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Monday Mailing Quote of the Week: "Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving." ~Albert Einstein

Oregon Fast Fact: Oregon State University’s mens baseball team won back to back College World Series in 2006 and 2007 defeating the North Carolina Tarheels in both championships.

Year 21 • Issue 24 02 March 2015 1. A Vacant Lot in Wyoming will Become One of the World's First Vertical Farms 2. The United States of Megadrought 3. 2015 Multicultural Conference and Reunion 4. Connecting a Town with Singletrack Sidewalks 5. Local Food With a Big Twist: Oregon Super-Cooperative Takes Aim at the Corporate Food System 6. Hazards Related Web Resources 7. Natural Law 8. Upcoming TREC Seminars 9. 5 Ways to Add Density without Building High-Rises 10. Get to Know Your Community: 7 Incredibly Useful Market Research Tools for Local Governments 11. Timelapse 1. A Vacant Lot in Wyoming will Become One of the World's First Vertical Farms Jackson, Wyoming, is an unlikely place for urban farming: At an altitude over a mile high, with snow that can last until May, the growing season is sometimes only a couple of months long. It's also an expensive place to plant a garden, since an average vacant lot can cost well over $1 million.

But the town is about to become home to one of the only vertical farms in the world. On a thin slice of vacant land next to a parking lot, a startup called Vertical Harvest recently broke ground on a new three-story stack of greenhouses that will be filled with crops like microgreens and tomatoes.

"We're replacing food that was being grown in Mexico or California and shipped in," explains Penny McBride, one of the co-founders. "We feel like the community's really ready for a project like this. Everybody's so much more aware of the need to reduce transportation, and people like to know their farmer and where food's coming from."

To access the full story, click here.

2. The United States of Megadrought When it comes to drought in the West, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. That’s the conclusion from a new study that links an increasing risk of decades-long drought episodes in the western United States to human-induced climate change. The study predicts drought severity outside the bounds of what’s thought to have occurred over the past 1,000 years, based on local tree-ring records.

“It’s certainly not good news,” said co-author Jason Smerdon, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The study was published Thursday in the inaugural issue of Science Advances, an open-access journal from AAAS, the same publisher as Science.

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Smerdon’s study is the first to examine the future risk of “megadrought” in the southwest and central United States in the context of historical episodes of drought in the same regions. Smerdon’s study suggests that the coming years are likely to see droughts worse than the epic dry periods that are thought to have caused profound changes to human settlement in the region over the last millennium.

To access the full story, click here.

3. 2015 Multicultural Conference and Reunion April 10–11, 2015 The Multicultural Conference and Reunion is open to Ducks of all backgrounds, and will feature entertaining and informative sessions about personal and professional growth presented by students and alumni alike. For alumni, it will be an exciting time to return to campus, reconnect with fellow Ducks, meet and motivate current students, and learn more about the UO's many diversity initiatives.

For UO students, what better place to be than a room full of Duck alumni who are eager to meet you and help!

For more information and to connect with fellow Ducks and friends prior to the reunion, please visit our Facebook group page.

Tentative Schedule: Friday, April 10 Campus Tours International Student Coffee Hour Reception, Celebration Dinner, and Entertainment Saturday, April 11 UO Executive Leadership Panel Student and Alumni Mini Presentations (TED Talk-format) Lunch with Closing Remarks Training on Remaining Engaged with the UO Location: Various locations on the UO campus Registration: Conference Fees (covering meals, snacks, and materials): UOAA Member rate: $50 General Attendee rate: $60 Rate for Current UO Students: Free (space limited) Online registration closes Wednesday, April 8.

For more information, click here.

4. Connecting a Town with Singletrack Sidewalks Some towns aim to become more “walkable.” One Colorado town has gone the two-wheeled route by becoming more “mountain bike-able.”

Eagle, Colorado, a 7,000-person town between Vail and Aspen, already has its share of walking paths and bike lanes, but its newest project will allow mountain bikers to ride from their driveways to the Page 2 of 5

trails, and for kids to ride from their homes to school—all on singletrack. The town unanimously approved the project, called Singletrack Sidewalks, in November, and organizers have started preliminary work for the first part of the network, which will lead from a neighborhood to an elementary school. The new trail addition is only half a mile, but connects an existing network of organic trails that have popped up in a neighboring 1,900-acre plot adjacent to the school.

After the first section is completed this spring, other connectors will follow, the town hopes. The finished project will allow bikers to ride from trailhead to trailhead, or for runners to run from one corner of the town to the other, all on a dirt network. The end goal: to add about 10 miles of free-touse trail.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Local Food With a Big Twist: Oregon Super-Cooperative Takes Aim at the Corporate Food System Narendra Varma loves chocolate. However, he’s also co-founder of Our Table Cooperative, a farm and grocery cooperative that aims to provide locally sourced, organically grown food to the city of Sherwood, Oregon. That means his love of chocolate is complicated.

“I just pretend that chocolate somehow magically appears on my plate,” Varma says. That selfadmitted delusion doesn’t extend to coffee, which he doesn’t drink and therefore feels comfortable labeling “some nasty thing that has to be imported from all over the planet.”

But people all over the world want chocolate and coffee and other things that can’t necessarily be grown in their backyard. Varma and his co-founders struggled with the question of how to provide those staple foods to their customers.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Hazards Related Web Resources Climate Security 101 The impact of climate change on national security might not be the most intuitive, but climate effects such as food shortages, extreme weather, and forced migration to more livable areas do cause social strife that can affect security. This project of the Center for Climate and Security answers many of the burning questions at the intersection of climate and security and lays out resources and documents that address the rest.

