Monday Mailing
Year 26 • Issue 4 30 September 2019 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
How To Be A Better Tourist (Katie McFall) Maywood Park: An Oregon City Within A City (Michael Hoch) Oregon Has A Mild Wildfire Season (Michael Hoch) The Klamath River Now Has The Legal Rights Of A Person Precarious Spot For Mobile Home Owners As Investors Swoop In Why Community-Owned Grocery Stores Like Co-Ops Are The Best Recipe For Revitalizing Food Deserts Scientists: Humans Are Rapidly Turning Oceans Into Warm, Acidifying Basins Hostile To Life (Michael Hoch) A Symphony For Policy Experimentation: The Innovation Quartet Real Native History In A Video Game: An Indigenous Take On The Oregon Trail WEBINAR - Radical Candor for Today’s Teams
1. How To Be A Better Tourist “More people are travelling – which is great! – but there are no hidden gems anymore.”
Quote of the Week: “Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.” – Elie Wiesel
Oregon Fast Fact #30 Silver Falls State Park is the Oregon's largest state park. It features 10 waterfalls and contains a wide variety of forested hiking trails.
That’s a comment I overheard waiting in an immigration queue in Dublin last month. The travellers were talking about Dubrovnik, and how crowded all destinations seem lately. The idea struck me in a weird way. Sure, more people are travelling than ever – which is good. People are broadening their horizons. But reducing destinations to an ever-shrinking collection of “hidden gems” to be ticked off a bucket list is the kind of attitude that’s fuelling overtourism. Over-tourism is a worldwide issue: Peru’s Machu Picchu. Scotland’s scenic Isle of Skye. Gion, Kyoto’s geisha district. Amsterdam’s Red Light district. The canals of Venice. California’s “super-blooming” poppy fields. The Louvre, which reopened late last month after a brief closure when employees walked out because of overwhelming crowds. Thailand’s Maya Bay, now closed to tourists indefinitely. All these places have been inundated by more tourists than they can handle, both domestic and foreign. Visitors are overcrowding, littering, acting drunk and lewd, causing environmental damage, failing to respect local culture, inappropriately touching or taking things and driving up rents. At the same time, no one should be discouraged from travelling. So how can you be a better tourist? To access the full story, click here.
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2. Maywood Park: An Oregon City Within A City Located inside Portland, tiny Maywood Park isn't a neighborhood — it's a city that formed when its residents battled the state over development. Today it lives on as a slice of old Portland. Matthew Castor walked the tree-lined streets of his quiet neighborhood in Northeast Portland one sunny Saturday in July. As he strolled, a pair of his Maywood Park neighbors stopped to bend his ear. One wanted to warn him about a possible beetle infestation in the neighborhood’s green space. Another neighbor wanted to share his concerns about recent traffic pattern changes the Portland Bureau of Transportation made to Northeast 102nd Avenue, which marks the eastern border of the neighborhood. On first look, Maywood Park is like many other neighborhoods in east Portland. It has a suburban vibe: large lots, wide streets, big shady trees, friendly neighbors. Electric scooters are few and far between. But Maywood Park has one key difference: It’s a city all its own. And Castor is the mayor. Tucked into the heart of east Portland, the city of Maywood Park was born out of a decade-plus battle to save itself from the jaws of development. To access the full story, click here.
3. Oregon Has A Mild Wildfire Season After two wildfire-filled seasons, Oregonians got a break this summer. Oregon’s fire season was the mildest since 2004 and the least expensive since 2010, according to statistics from the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center. The Statesman Journal reports that statewide, wildfires burned just 67,795 acres this year compared to 883,405 acres a year ago. Cost also plummeted, dropping to $58 million this year compared to a record-high $530 million in 2018. “This year was a relief,” said Dana Skelly, wildfire fuels manager for the U.S. Forest Service. “We had two really long and difficult years. It was nice to have a break.” One reason for the lack of wildfires was that Oregon’s forests never dried out to the level of the past two years, thanks to cooler temperatures and greater humidity, especially in the mountains. Even when wildfires ignited, “we never had a fire environment that was set up for explosive growth,” Skelly said.
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Fire danger is measured based on the “energy release component” in forests — how hot a forest is likely to burn. Three of the past five years, Oregon has been at the highest level of danger, while this year, “we were average or even below average most of the year,” Skelly said. To access the full story, click here.
