Monday Mailing - April 27, 2020

Monday Mailing

Year 26 • Issue 33 27 April 2020 1.

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Residents of Rural Oregon Towns Ask Urban Dwellers to Stay Home (Katie McFall) US Supreme Court Ruling Ends Oregon’s Non-Unanimous Jury Convictions Is it Time to Revive the Pattern Language?

To Cut Carbon Emissions, A Movement Grows to ‘Electrify Everything’ Coronavirus is Creating a Food Security Crisis in Indian Country Lessons from Pandemics: Comparing Urban and Rural Risks How to Make Your (Now Virtual) Event Shine Rural Innovation in Quarantine: The Power of Virtual Events Energy Equity: Bringing Solar Power to Low-Income Communities What Covid is Exposing About the Climate Movement (Michael Hoch) OSU Master Gardeners Offer Tips as People Plant Pandemic Patches (Katie McFall)

1. Residents of Rural Oregon Towns Ask Urban Dwellers to Stay

Home

Quote of the Week:

“Divide each difficulty into as many parts as if feasible and necessary to resolve it.”

- Rene Descartes

Oregon Fast Fact

Portland’s artists are varied and inspiring: Gus Van Sant, Matt Groening, Chuck Palahniuk, Beverly Cleary, Stephen Malkmus are all from Oregon!

Doug Hoschek has been counting cars in the driveways of Sunriver rental homes.

Hoschek is a full-time resident of the 1,400-person Deschutes County town, and he’s alarmed by an abundance of unfamiliar license plates.

He thinks some tourists are ignoring Gov. Kate Brown’s stay-at-home order, traveling to the popular vacation town and putting his older community in danger of a COVID-19 outbreak.

“There’s been enough Washington cars down here to choke a chicken,” Hoschek said. “What we hope will happen is, people will respect us as we respect them. We’re not getting in our cars and going over to Portland and checking into hotels.”

Despite Brown’s March 23 stay-at-home order and local government bans on short-term rentals, residents of Oregon’s rural and vacation communities say outsiders are still visiting — for day trips, or even longer stays, which enforcement might not catch.

To access the full story, click here.

2. US Supreme Court Ruling Ends Oregon’s Non-Unanimous Jury Convictions

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Monday that the U.S. Constitution requires unanimous jury verdicts to convict defendants in state criminal

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courts. The ruling in Ramos v. Louisiana not only overturns a previous Supreme Court ruling, but also ends Oregon’s history of using non-unanimous juries to find people guilty of crimes other than murder. In Oregon and Louisiana, the ruling could affect hundreds, if not thousands of defendants who are appealing their cases.

Specifically, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the 14th Amendment incorporates a person’s Sixth Amendment right to jury unanimity.

Oregon was the last state in the country that utilized a non-unanimous jury law, allowing convictions in many types of cases with an 11–1 or 10–2 decision.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Is it Time to Revive the Pattern Language?

Software and other fields have made brilliant progress with the pattern language methodology, while built environment fields lag badly, mired in parochial debates over the massive book that invented the methodology.

Although virtually everyone uses Wikipedia routinely today, it's remarkable how few know its surprising provenance in the world of planning and architecture.

Wiki, the methodology that powers Wikipedia, was invented by a computer scientist named Ward Cunningham to create a web-based system of the "pattern languages of programming"— an idea exported from architect Christopher Alexander's 1977 classic A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction.

Pattern languages are, at heart, nothing more than "a method of describing good design practices or patterns of useful organization within a field of expertise," as described by Wikipedia. The "pattern" encapsulates key relationships within the set of design elements, which, if configured in the "right" way, will produce the desired outcome. Each pattern typically includes a name, problem-statement, discussion conclusion, and hyperlinks.

To access the full story, click here.

4. To Cut Carbon Emissions, A Movement Grows to ‘Electrify Everything’

On March 24, just before the city council of Santa Cruz, California passed an emergency measure to prevent evictions of renters suffering from lost income during the coronavirus pandemic, it adopted another new ordinance: effective July 1, all construction permit applications for new buildings in the city must submit a declaration that their design is “Natural Gas-Free.”

With that vote, Santa Cruz became the 30th city or county in California to enact a measure limiting or prohibiting the use of natural gas in new construction. It was just the latest in a string of victories for the “electrify everything” movement, which is pushing for a rapid transition away from burning natural gas and other fossil fuels in buildings.

In the past year, gas bans have spread with a speed that has taken even some of its most ardent proponents by surprise. Last July, Berkeley became the first city to adopt an outright prohibition Page 2 of 5

on gas connections in most new buildings. A raft of other California cities followed with their own versions, including Menlo Park, home to some of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies, and San Jose, the tenth largest city in the nation. In November, the movement leapt beyond California when Brookline, a large suburb of Boston, became the first municipality in Massachusetts to pass an all-electric requirement for new buildings.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Coronavirus is Creating a Food Security Crisis in Indian Country

“There’s no way this is going to end well,” said Catherine Bryan, explaining the dire circumstances Native tribes are facing as coronavirus has taken hold in their communities. Bryan is the director of the Strengthening Tribal and Community Institutions program at the First Nations Development Institute (FNDI), a nonprofit grantmaking organization, and one of many people working to support Indigenous people on the frontlines of coronavirus.

