Monday Mailing
Year 25 • Issue 20 4 February 2019 1. Deep Freeze Puts Strain On Midwest Gas And Electricity Grids 2. How Finland Solved Homelessness 3. Oregon Lawmakers Unveil Their Plan To Curb Carbon Emissions (Michael Hoch) 4. New Data Show Rural Oregonian and Communities of Color Making Significant Economic Advances (Corum Ketchum) 5. How An Oregon Rancher Is Building Soil Health – And A Robust Regional Food System 6. Rethink, Retool, Then Recycle? (Patrick Lynch) 7. The Quest For The Multigenerational City 8. Lincoln Park And The Complicated History Of Gentrification In Chicago (Bayoán Ware) 9. How Much Is The North Santiam River Worth? Try $170 Million A Year 10. EARTH DAY SERVICE PROJECT – Oregon Dunes Restoration Collaborative 1. Deep Freeze Puts Strain On Midwest Gas And Electricity
Grids
The deep freeze is putting gas and power grids to the test. In the midst of some of the lowest temperatures in years, utility companies in parts of the Upper Midwest have asked customers to turn down their thermostats to ensure that there's enough natural gas to go around.
Quote of the Week:
“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.” ― Desmond Tutu
Ahead of the plunge, grid operators throughout the Midwest had said they were prepared. But this cold snap will be a big test of the resiliency of the energy grid, reports the trade publication E&E News. "The event will be a test of the bulk power system's resilience and especially the ability of coal, natural gas and wind generation to deliver power when called upon." To access the full story, click here.
Oregon Fast Fact #30
Silver Falls State Park is the Oregon's largest state park. It features 10 waterfalls and contains a wide variety of forested hiking trails.
2. How Finland Solved Homelessness Four years ago, Thomas Salmi was drinking to forget. He was homeless and living on the streets of Finland’s capital city Helsinki. He had a rough start in life. He wasn’t able to live at home because his father had problems with aggression. He ended up going to nine different children’s homes, before falling through the cracks of the system in his late teens. By 21 he was homeless. “I lost the sense of a normal life. I became depressed, aggressive, angry and I abused alcohol a lot.” He would drink up to half a gallon a day and then get into trouble. “I thought why would I care if I go to jail? I don’t have to be out there in snow and cold.” Page 1 of 5
Salmi was sleeping in Helsinki train station when a social worker found him and told him he could help. He was put in touch with Helsinki Deaconess Institute (HDI), a Finnish nonprofit that provides social services. A year later he moved into Aurora-Tola, a 125-unit house run by HDI. To access the full story, click here.
3. Oregon Lawmakers Unveil Their Plan To Curb Carbon Emissions
With the governor showing support and Republicans hoping to hit the brakes, Oregonians got their first look Thursday at a sweeping proposal to sharply reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The 98-page bill sketches out how Oregon could use a cap-and-trade system to both force air pollution to a level far below the state’s 1990 emissions and generate money to help pay for projects and initiatives aimed at smoothing the transition to a low-carbon economy. The release of the so-called “Clean Energy Jobs” bill has been keenly anticipated for weeks. After years of discussion, the state’s top Democrats are making the bill’s passage a priority this year as they enjoy supermajorities in both legislative chambers. Meanwhile, Republicans and business groups have bristled at an idea they believe will raise costs for Oregonians but contribute very little to actually curbing climate change. To access the full story, click here.
4. New Data Show Rural Oregonians And Communities Of Color Making Significant Economic Advances Josh Lehner of the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis produced two new charts today that provide hopeful news. First, Lehner notes, the job count in rural Oregon has returned to levels reached before the Great Recession. "Both urban and rural areas of the state, in aggregate, lost the same percentage of their jobs during the Great Recession. However, urban areas returned to growth first—Portland in particular, being the biggest and most diverse economy in the state—and have been at historic highs for years," Lehner writes. "Fast forward to today, employment in Oregon's rural counties is now back to where it was prior to the Great Recession. This is not a destination, but is an important milestone to note." To access the full story, click here.
5. How An Oregon Rancher Is Building Soil Health – And A Robust Regional Food System
When Cory Carman returned in 2003 to her family’s ranch in remote Wallowa County in eastern Oregon with a Stanford degree in public policy in hand and a stint on Capitol Hill under her belt, Page 2 of 5
her intention was to stay for the summer, helping her uncle and grandmother with ranch work while she looked for her next job working on public policy. By that fall, though, it was obvious that if she left, the ranch wouldn’t be there for her to come back to. “They were the only ones left on the ranch,” she said, recalling the heartbreaking specter of how hard her uncle and her grandmother, who was then in her 80s, had to work to barely scrape by. “I think I felt the weight of what they were trying to hold together, and I thought how unfair it was for me to expect that they could just keep it together until I came back someday.” So she decided to stay. To access the full story, click here.
