Monday Mailing 060319

Monday Mailing

Year 25 • Issue 36 3 June 2019 1.

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Quote of the Week:

"In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.”

- Aldo Leopold

Oregon Fast Fact #8

At 329 feet the Coast Douglas-Fir in Oregon is considered the tallest tree in the state.

Green Organizations Are Dropping the Ball On Inclusion (Sienna Fitzpatrick) Community Connector (Michael Walker) California Approves Wide Power Outages To Prevent Wildfires The Struggle Of “Eating Well” When You’re Poor Why America’s New Apartment Buildings All Look The Same (Gabriel Leon) Lobbying Against Key US Climate Regulations ‘Cost Society $60bn,’ Study Finds (Michael Hoch) How Chicago’s South Side Is Creating The ‘Un’ High Line (Bayoán Ware) Oregon Sen. Merkley introduces bill for new wilderness at Painted Hills, Sutton Mountain (Michael Hoch) RESOURCE: Beyond Diversity – A Roadmap To Building An Inclusive Organization (Sienna Fitzpatrick) RESOURCE: The ABCs Of ADUs

1. Green Organizations Are Dropping the Ball On Inclusion Back in the early 1980s, during an undergraduate environmental studies class, Dorceta Taylor asked a question that would whisk her onto a path leading, in recent years, to groundbreaking research on diversity in environmental organizations.

Taylor realized about midway through the course at Northern Illinois University that she was the only nonwhite person in it. She asked her professor why during class one day.

“There are no other black students in the course,” Taylor recalls the professor replying, “because blacks are not interested in the environment.”

Taylor was aghast. Her native Jamaica is a black nation where environmental studies and concerns are embedded in daily life. She thought her professor was an idiot and went to the library to prove it. But after pulling every article she could find about black people and the environment, Taylor was shocked at her findings: They all said the exact same thing her professor had.

“I realized, oh my god, this is a body of thought,” Taylor says. “And for the first time, I had this out-of-body experience that I’m black and not supposed to do environment. And I’m not supposed to be good at it. But I still had this nagging feeling that said, ‘You guys are wrong.’”

To access the full story, click here.

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2. Community Connector A net-neutrality activist is pioneering cheap, fast internet in a rural Oregon town. Could this be a solution to bridging the digital divide?

One rainy spring day in the small logging town of Clatskanie (pop. 1,800), near the Columbia River, Linda Depersis expertly finished assembling a bouquet of flowers inside her store on the town’s main street. Selling flower arrangements is the mainstay of her business, and like many small retailers, she relies on the payment platform Square to process credit- and debit-card payments.

While payment-processing software has progressed by leaps and bounds, for a long time her internet connectivity had not. Depersis needs a reliable connection to process payments through the Square software, as well as at her home, where she uploads pictures of flowers to sell online. Living in a rural area, where internet service providers often lack financial incentives to upgrade infrastructure, she has often had to put up with a slow and expensive connection.

As luck would have it, Depersis’s shop is located just a few hundred feet from a computer repair store that is the hub of a pioneering project to offer cheap and fast broadband through a decentralized internet service. The purveyor of the technology is Deborah Simpier, co-founder and chief operating officer of Althea, a startup that has chosen Clatskanie to launch its first U.S. autonomous-bandwidth market.

At the heart of Althea’s business is special software the founders created, which runs on routers. This software allows routers inside a network to pay each other for bandwidth. The routers send internet traffic along the cheapest and most efficient route available, helping to keep down costs for internet.

To access the full story, click here.

3. California Approves Wide Power Outages To Prevent Wildfires

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California regulators on Thursday approved allowing utilities to cut off electricity to possibly hundreds of thousands of customers to avoid catastrophic wildfires like the one sparked by power lines last year that killed 85 people and largely destroyed the city of Paradise.

Utilities' liability can reach billions of dollars, and after several years of devastating wildfires, they asked regulators to allow them to pull the plug when fire risk is extremely high. That's mainly during periods of excessive winds and low humidity when vegetation is dried out and can easily ignite.

The California Public Utilities Commission gave the green light but said utilities must do a better job educating and notifying the public, particularly those with disabilities and others who are vulnerable, and ramp up preventive efforts, such as clearing brush and installing fire-resistant poles.

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The plans could inconvenience hundreds of thousands of customers while endangering some who depend on electricity to keep them alive, like 56-year-old Kallithea Miller.