As of today, there are more than 1,000 cases of COVID-19 in the Navajo Nation—the largest Indigenous reservation in the continent, spanning more than 17 million square miles of rural Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, with a population of more than 350,000 people. And so far, there have been 44 confirmed deaths. If the Navajo Nation were a U.S. state, it would rank behind only New York and New Jersey for per-capita confirmed cases.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Lessons from Pandemics: Comparing Urban and Rural Risks

According to popular culture, the best disaster survival plan is to isolate on a private island, mountain retreat or other rural property. For some people, preparing a secluded bunker with sufficient emergency supplies (“prepping”) is a hobby or business. However, for most households this is an ineffective and unrealistic response. Although an affluent and healthy individual with practical skills and anti-social tendencies may be happy and healthy in rural isolation, most people have responsibilities and dependencies, including work, caregiving, and personal needs, that require access to services, activities and other people, and after a few weeks of hiding alone would die of boredom. There are much better ways to prepare for pandemics and other health, environmental, and economic risks.

In fact, most people are far better off before, during and after a disaster living in an urban area that provides convenient access to essential services and activities than moving to an isolated rural area. Cities are significantly safer and healthier overall, resulting in lower mortality rates and longer lifespans than in rural area, as illustrated below. Rural residents have shorter lifespans due to higher rates of cardiovascular, respiratory and kidney diseases, unintentional injuries lung and colorectal cancer, suicide, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and birth defects.

These urban-rural differences are even greater for poor and minority groups.

To access the full story, click here.

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7. How to Make Your (Now Virtual) Event Shine

As in-person events get canceled in the shadow of COVID-19, the shift to online meetings is happening literally everywhere right now, from the halls of business and educational institutions to the performance venues and public spaces of our cultural establishments.

At Duarte Inc., we have helped public companies flip their large in-person conferences to virtual events, and we have built our own workshops in virtual format. So we know that for organizations getting into virtual presentations for the first time, a few basics are critical. You can move your event to the small screen without coming across as small time.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Rural Innovation in Quarantine: The Power of Virtual Events

Rural places are normally places of deep social connection, with strong communities and a powerful sense of caring for our neighbors. The COVID-related quarantine, by forcing people to stay home apart from friends and community members, has tugged at those bonds. But many rural leaders, determined to keep their communities connected and get through this crisis together, have discovered the power of virtual events.

Virtual events transcend geographic boundaries, allowing collaborators to meet and discuss ideas from anywhere in the world. They’re a way to keep people connected, to allow for the social exchanges that add an interest and spontaneity to our everyday lives that’s been lost in the routine of lockdown. And importantly for us here at CORI, virtual events give rural innovators an avenue to keep up their momentum, brainstorming and workshopping the ideas that will power our collective future.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Energy Equity: Bringing Solar Power to Low-Income Communities

Isbel “Izzy” Palans lives in a small cabin nestled among mountain peaks and towering trees in the Colorado Rockies. Her home is often shaded and, during the long winters, buried under heaps of snow. Her monthly utility bills show credits for solar electricity production, but no solar panels are affixed to her roof. Instead, the power comes from a solar array some 60 miles away in a nearby valley.

Last year, the panels nearly slashed her energy bill in half. “I’ve been thrilled,” said Palans, a 76year-old retired waitress who relies partly on Social Security benefits to make ends meet.

Palans is a subscriber to a 145-kilowatt solar array project run by Holy Cross Energy, a rural utility cooperative. Built with state funding, the program provides solar credits to more than 40 low-income households in western Colorado that otherwise wouldn’t have the financial or technical means to access renewable energy. The venture is just one of a growing number of socalled “community solar” projects across the United States focused on delivering renewable energy — and the cost-savings it can provide — to low-income households, from California to Minnesota to Massachusetts.

To access the full story, click here.

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10. What Covid is Exposing About the Climate Movement

Fifty years ago, 20 million Americans took to the streets for the first Earth Day, voting with their feet against the degradation of the planet. Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly captured the moment with his legendary anti-pollution poster: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

On Wednesday, environmentalists around the world will take to their keyboards for the 50th Earth Day, forced online by the coronavirus crisis but still dedicated to saving the planet from the slower-motion climate crisis. As the earth has begun to broil, though, the Earth Day movement has reshaped its narrative, arguing that the enemy isn’t really us.

In recent years, green activists have pivoted away from guilt-tripping us about our carbon footprints and embraced a more politically appealing message: Our personal choices don’t really matter, so we should stop worrying so much about what we eat or drive and whether we recycle or compost. The new environmentally correct message is that only large-scale political and institutional change can save the climate, so lecturing ordinary people about using plastic straws and other individual behaviors with relatively paltry climate impacts is a distraction from government policies and corporate abuses with catastrophic impacts.

In other words, if you care about the earth, you should focus on the damage being done to it by real enemies like President Donald Trump and ExxonMobil, not the damage being done to it by you.

To access the full story, click here.

11. OSU Master Gardeners Offer Tips as People Plant Pandemic Patches

Starting with the World War I, the U.S. government was encouraging Americans to grow their own food to help relieve shortages. Originally known as the war garden movement, these socalled “victory gardens” made a reappearance in the 1940s during World War II. And the idea of growing your own food is still popular — so popular, in fact, that Oregon State University has seen online enrollment for their Master Gardener Short Course Series jump by nearly a thousandfold.

“In a normal year, we might get 20 to 30 folks who will enroll in one of those short courses,” said Gail Langellotto, the program’s statewide coordinator and a horticulture professor at OSU. “But this year we have over 29,000 who registered for our vegetable gardening course alone.”

To access the full story, click here.

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