Monday Mailing 072219

Monday Mailing

Year 25 • Issue 43 22 July 2019 1. Surveillance Cameras Debunk the Bystander Effect 2. The Regime Of Glaciers Is Headed To Its End 3. Study Makes Case for High-Speed Rail in Pacific Northwest (Gabriel Leon) 4. 'Climate Despair' Is Making People Give Up on Life (Michael Hoch) 5. Farming’s Economic Troubles Go Much Deeper Than Floodwaters 6. The Future of the City Is Childless (Gabriel Leon) 7. Lack Of Broadband Puts Tribal, Rural Areas ‘In Jeopardy,’ Lawmakers Told 8. The Status Quo Is A Choice, Too 9. USDA Agency’s Relocation Could Affect Grantmaking Abilities, Union Says 10. Food Justice Voices: Solidarity, Education and Action! Comedores Sociales: An Emerging Movement In Puerto Rico

1. Surveillance Cameras Debunk the Bystander Effect

It’s one of the most enduring urban myths of all: If you get in trouble, don’t count on anyone nearby to help. Research dating back to the late 1960s documents how the great majority of people who witness crimes or violent behavior refuse to intervene.

Quote of the Week:

“Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you; spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life.”

- Amy Poehler

Oregon Fast Fact #27

Portland is an example of outstanding urban planning.

The city is known as The City of Roses.

Psychologists dubbed this non-response as the “bystander effect”— a phenomenon which has been replicated in scores of subsequent psychological studies. The “bystander effect” holds that the reason people don’t intervene is because we look to one another. The presence of many bystanders diffuses our own sense of personal responsibility, leading people to essentially do nothing and wait for someone else to jump in.

Past studies have used police reports to estimate the effect, but results ranged from 11 percent to 74 percent of incidents being interventions. Now, widespread surveillance cameras allow for a new method to assess real-life human interactions. A new study published this year in the American Psychologist finds that this wellestablished bystander effect may largely be a myth. The study uses footage of more than 200 incidents from surveillance cameras in Amsterdam; Cape Town; and Lancaster, England.

Researchers watched footage and coded the nature of the conflict, the number of direct participants in it, and the number of bystanders. Bystanders were defined as intervening if they attempted a variety of acts, including pacifying gestures, calming touches, blocking contact between parties, consoling victims of aggression, providing practical help to a physical harmed victim, or holding, pushing, or pulling an aggressor away. Each event had an

Page 1 of 7

average of 16 bystanders and lasted slightly more than three minutes.

The study finds that in nine out of 10 incidents, at least one bystander intervened, with an average of 3.8 interveners. There was also no significant difference across the three countries and cities, even though they differ greatly in levels of crime and violence.

To access the full story, click here.

2. The Regime Of Glaciers Is Headed To Its End

Walking the icy flanks of Mount Baker — an active volcano in Washington State and one of the highest peaks in the Cascade Range — is probably one of most untainted wilderness experiences. And yet, it feels profoundly unnatural to me as I trudge up an oblique sheet of ice with crampons lashed to my boots and an ice axe hefty enough to clobber a mountain goat or a yeti gripped tightly in one hand. When I stop to fumble with my backpack and readjust my borrowed, baggy rain pants, which are failing to keep moisture from penetrating the innermost layers of my clothing, Mauri Pelto, the glaciologist who has brought me here, offers me a reprieve. “As we head into this icefall, you have to let me know,” he says quietly. “Maybe it’s just not the place for you.”

I have been asking myself this — whether this field of ice, known as the Easton Glacier, is the place for me — since the evening before, when I tried to navigate what Pelto had described as an easy jaunt to his camp more than a kilometer up a stream channel only to find myself stumbling across an obstacle course of mud, boulders, dense clusters of alder saplings, and glacial till. When I finally located his crew’s two tents well after nightfall (which, on an early August evening, arrived just before 9:00 p.m.), Pelto called out casually from inside one of them without disengaging from his sleeping bag: “Welcome to camp.” Then this morning, when we set out in the rain and I saw the glowing blue and gray leviathan of the Easton Glacier looming through the clouds, doubts churned in my stomach.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Study Makes Case for High-Speed Rail in Pacific Northwest

The collapse of the California High-Speed Rail project hasn’t killed all prospects for high-speed trains connecting cities on the Pacific coast. A study conducted by two U.S. states and one Canadian province holds out the possibility that we could see trains zipping between Portland, Seattle and Vancouver at 200-plus miles per hour sometime in the future.