Although she lives far from wildfire danger near a shopping mall in Stockton, south of Sacramento, she relies on a refrigerator to cool her insulin and a machine to keep her breathing at night.

To access the full story, click here.

4. The Struggle of “Eating Well” When You’re Poor I unfurl a bag of chips, barefoot and alone. I keep the lights out. I drop my shoulders, bend my neck forward, and allow my mouth to be happy when it meets the salt and the grease. I eat one chip, then two, then the entire bag. Eating satiates nothing; not my hunger, nor my sadness. I close cupboards quietly, open the microwave before it beeps. When I am done, my stomach is distended with bloat. The next day, I know, my fingers will be swollen from all of the salt. With enough sugar, a patch of bright acne will sprout around my mouth and chin. At first, I cover it with concealer. Before long, I leave my skin how I feel: angry, red hot with loneliness. In the months following my grandmother’s death, I repeat this process: I try cookies, spoonfuls of peanut butter, an entire sleeve of crackers, rum balls with too much liquor, frozen pizzas that melt and burn in my microwave. Nothing works.

For the first time, I want food to bring me home: not to her kitchen, where we rarely turned on the oven to cook, but to our small town’s greasy diner, where once every summer—because that’s how often we could afford it—we shared a plate of fried clams and french fries. I want food to bring me home to the gas station where I walked most afternoons after school and bought a slushie and stained my tongue blue.

I search my cupboards, then the fridge, then the freezer. In the morning, I will drink black coffee and eat the tartest tangerine I can find. Later, it will be vegan pad Thai, farm-to-table tacos, or a wood-fired pizza that costs four times as much as the one in my freezer. I’ve spent my adult life hungering for these foods, not just for their taste, but for their status. In the months following my grandmother’s death, these meals make me feel like an imposter.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Why America’s New Apartment Buildings All Look The Same

These buildings are in almost every U.S. city. They range from three to seven stories tall and can stretch for blocks. They’re usually full of rental apartments, but they can also house college dorms, condominiums, hotels, or assisted-living facilities. Close to city centers, they tend toward a blocky, often colorful modernism; out in the suburbs, their architecture is more likely to feature peaked roofs and historical motifs. Their outer walls are covered with fiber cement, metal, stucco, or bricks.

They really are everywhere, I discovered on a cross-country drive last fall, and they’re going up fast. In 2017, 187,000 new housing units were completed in buildings of 50 units or more in the U.S., the most since the Census Bureau started keeping track in 1972. By my informal massaging of the data, well over half of those were in blocky mid-rises.

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These structures’ proliferation is one of the most dramatic changes to the country’s built environment in decades. Yet when I started asking around about them, they didn’t seem to have a name. I encountered someone calling them “stumpies” in a website comment, but that sadly hasn’t caught on. It was only after a developer described the style to me as five-over-one—five stories of apartments over a ground-floor “podium” of parking and/or retail—that I was able to find some online discussion of the phenomenon.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Lobbying Against Key US Climate Regulations ‘Cost Society $60bn,’ Study Finds Political lobbying in the US that helped block the progress of proposed climate regulation a decade ago led to a social cost of $60bn, according to a new study.

Environmental economists Dr Kyle Meng and Dr Ashwin Rode have produced what they believe is the first attempt to quantify the toll such anti-climate lobbying efforts take on society.

The pair say their work reveals the power firms can have in curtailing government action on climate change, in the face of “overwhelming evidence” that its social benefits outweigh the costs, which range from reduced farming yields to lower GDP. Crucially, they found that the various fossil-fuel and transport companies expecting to emerge as “losers” after the bill were more effective lobbyists than those expecting gains.

The authors say their results, published in Nature Climate Change, support the conclusion that lobbying is partly responsible for the scarcity of climate regulations being enacted around the world.

However, they tell Carbon Brief that there is still hope for those seeking to develop effective new climate policies: “Our bottom line is: climate policy emerges from a political process. We’ve shown that this political process can undermine the chances of passing climate policy. But we’ve also shown that careful design of climate policy can help make it more politically robust to opposition.”

To access the full story, click here.

7. How Chicago’s South Side Is Creating The ‘Un’ High Line

Englewood, in Chicago’s South Side, is only a few miles south of downtown, but in many ways, an entire world away. The city’s glittering skyscrapers are not to be found here. Large parcels of vacant land interspersed with residential, commercial and industrial buildings are indicative of the effects of decades of disinvestment and population loss.

