Monday Mailing
Year 25 • Issue 21 11 February 2019 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Want Proof Climate Change Is Here? Look At Oregon In 2018, Report Says (Michael Hoch) America’s Five Best Small Cities For Biking (Bayoán Ware) Tube Man Waves Bye-Bye To Wolves (Corum Ketchum) Why People Still Don’t Buy Groceries Online (Bayoán Ware) The Green New Deal Is Already At Work In One Portland Neighborhood (Michael Hoch) 5 Ways To Protect The Planet Without Disenfranchising People With Disabilities The Real Cost of Cheap Groceries How ‘Vasectomy Zoning’ Makes Childless Cities (Corum Ketchum) RESOURCE - The Economics of Local Food Systems: A Toolkit To Guide Community Discussions, Assessments and Choices RESOURCE – 21-Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge (Taylor West)
1. Want Proof Climate Change Is Here? Look At Oregon In
2018, Report Says
Climate change is playing out in significant ways in Oregon, with evidence in the form of more severe wildfires, lower summer stream flows and diminishing winter snowpacks, according to the state’s fourth annual climate assessment report.
Quote of the Week:
“One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings.” ― Franklin Thomas
Oregon Fast Fact #7
Pilot Butte, a cinder cone volcano, exists within the city limits of Bend.
The report, issued Thursday by the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, made it clear that climate change is no longer something to discuss as part of the Northwest’s future. It’s happening now — and will get more severe. “Simply put, the state’s biggest fire years occur when summers are usually warm and dry,” said Philip Mote, an author of the report and the former director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute. “Since warm and dry summers are occurring more frequently, we can expect the fire danger to increase as well.” To access the full story, click here. 2. America’s Five Best Small Cities For Biking Could a bunch of the country’s best cities for biking be towns that most Americans have never heard of? That’s one unexpected implication of the PlacesForBikes City Ratings, which balances complex data from six sources to compare cities to one another based not on reputation but on factors like low-stress network connectivity, safety and documented public investment.
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It definitely surprised us here at PeopleForBikes that Wausau, Wisc., came out as a better place to bike than Minneapolis, Portland, Ore., or Davis, Calif. But the whole point of a data-driven system is to discover things you didn’t expect. And the fact is that smaller cities and towns have massive potential for biking. The main problem is actually that a lot of people haven’t realized it yet. To access the full story, click here.
3. Tube Man Waves Bye-Bye To Wolves
BUTTE FALLS, Ore. — The display is almost hypnotic, watching the inflatable tube man twist and wave at Ted Birdseye’s ranch bordering the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest in Southern Oregon. His kids say it looks like a neon green alien dancing at night. His wife’s co-worker jokes about the ranch turning into a used car lot. But so far, Birdseye said he is sleeping soundly at night with the tube man standing guard against wolves that have repeatedly attacked his cattle. Wolves from the nearby Rogue pack have killed or injured at least seven calves and one guard dog in the last year at the Mill-Mar Ranch in Jackson County, frustrating Birdseye and wildlife managers trying feverishly to keep the predators at bay.
Following the most recent confirmed depredation on Jan. 18, Birdseye received two inflatable tube men — one green, one yellow — on loan from the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife, which is assisting ranchers across the state with hazing wolves using non-lethal deterrents. To access the full story, click here.
4. Why People Still Don’t Buy Groceries Online
Nearly 30 years ago, when just 15 percent of Americans had a computer, and even fewer had internet access, Thomas Parkinson set up a rack of modems on a Crate and Barrel wine rack and started accepting orders for the internet’s first grocery delivery company, Peapod, which he founded with his brother Andrew.
Back then, ordering groceries online was complicated—most customers had dial-up, and Peapod’s web graphics were so rudimentary customers couldn’t see images of what they were buying. Delivery was complicated, too: The Parkinsons drove to grocery stores in the Chicago area, bought what customers had ordered, and then delivered the goods from the backseat of their beat-up Honda Civic. When people wanted to stock up on certain goods—strawberry yogurt or bottles of Diet Coke—the Parkinsons would deplete whole sections of local grocery stores. To access the full story, click here.
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5. The Green New Deal Is Already At Work In One Portland Neighborhood
It’s a cloudy gray day in Cully, a neighborhood in northeastern Portland, and the air is thick with the smell of burnt tires. The culprit? An asphalt manufacturing plant, where black rubble is piled into one long heaping mound, waiting to be hauled off to areas across the city to fill in old potholes and pave new streets. Cully is located in one of the city’s most culturally diverse pockets, but the predominantly lowincome neighborhood is regularly subject to industrial pollution. Automobile salvage lots, including one that caught fire and spewed toxic chemicals into the air last year, litter entire city blocks with old car parts and used tires. Across the street from the asphalt plant, a barren parking lot is cordoned off by a chain-link fence. This was formerly the site of the Sugar Shack, a notorious strip club and adult video store that was torn down less than two months ago. After the owners’ arrest in 2015 for tax fraud and running a prostitution ring, the lot became a meeting spot for neighborhood groups and community members. Now, thanks to a coalition of four local organizations that goes by the name Living Cully, the site will soon be home to a new affordable housing complex: Las Adelitas, named in honor of the women soldiers who fought during the Mexican Revolution. To access the full story, click here.
