. That number is easily the highest in the last 25 years, the time since the park started implementing modern tracking methods.

The record number "confirms the value these places have to the American people," Crater Lake superintendent Craig Ackerman said in a press release Friday. "These numbers are reminders that the national parks serve to create lasting memories for individuals and families through their enjoyment of and deep connection to these special places.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Woodburn UGB Proposal Approved by State After well over a decade of work, and an estimated $1 million or more in public funds and staff time expended, the city of Woodburn’s urban growth boundary (UGB) saga is finally coming to a close.

On Dec. 14, the city and county jointly approved a remanded and amended version of the Woodburn UGB, which includes 190 acres of industrially zoned land, 406 acres residential, 23 acres commercial and 230 designated urban reserves.

The 21-day window for appealing that decision to the state Land Conservation and Development Commission passed Thursday, with no takers. That cleared the way for the case to be approved by a director’s order, which came Monday morning, according to a release from the city the following day.

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“Once that approval order goes out, it will be our final action, and the city will have an approved UGB expansion,” said Angela Lazarean, Mid-Willamette Valley regional representative for the Department of Land Conservation and Development.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Timber Oligarchs Transform Into Beef Barons in Harney County and the Oregon High Desert Throughout the Ammon Bundy and militia thug seizure of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, the media has not reported on the modern day filthy rich cattle barons of Harney County and beyond.

Articles rarely if ever contain an environmental voice. Yet there have been endless interviews of carping ranchers claiming oppression by the federal government.

PROFILE OF A HARNEY COUNTY RANCH OWNING FAMILY: 6000 Cattle Impacting 750,000 Acres, 100 Race Horses An Oregon Public Broadcasting story on taxpayer subsidies to cattlemen included a Harney County ranch manager griping about federal government over-reach.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Plan for Former Mill Complex to Bring New Life to ‘Ghost Town’ Feb. 01 -- THORNDIKE, Maine -- A century ago, the small Waldo County farming community of Thorndike was a bustling town on the railroad line with an active grain mill, a department store, a cheese factory, an inn, a theater and even an automobile dealership.

Asked what it's like today, and Diana Prizio , who owns the Garden Variety antique and home goods shop in downtown Thorndike -- population 890 at the last census -- doesn't mince words.

"It's a ghost town," she said.

But Prizio and a group of residents have a dream of bringing more life to Thorndike , and a concrete plan of how to do so. It involves the three downtown buildings that make up the former OJ Farwell & Sons store and grain mill, a complex that the group of seven local writers, artists, craftspeople, builders and historians purchased in the summer of 2015.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Voter's Guide: Compare Candidates on Climate and Energy From “moral issue” (Bernie Sanders) to “hoax” (Donald Trump), presidential candidates’ views on climate change are diverse, and they split largely along party lines.

Some comments have been colorful. GOP candidate Marco Rubio said climate action needs to be global, because “America is not a planet.” Fellow Republican Sen. Ted Cruz called climate change a “pseudo-scientific theory.” Democrat Hillary Clinton said she “crashed” a meeting with the Chinese to broker a climate deal.

As Iowans go to the polls Monday for the first statewide vote of the 2016 presidential campaign, we offer this guide to key topics that have received little attention in the official debates despite last month's historic UN climate accord.

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What has been promised is rather dramatic. Cruz, a conservative Texan, says he’ll eliminate the Department of Energy and several programs at the Environmental Protection Agency. Trump, a New York businessman, says he’ll slash funding for the EPA, calling it “the laughing stock of the world.”

To access the full story, click here.

6. Uncle Sam Makes It Easier for Your SNAP Benefits to Go Toward a CSA Share The very thing that makes the community supported agriculture model a boon for farmers— customers pay for the whole season up front, enabling growers to purchase seeds, tools, and other supplies—has rendered CSA programs inaccessible to many low-income Americans, who typically don’t have several hundred dollars to spend all at once. But thanks to new language in last year’s Farm Bill, things are changing. Before the passage of the 2014 bill, farmers were able to accept SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits, but USDA regulations required that payments be credited weekly, at the point of pickup. Not only did that rob farmers of early-season buying power; it also cost them hours spent processing the transactions each week (SNAP works on an electronic debit system).