Since hitting its peak population in 1960, the Englewood and West Englewood neighborhoods have lost approximately two-thirds of their population. More than 40 percent of the population has incomes below the poverty line, and one out of every five individuals is unemployed.

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“The recession of 2007-08 decimated many of the homeowners who were left here,” says Anton Seals, lead steward of Grow Greater Englewood, an organization that works with residents in Englewood to create and maintain green business enterprises and sustainable food economies.

Besides Grow Greater Englewood’s food-focused mission, the organization is developing the Englewood Line Trail — converting a two-mile stretch of an abandoned elevated railway line into a linear park. There would be walking and biking opportunities, urban farming plots, and places for kids to play.

But unlike the most famous linear park in the country — and unlike Chicago’s own 606 trail — Grow Greater Englewood plans to create the Englewood trail for and with existing residents.

“We’re … trying to … create spaces, a black space in particular where parents can bring their children to one, return and get closer to nature and learn about food. But [the trail would also include] places where they can have fun, where technology and energy are integrated into these spaces.” says Seals.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Oregon Sen. Merkley Introduces Bill For New Wilderness At Painted Hills, Sutton Mountain

Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley is taking another swing at adding wilderness protections to a large mountain above the Painted Hills near Mitchell in Eastern Oregon.

The bill, introduced Wednesday, would establish 58,000 acres of wilderness on Sutton Mountain while also transferring 2,000 acres of federal land to the city of Mitchell for economic development.

It’s the second time Merkley has introduced the legislation. The bill failed to get much traction the first time around in 2015, even though it generated a unique amount of approval in deep red Wheeler County, with both the county commissioners and city council endorsing the measure.

“With this legislation, we’ll make sure that future generations will be able to experience some of Oregon’s most incredible landmarks—while also creating jobs and economic opportunities in the county now,” Merkley said.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Resource: Beyond Diversity – A Roadmap To Building An Inclusive Organization

The increasingly diverse demographics of the United States and the rising share of educational and consequent financial capital possessed by people of color are beginning to force organizations across sectors to rethink models of success and how to ensure sustainability in the future. In the environmental sector, organizations are turning attention to diversifying management and leadership to better reflect the constituencies they serve. In order to do this effectively, mainstream environmental organizations must institute readiness, recruitment, and retention (3Rs) practices that integrate diversity, equity and inclusion into their mission and work. In terms of diversity, equity and inclusion, readiness refers to an organization’s capacity Page 5 of 6

and preparedness to foster diverse viewpoints, support employees and partner organizations through inclusive and equitable practices and culture. Recruitment means the active procurement of diverse talent pools, and retention means building meaningful pathways to promotion and building affinity within the organization so that all differences are valued. 3R best practices are the tools by which an organization meets its diversity challenges, especially at the highest levels, and transforms into a truly inclusive work culture. 3R practices are critical to organizations remaining relevant and developing sustainable solutions to our most pressing environmental problems.

This Report Research on readiness, recruitment, and retention practices among environmental NGOs and foundations has been limited, with virtually no examination of how these practices increase diversity and which specific practices used by these organizations are most effective. In this study, we examine these practices, collected through 85 in-depth interviews and surveys with CEOs, COOs and HR Directors of major U.S.-based environmental NGOs and foundations. Where appropriate, we also present relevant research from diversity studies outside the environmental movement.

A significant aspect of this research includes interviews with consultants from blue chip and boutique executive search firms identified as having been used frequently by environmental organizations in the recent past. Some analysis of that research is included here, and a more thorough examination of executive search practices and their efficacy in diversifying the C-Suites of environmental NGOs and their funders is captured in a separate report, Diversity Derailed: Limited Demand, Effort and Results in Environmental C-Suite Searches (2016).

To access the full report, click here.

10. RESOURCE: The ABCs OF ADUs As small houses or apartments that exist on the same property lot as a single-family residence, accessory dwelling units — or ADUs — play a major role in serving a national housing need. This traditional home type is re-emerging as an affordable and flexible housing option that meets the needs of older adults and young families alike.

The ABCs of ADUs is a primer for elected officials, policymakers, local leaders, homeowners, consumers and others to learn what accessory dwelling units are and how and why they are built. The guide also suggests best practices for how towns, cities, counties and states can include ADUs in their mix of housing options.

To access the resource, click here.

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