The International Railway Journal reports that a year-long feasibility study released July 15 projects that anywhere from 1.7 million to 3.1 million people would ride a high-speed rail line connecting the three principal cities of the Pacific Northwest in its first year of operation. That would produce operating revenues ranging from $160 million to $250 million in the first year.

The study concluded that the line would bring in enough fare revenue to cover operating costs over the 40-year operating period the study examined.

A 350-km/h (217-mph) high-speed line would cut Seattle-Portland and Seattle-Vancouver travel times to an hour each. It could be built within the $24-42 billion construction budget identified Page 2 of 7

in a feasibility study two years ago. The study assumed work would begin on the line in 2027 and that it would open for revenue service in 2034.

The study, which was conducted by the Washington State Department of Transportation in partnership with the Oregon Department of Transportation, the Province of British Columbia and Microsoft, recommended that the three governments set up a steering committee composed of representatives of each state and province. The committee would address issues of governance, operating structure and contracting and identify possible legal obstacles to the project’s advancement.

To access the full story, click here.

4. 'Climate Despair' Is Making People Give Up on Life In the summer of 2015—the warmest year on record at the time—it was the literal heat that got to Meg Ruttan Walker, a 37-year-old former teacher in Kitchener, Ontario. "Summers have been stressful to me since having my son," said Ruttan Walker, who is now an environmental activist.

"It's hard to enjoy a season that's a constant reminder that the world is getting warmer."

"I think my anxiety just reached a peak," Ruttan Walker continued. It felt like there was nowhere to go, and although she had spoken to her primary care doctor about anxiety, she hadn't sought help with her mental health. Suddenly, she was contemplating self-harm. "Though I don't think I would have hurt myself, I didn't know how to live with the fear of... the apocalypse, I guess? My son was home with me and I had to call my friend over to watch him because I couldn't even look at him without breaking down," Ruttan Walker said. She eventually checked herself into an overnight mental health facility.

Her case is extreme, but many people are suffering from what could be called "climate despair," a sense that climate change is an unstoppable force that will render humanity extinct and renders life in the meantime futile. As David Wallace-Wells noted in his 2019 bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth, "For most who perceive an already unfolding climate crisis and intuit a more complete metamorphosis of the world to come, the vision is a bleak one, often pieced together from perennial eschatological imagery inherited from existing apocalyptic texts like the Book of Revelation, the inescapable sourcebook for Western anxiety about the end of the world."

"Climate despair" has been a phrase used at least as far back as Eric Pooley's 2010 book, The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth, but it's been in wide circulation for perhaps as little as two years. In more progressive Sweden, the term klimatångest has been popular since at least 2011 (the year a Wikipedia article with that name was created). In The Uninhabitable Earth, Wallace-Wells notes that the philosopher Wendy Lynne Lee calls this phenomenon "eco-nihilism," the Canadian politician and activist Stuart Parker prefers "climate nihilism," and others have tried out terms like "human futilitarianism."

To access the full story, click here.

Page 3 of 7

5. Farming’s Economic Troubles Go Much Deeper Than Floodwaters

Land isn’t the only thing submerged in the continued flooding that inundates parts of the Midwest.

Also down in the depths where no one can see it is the real story about what’s happening in the nation’s farm economy, according to John Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union.

“I’ve yet to speak with anyone in the media who wants to dig any deeper than the floods and trade wars,” Hansen said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “The truth is, these floods are just revealing the real story about the agricultural economy. Farmers aren’t in any shape to take this kind of hit.”