6. 5 Ways To Protect The Planet Without Disenfranchising People With Disabilities
People with disabilities are disproportionately affected by disasters, which are worsening and increasing because of climate change. The National Council on Disability estimated that a “disproportionate number of the fatalities” amid Hurricane Katrina were people with disabilities. Typical evacuation routes and disaster plans are often not accessible to this vulnerable group, while interruptions to electricity are deadlier for those who require machines to treat medical conditions. And it isn’t just disasters like fires, superstorms, and floods. Extreme heat, which up to 75 percent of humanity may be at risk of experiencing by 2100, has adverse physical and mental health effects in healthy individuals. But people with neurological conditions who cannot sweat or regulate body temperature are even more vulnerable to extreme heat. And those are just a few examples. To access the full story, click here.
7. The Real Cost of Cheap Groceries
There's a price war raging in the grocery aisle—but the people who actually grow and gather our food may be the battle's true losers. Meet the produce pickers of Texas's Rio Grande Valley, whose penny-per-bunch harvest helps stock your pantry for less.
Our food is cheap—by some measures, cheaper than it’s ever been. Americans now spend less than 10% of their disposable income on what they eat. When researchers first began tracking this figure some 90 years ago, it was closer to 25%.
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But the inexpensive supermarket fare that consumers now expect doesn’t come without a hidden human cost. To see, firsthand, the true price of keeping those shelves stocked, Fortune traveled down to the Rio Grande Valley—among the best areas in the country for growing food crops, and one President Trump put in the spotlight last week when he visited the region to make his case for the border wall. To access the full story, click here.
8. How ‘Vasectomy Zoning’ Makes Childless Cities
At the end of last year, the Philadelphia City Planning Commission weighed a proposed zoning change that would effectively ban new day-care centers—along with tire stores and car repair shops—in a large chunk of northwest Philadelphia. The bill swiftly encountered fierce resistance, and it now appears dead. But the effort to block additional child-care facilities with a zoning overlay hints at a broader relationship between city planning and the cost of raising children. A growing body of research indicates that restrictive zoning—which often blocks the services and housing that families need—may help to explain why family sizes are shrinking in the United States.
The U.S. birth rate recently sunk to a 30-year low, a trend that’s been blamed on everything from economic anxieties and climate change to the rise of smartphones and the Millennial “sex recession.” Perhaps we should also lay some of the responsibility at the feet of city planning. As bizarre as an anti-day-care bill may seem, the fear of more children coming into a community is a mainstay at new housing proposal hearings. Particularly in high-cost suburbs along the coasts, the mere inclusion of three-bedroom apartments—the kind of units young families need—can get a project in hot water with elected officials. While the justifications for blocking this kind of housing vary from preserving rural character to preventing (real or imagined) school overcrowding, the result is that more and more municipalities are adopting policies designed to keep out children and the families who care for them. To access the full story, click here.
9. RESOURCE - The Economics of Local Food Systems: A Toolkit To Guide Community Discussions, Assessments and Choices
As consumers across the Nation express a growing interest in a closer connection to their food producers—whether through access to more localized markets and/or shorter supply chains— cities and regions have begun to regard the expansion of local food marketing activities as a critical component of their economic development strategies. Rising demand for locally produced, source-identified, and differentiated food products has generated a plethora of new and spinoff businesses in many communities, which aim to increase the range of and accessibility to local food items for both retail and wholesale customers. In turn, this emergence of local food businesses has sparked a groundswell of financial support and interest from private foundations and public agencies on the assumption that the development of local food systems contributes to positive economic outcomes, especially with respect to local economic development and improved farm viability. Unfortunately, given the nascent nature of local food demand growth and the scarcity of available data, relatively few of these efforts have been guided by rigorous assessments. Page 4 of 5
In response, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has formed new initiatives and programs to develop new markets and support existing markets so that producers and their communities may leverage these new opportunities. Specifically, the USDA, Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) has managed the Farmers Market Promotion Program (now expanded to the Local Foods Promotion Program), with great expectations of positive outcomes, but no standardized approach on how to evaluate market and economic outcomes. As a result, a team of regional economists and food system specialists were assembled through a project hosted by Colorado State University (CSU) to develop a Toolkit comprised of food system assessment principles and economic indicators a community may expect to share. Given the real-world projects, experiences, and applied research of the CSU-led team, the Toolkit is grounded in practices that are credible and useable within the economic development discussions guiding communities. The goal of this Toolkit is to guide and enhance the capacity of local organizations to make more deliberate and credible measurements of local and regional economic activity and other ancillary benefits. To access view the resource, click here.
10. RESOURCE – 21-Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge The 2019 Racial Equity Challenge starts on April 1st!
As part of our commitment to racial equity and food justice, the Food Solutions New England (FSNE) network is dedicated to normalizing conversations about the role of racism in shaping our food systems (local, regional, national and global). We believe it benefits us all to have greater collective capacity and courage to identify and address the different ways that bias, prejudice, privilege, and oppression show up in our work and lives. This Challenge was originally developed by Dr. Eddie Moore, Jr. and Debby Irving and has been adapted by Food Solutions New England with support from the Interaction Institute for Social Change. The challenge is designed to create dedicated time and space to build more effective social justice habits, particularly those dealing with issues of race, power, privilege, and leadership. Participation in an activity like this helps us to discover how racial injustice and social injustice impact the food system, to connect with one another, to identify ways to dismantle racism and become better leaders for a more just, equitable food system. To learn more about the challenge, click here.
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