Surprisingly, CSAs rarely accepted SNAP benefits until 2011, when Bryan Allan of Zenger Farm, a nonprofit educational center in Portland, Oregon, spearheaded a pilot CSA-SNAP program and developed online tutorials and a print manual to help other growers navigate the red tape involved in becoming certified to accept the benefits. “Everyone deserves access to fresh, healthy food, regardless of their income level,” says Allan, who advocated for the latest Farm Bill. And America’s family farms deserve all the customers they can get: If just 1 percent of the $74 billion in food stamps spent annually was redirected to CSA farms, the people with their hands in the dirt would harvest $740 million.

To access the full story, click here.

7. A Map Of The Carbon Footprint Of All 31,000 ZIP Codes In The U.S. Which households contribute most to climate change? To find out, take a look at this interactive map created by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. It provides estimates for all 31,000 ZIP codes, based on everything people consume in a single year, including energy, travel, goods, and services.

A major finding of the research: suburbs account for more greenhouse gas emissions than other areas. In total, suburbs produce about 50% of household emissions, despite housing only 143 million people in total from a U.S. population of 313 million. Inner city residents tend to have lower carbon footprints, because they live in smaller homes and use more public transit. Some urban households produce 50% of the national average, while some suburban households emit double the national average.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Winners of The Best Photo of 2015 Contest Congratulations to the winners of the Best Photo of 2015 contest!

More than 1,700 images, taken in 2015, were submitted by amateur photographers. A big, big thank you to everyone who took part. There was no theme, and the photos showed a wealth of skill and

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variety, from landscapes to portraits, pets to people, black-and-white to color, and every season of the year.

To access the full story (and some awesome photos), click here.

9. The Endangered Female Farmer In 2013, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a report on female farmers that contained what appeared to be some very good news: the share of farms operated by women had nearly tripled in the thirty years between 1978 and 2007.

Understandably, the media covered this development as a sign of real progress. Headlines from Grist and USA Today gushed that women were "breaking the grass ceiling," while NPR, The New York Times, and other national publications ran similarly upbeat stories. In 2014, USDA released data from the 2012 Census of Agriculture showing that there had been a small drop in the number of female farmers between 2007 and 2012, but that still hasn't slowed the celebratory articles about the growing number of women in agriculture.

A closer look at the data, however, presents a much more troubling story. Instead of ushering in the era of the female farmer, the last 40 years have seen little progress in female farm ownership--and potentially some serious backsliding.

To access the full story, click here.

10. Google is Offering a Free Online Class About Deep Learning Techies who have some background in machine learning may want to tune into Google's new course on deep learning. Available through Udacity—home to a host of open online courses—the class is expected to run about three months, assuming people put in about six hours of work per week.

The course will also introduce participants to TensorFlow, the open-source deep learning platform Google unveiled back in November. Deep learning, a division of machine learning through which machines detect and classify patterns in data, is the driving force behind Google Photos' search engine and the company's speech recognition technology.

"Deep learning is a modern take on the old idea of teaching computers, instead of programming them," Vincent Vanhoucke, a principal scientist at Google, wrote in a Udacity blog post. "It has taken the world of machine learning by storm in recent years, and for good reason! Deep learning provides state-of-the-art results in many of the thorniest problems in computing, from machine perception and forecasting, to analytics and natural language processing."

To access the full story, click here.

11. Infinite Earth Radio has launched!

The Local Government Commission is VERY excited to announce the launch of Infinite Earth Radio a weekly podcast produced by Skeo in association with the Local Government Commission.

We believe that in a world of finite natural resources, a smart, sustainable and prosperous future is only possible by lifting people up and unleashing unlimited human potential. Infinite Earth Radio is committed to spreading ideas that lift up and revitalize marginalized neighborhoods and build greater 21st century communities.

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Each week we interview visionary civic leaders who are transforming the future. But, it is not all talk... you will learn what the brightest and most visionary leaders are doing to help build smarter, more sustainable, and more equitable communities and how YOU can help bring these ideas to your community To access the full story, click here.

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