Since February, Hansen has fielded dozens of calls from journalists covering the devastating spring floods throughout Nebraska, Iowa and Northwest Missouri. While Nebraska Farmers Union and partner organizations have helped farmers and other rural residents respond to the flooding disasters, Hansen feels that national media coverage has been too narrow.

Hansen said that overproduction of certain crops, low prices paid to farmers, corporate concentration, trade policy and underfunded or poorly-managed rural infrastructure were all pre-existing problems that the flooding intensified.

“Before the flood, before the tariffs, the Nebraska Rural Response Hotline had set monthly records for calls from farmers in crisis. This is the oldest national continuously operated farm crisis response hotline in the country.” The Nebraska Rural Response Hotline (1-800-464-0258) is a service of the Farm Crisis Response Council, where Hansen is a board member. Farmers, ranchers or rural people who call the hotline speak with staff who refer callers to attorneys, financial counselors, clergy, other farmers and mediators.

To access the full story, click here.

6. The Future of the City Is Childless A few years ago, I lived in a walkup apartment in the East Village of New York. Every so often descending the stairway, I would catch a glimpse of a particular family with young children in its Sisyphean attempts to reach the fourth floor. The mom would fold the stroller to the size of a boogie board, then drag it behind her with her right hand, while cradling the younger and typically crying child in the crook of her left arm. Meanwhile, she would shout hygiene instructions in the direction of the older child, who would slap both hands against every other grimy step to use her little arms as leverage, like an adult negotiating the bolder steps of Machu Picchu. It looked like hell—or, as I once suggested to a roommate, a carefully staged public service announcement against family formation.

Apparently, the public got the message. Last year, for the first time in four decades, something strange happened in New York City. In a non-recession year, it shrank.

We are supposedly living in the golden age of the American metropolis, with the same story playing out across the country. Dirty and violent downtowns typified by the “mean streets” of

Page 4 of 7

the 1970s became clean and safe in the 1990s. Young college graduates flocked to brunchable neighborhoods in the 2000s, and rich companies followed them with downtown offices.

To access the full story, click here.

7. Lack Of Broadband Puts Tribal, Rural Areas ‘In Jeopardy,’ Lawmakers Told

WASHINGTON – The Havasupai tribe is falling behind in education, health and emergency needs because, like many rural communities, it lacks affordable, reliable and high-speed broadband, a tribal councilwoman told a House committee Thursday.

Ophelia Watahomigie-Corliss was one of several witnesses who said rural areas are “in jeopardy” of being left behind without the high-speed internet access of broadband, which is used for everything from telemedicine to distance learning to up-to-the-minute market reports for farmers.

“Community members can better their lives and their education through future broadband expansion,” Watahomigie-Corliss said in testimony prepared for a House Agriculture subcommittee.

“These services that ordinary Americans have been using for the past 20 years are still not a reality for my entire community, but this is the first glimmer of hope we have seen for decades,” she said of gain the tribe has made recently after decades of effort.

The Havasupai are among 24 million Americans in rural communities that lack infrastructure for high-speed broadband that is “critical to survival,” said Rep. Austin Scott, R-Georgia.

“Big data and artificial intelligence, cloud storage and computing, the internet of things and data analytics, telemedicine, and other modern tools cannot be replicated without broadband access to the Internet,” he said.

To access the full story, click here.

8. The Status Quo Is A Choice, Too

The Wall Street Journal recently reported some truly depressing statistics about black homeownership in America, which has fallen to the lowest rate on record. Yes, in 2019.

While Hispanic homeownership rate is on the rise, the black homeownership rate has fallen 8.6 percentage points since its peak in 2004, hitting its lowest level on record in the first quarter of this year, according to census data.... Analysts say black communities have struggled to recover financially since the housing crisis, which has kept homeownership out of reach.