6. Rethink, Retool, Then Recycle?
As 2019 gets underway, the story of U.S. recycling is in many ways that of a market with immense potential, one that despite recent setbacks continues to step on its own feet. Until recently, China has been the world’s dominant market for recyclable material; in 2016 the country counted for 60 percent of global demand and roughly a third of U.S. exports. But 2018 started with a cataclysmic bang, as China made good on promises to enact stringent standards on imported paper and plastic refuse. That resulted in a complete halt to imports of some 32 recycled materials. A collapse in prices for some goods followed, while others went into a sympathetic swoon. As a result, some cities — Kirkwood, Missouri, and Deltona, Florida, among them — suspended recycling altogether, while others scaled back on the types of waste they would accept. Municipal recycling programs were blindsided by China’s market constriction. Malaysia and a few other countries initially accepted what China would not, but they were quickly inundated and closed their markets as well. By spring 2018, mountains of bottles and paper from weekly U.S. collections soon overwhelmed the private-sector processing facilities that work with cities to sort and ship materials. By some estimates, 500,000 tons of paper collected for recycling were likely to end up in landfills by the end of last year. To access the full story, click here.
7. The Quest For The Multigenerational CIty
Faye is stressed out about the craft room in her condominium. “I get very overwhelmed when I try to clean it,” she tells me when I arrive on the doorstep of her condo one hot Tuesday evening in June. She’d submitted a request for volunteer help through Capital City Village, a nonprofit in Austin, Texas, that helps older people age in their homes and communities, and I, a volunteer, had responded. “That’s OK, I love to organize,” I say.
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“Well, I hope so,” she says, already worrying as she invites me in and sits me down on the couch. She asks me to tell her about myself. She is skeptical: Why am I spending my Tuesday evening helping a retiree I’d never met clean her apartment? I shrug. I’m new to town. I don’t know very many people. I’m trying to get to know Austin—to understand this city beyond its carefully curated twang and charm. And to do that, I’m looking beyond my immediate contemporaries. To access the full story, click here.
8. Lincoln Park And The Complicated History Of Gentrification In Chicago
In December 1969, Stephen Shamberg resigned as president of one of the most powerful neighborhood organizations in Chicago, the Lincoln Park Conservation Association. His letter of resignation carried a blunt message for the people he had been leading. “We are assisting,” he wrote, “in the destruction of our community.” For fifteen years, LPCA had fought to transform its piece of the city’s North Side, just two miles from downtown on the shores of Lake Michigan. And indeed, Lincoln Park had been transformed. Dilapidated homes boasted new windows and paint; developers clamored to invest where banks had refused to lend; and new businesses were opening. But its members were not feeling triumphant. Instead, they found themselves bitterly divided: Some feared their decades of work might soon be rolled back. Others believed it deserved to be. Back in the 1940s, when the antique dealers, historians, and lawyers were just beginning their campaign to restore Lincoln Park’s Victorian-era grandeur, they had felt no such ambiguity. Back then, the stakes had seemed very different to them, their campaign to remake the neighborhood almost utopian. To access the full story, click here.
9. How Much Is The North Santiam River Worth? Try $170 Million A Year
The North Santiam River has an impact of $170 million each year from uses including municipal water for 235,000 people in cities like Salem and Stayton, recreation on the river, hydropower and irrigation, according to an ECONorthwest report. And millions of dollars are lost when something goes wrong, such as the toxic algae blooms at Detroit Lake last summer.
The ECONorthwest report – which cost $30,000 — was commissioned by the North Santiam Watershed Council and the Oregon Business Council and was funded by Meyer Memorial Trust, Marion Soil and Water Conservation District, Marion County and Salem. It was the first to address the economic impact of the river. The report comes as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which manages Detroit Dam, has proposed draining Detroit Lake to a level below previous drought stages for one to three years to build a cooling tower and aid in fish passage up the North Santiam River.
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The Corps of Engineers is under a legal mandate to correct water temperatures to save the endangered Willamette River Steelhead and Upper Willamette River Spring Chinook. To access the full story, click here.
10. EARTH DAY SERVICE PROJECT – Oregon Dunes Restoration Collaborative
Jeff Malik, RARE Member serving with the Oregon Dunes Restoration Collaborative is continuing to set-up the Earth Day Service Project in the Oregon Dunes. It is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, April 20th. We will spend a half-day cutting and pulling invasive plants. There will be an optional guided nature hike in the dunes with some experts on the ecosystem. Free time in the afternoon followed by camping that night! (Camping is optional and you can choose to return home or stay elsewhere on the coast. There is also talk of RARE renting a few a few Yurts for those who participate. We’ll be approximately 10 miles south of Reedsport) Please RSVP to Jeff (Jeff@EugeneCascadesCoast.org) so he can coordinate tools, camping gear and yurt rental. To learn more about Oregon Dunes Collaborative, click here.
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