Migration for Memory: A Disaster Mitigation Framework for Cultural Resources As anyone who has lived through flood, fire, or other disasters can attest, it’s the irreplaceable losses like documents, pictures, and keepsakes that cause the most heartbreak. The same is true for communities. Now comes this framework to give those safeguarding community treasures the tools they need to make sure cultural resources make it through. Everything from training to logistics to working with emergency managers is included, so take a look.

EMS Domestic Preparedness Improvement Strategy Gaps in emergency medical service preparedness could mean life or death during a disaster, yet with so many distinct EMS agencies involved, it’s easy for cracks to appear. This report looks at four different categories necessary for effective EMS preparedness and outlines how they can be used to identify barriers to preparedness and create goals to overcome them.

Coping with Earthquakes Induced by Fluid Injection

As the practice of hydraulic fracturing has increased, scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey have Page 3 of 5

been looking at ways to mitigate the damage caused by the manmade earthquakes that ensue. With that as a goal, this paper calls for transparency and data on the practices and chemicals being used in the so-called fracking industry.

The National Academies Climate Intervention Reports Recently we crossed into what scientists believe is a point-of-no-return in regards to climate change.

But hopefully that doesn’t mean we can’t move ahead. These two reports examine two possible solutions—carbon dioxide removal and reflecting sunlight to cool the earth. Read about the pros, the cons, and how much it might cost to undo a little of the damage.

7. Natural Law It’s January 16, 2014, and the Duncan Campbell Auditorium at the University of Oregon law school isn’t just a classroom—it’s a battleground. On one side is the Oregon state government, on the other are two teenagers whose suit demanding the state protect the climate was dismissed by a lower court.

Three Oregon Court of Appeals judges have journeyed from Salem to hear the teenagers’ appeal in UO classrooms, giving law students the opportunity to witness an appeals court hearing right on campus. TV cameras in the rear of the packed, makeshift court pan from the young plaintiffs and their mothers—coplaintiffs in the suit—to the teenagers’ dozens of friends who are skipping history class today in favor of partaking in the real thing, and finally to Eugene Mayor Kitty Piercy, in attendance to support the teens. But the UO law professor sitting quietly next to the mayor is the reason anyone is gathered here at all. It is, after all, Mary Christina Wood’s pioneering atmospheric trust litigation that enabled these kids to sue their government.

The teenagers’ argument springs straight from the pages of Wood’s book Nature’s Trust, released just three months earlier in October 2013. Nature’s Trust spells out a simple enough concept: Citizens have a right to live and flourish. Therefore, a government elected by the people has a duty to protect the natural systems required for their survival; namely forests, wildlife, soil, water, and air (or atmosphere). If the executive and legislative branches both fail in that duty of protection, the resulting violation of citizens’ constitutional rights requires the third branch, the judicial, to intervene.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Upcoming TREC Seminars March 6: Empirical Evaluation of Transit Signal Priority through Fusion of Heterogeneous Transit and Traffic Signal Data and Novel Performance Measures; Wei Feng, Performance Measures Analyst, Chicago Transit Authority* March 13: Self-Organizing Signals: A Better Framework for Transit Signal Priority; Peter Furth, Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northeastern University* For more information, click here.

9. 5 Ways to Add Density without Building High-Rises Portland and many other cities around the country are facing the problem of adding more housing and infrastructure as more and more people move into the city. In short, they are being forced to densify, to fit more people into a limited amount of space. Portland has an urban growth boundary, so density is a specially pressing problem in the face of a projected population boom of 725,000 additional people in 20 years. The threat of people moving in with nowhere to house them has led to large swaths of the historic fabric of urban neighborhoods to be destroyed and replaced with modern midrises and high-rises that are often out of many people’s price range. It’s led to people being displaced from their neighborhoods either to make room for new buildings or just simply by being priced out as densification has brought gentrification along with it. Cities have done a poor job in Page 4 of 5

adding density in a gentler, kinder way that has fewer consequences to their existing character and existing populations, which are the reasons why people are moving there in the first place. A great example of this is Vancouver, BC, which has increasingly become a sea of anonymous glass and steel high-rises in lieu of the quaint, diverse and beautiful city it was known to be. Another example is how high-rise development is threatening to destroy the walkable and historic downtown arts district of Roosevelt Row in Phoenix, AZ. To access the full story, click here.

10. Get to Know Your Community: 7 Incredibly Useful Market Research Tools for Local Governments Understanding your community is one of the keys to successful local government decision-making.

Makes a ton of sense. As a planner, the more you know your community the more you’ll be able to deliver the kind of successful community plans they're looking for.

The more you know your community, the better you'll be able to evaluate perceptions of local areas and of council services, gauging perceptions towards green spaces, parks, open spaces, street lighting, parking, and the list goes on.

So what is the most effective way to understand your online community and quickly gauge perception towards a plan, a service or a program? I’ve gathered a list of 7 tools that caught my eye while during some research for a client who wanted to dig deep and get to know her online community better.

To access the full story, click here.

11. Timelapse Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. Telescopes point in one direction: out. Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was the one that ought to matter most to us—Earth.

That changed when NASA created the Landsat program, a series of satellites that would perpetually orbit our planet, looking not out but down. Surveillance spacecraft had done that before, of course, but they paid attention only to military or tactical sites. Landsat was a notable exception, built not for spycraft but for public monitoring of how the human species was altering the surface of the planet.

Two generations, eight satellites and millions of pictures later, the space agency, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has accumulated a stunning catalog of images that, when riffled through and stitched together, create a high-definition slide show of our rapidly changing Earth. TIME is proud to host the public unveiling of these images from orbit, which for the first time date all the way back to 1984.

To access the full story, click here.

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