The news gets worse, at least for anyone who thinks that the opportunity to save for retirement and build intergenerational wealth, as white Americans have largely been able to do (with homeownership as the most prominent mechanism), should be available in equal measure to other Americans, too: Homes in neighborhoods with a high concentration of white borrowers on average have seen their homes appreciate 3% from 2006 through 2017, according to the study. However, homes in Page 5 of 7

neighborhoods with a concentration of black borrowers on average are worth 6% less than they were in 2006. High-income black borrowers have concentrated in neighborhoods where homes have lost 2% of their value, compared with white borrowers, who have concentrated in neighborhoods where homes have appreciated 5%.

I think about statistics like this when I think about a common critique of zoning reform to allow more homes in more places, which is that we don't know how it will affect vulnerable communities: low-income people, people of color, and people in gentrifying areas susceptible to displacement. In California, this has been a flash point in the debate around the dead-for-now statewide upzoning bill, SB50, which would have required cities to allow a much greater density of homes near transit stations. In Austin, Texas, anti-displacement activists and wealthy homeowners alike helped kill a zoning code overhaul, CodeNEXT, in 2018. Many of them focused on the uncertainty about CodeNEXT's future effects—even while pro-CodeNEXT advocates observed that the existing system in Austin “has been a major catalyst for gentrification and displacement.”

To access the full story, click here.

9. USDA Agency’s Relocation Could Affect Grantmaking Abilities, Union Says

The National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) will lose so many employees in its move to Kansas City that it could affect its ability to distribute grants to land-grant universities and other institutions, according to a press release from the union that represents NIFA workers.

The American Federation of Government Employees, which NIFA workers voted overwhelmingly to join last month, says that up to 70 percent of the institute’s workers might quit rather than make a permanent move from Washington, D.C., to the Kansas City area.

The union’s press release says the institute will experience “catastrophic employee attrition” as a result of the move. The USDA has not released any figures on employee attrition. Workers have until July 15 to decide whether to make the move.

“Moving a granting agency at the end of the fiscal year will have a detrimental impact on getting grant money out the door to our stakeholders,” said Wesley Dean, the acting vice president of Local 3403 for NIFA, in the press release. “Our staff, with all their years of experience, are leaving for other agencies. We should be focused on this, rather than hastily moving the agency.”

In 2018, NIFA distributed nearly $1.5 billion in grants, primarily to universities. The grants went to research projects and institutions in about half of all U.S. congressional districts, according to the agency’s website.

Current funding opportunities highlighted on the agency’s website include support for workforce development and family services for military families, building stronger university agriculture programs, and helping farmers who are experiencing mental health crises.

To access the full story, click here.

Page 6 of 7

10. Food Justice Voices: Solidarity, Education and Action! Comedores Sociales: An

Emerging Movement In Puerto Rico

We are excited to continue our powerful Food Justice Voices series with Comedores Sociales: An Emerging Movement in Puerto Rico. Food Justice Voices is intended to amplify the voices and experiences of grassroots leaders that aren’t heard enough, while creating awareness and educating readers on various issues connected to hunger and poverty. In this latest issue Giovanni Roberto, a social activist and organizer for the Center for Political, Educational and Cultural Development (CDPEC) and the Community Kitchens Project of Puerto Rico (Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico), tells the story of the emergence of student-to-student, community-tocommunity feeding centers – a personal and political story of ingenuity and resistance.

Giovanni describes how poverty and hunger were rampant in Puerto Rico even before Hurricane Maria and Irma devastated the island in 2017. When he was a child, Giovanni’s family struggled to make ends meet and consistently access food. Then in 2013 he saw his fellow students’ struggling to maintain nutritious and affordable diets on a student budget. Driven by his experiences, Giovanni set up donation-based food stands at the University of Puerto Rico campus and other locations throughout the island. The initiative eventually grew until it became about more than just nourishing hungry people to a political project to mobilize for the right to nutritious food and to improve the overall social conditions of Puerto Ricans.

“Though our models and processes varied, we all shared a common understanding that the work was not about charity, but about building solidarity among the people of Puerto Rico.” – Giovanni Roberto To access the full story, click here.

Page 7 of 7