4. The Klamath River Now Has The Legal Rights Of A Person This summer, the Yurok Tribe declared rights of personhood for the Klamath River — likely the first to do so for a river in North America. A concept previously restricted to humans (and corporations), “rights of personhood” means, most simply, that an individual or entity has rights, and they’re now being extended to nonhumans. The Yurok’s resolution, passed by the tribal council in May, comes during another difficult season for the Klamath; over the past few years, low water flows have caused high rates of disease in salmon, and cancelled fishing seasons. With the declaration, the Yurok Tribe joins other Indigenous communities in a growing Rights of Nature movement aimed at protecting the environment. Last year, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe adopted the Rights of Manoomin to protect wild rice — manoomin — and the freshwater sources it needs to survive in Minnesota. And in 2017, the New Zealand government adopted the Rights of the Whanganui River, stemming from a treaty process with Māori iwis, or tribes, that gives the river its own legal standing in court. “By granting the rights of personhood to the Klamath River, not only does it create laws and legal advocacy routes, but it’s also an expression of Yurok values,” says Geneva Thompson, associate general counsel for the tribe and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, who worked on the resolution. “The idea is that the laws of a nation are an expression of the nation’s values.” The Yurok resolution draws inspiration from the Rights of Manoomin, as well as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which enshrines the right of Indigenous people to conserve and protect their lands and resources. Legal personhood provides a different framework for dealing with problems like pollution, drought and climate change, though no case has yet been brought to put the Whanganui, Manoomin or Klamath rights to the test in court. The crucial aspect to establishing these legal frameworks, Indigenous lawyers say, involves shifting relationships and codifying Indigenous knowledge — in other words, recognizing nonhuman entities not as resources, but as rights-holders. To access the full story, click here.
5. Precarious Spot For Mobile Home Owners As Investors Swoop In When the time came for her to sell the mobile home park she and her son owned near Aspen, 89-year-old Harriett Noyes had two big offers and an even bigger decision: Take nearly $30 million from a developer who would likely evict her family and friends to build luxury homes, or sell to the county for a fraction of that to preserve affordable housing in one of the most expensive areas in the United States. She chose family and friends.
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“I could see the need for the people to have a place to live, and this was their life and they had homes,” said Noyes, who has lived in the Phillips Mobile Home Park for more than four decades. “I just didn’t have the heart to just jerk it out from under ’em.” Carved into a red-rock hillside along the banks of the Roaring Fork River in the mountains of western Colorado, the park is one of the last bastions of affordable housing in the area, which takes pride in its world-class skiing and is a veritable playground for the rich and the famous. Noyes and her son Hyrum, 61, sold the 76-acre park to Pitkin County for $6.5 million in 2018 with the promise of upgrades and to keep the community affordable. The deal preserved as affordable housing 35 mobile homes, four cabins and an old ranch house, according to The Aspen Times. Across the country, mobile home parks are an attractive investment. Tenants own their homes but not the land they sit on, and because the homes aren’t actually easy to move, are at the mercy of landlords, who can increase rents or sell the land out from under them. Some states are passing laws to increase protections for mobile home owners, while nonprofit groups are also stepping in to help residents facing rent hikes or evictions. To access the full story, click here. 6. Why Community-Owned Grocery Stores Like Co-Ops Are The Best Recipe For
Revitalizing Food Deserts Tens of millions of Americans go to bed hungry at some point every year. While poverty is the primary culprit, some blame food insecurity on the lack of grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods. That’s why cities, states and national leaders including former first lady Michelle Obama made eliminating so-called “food deserts” a priority in recent years. This prompted some of the biggest U.S. retailers, such as Walmart, SuperValu and Walgreens, to promise to open or expand stores in underserved areas. One problem is that many neighborhoods in inner cities fear gentrification, when big corporations swoop in with development plans. As a result, some new supermarkets never got past the planning stage or closed within a few months of opening because residents did not shop at the new store. To find out why some succeeded while others failed, three colleagues and I performed an exhaustive search for every supermarket that had plans to open in a food desert since 2000 and what happened. To access the full story, click here.
7. Scientists: Humans Are Rapidly Turning Oceans Into Warm, Acidifying Basins Hostile To Life Without the world’s oceans, climate change would actually be much worse. The oceans directly absorb about a quarter of the CO2 we have been spewing into the atmosphere. They also take Page 4 of 6
in most of the heat generated by global warming. And they have been a buffer against even greater warming. But though they protect us, the oceans also are in great distress, as a sweeping new report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change clearly shows. “The ocean has been acting like a sponge, absorbing heat and carbon dioxide to regulate global temperatures, but it can’t keep up,” IPCC vice chair Ko Barrett said at a press conference. “The world’s oceans and cryosphere have been taking the heat of climate change for decades. The consequences for nature and humanity are sweeping and severe.” On Wednesday, the IPCC, convened by the UN to assess climate science, released a summary of the report on the oceans and frozen regions of the world, or cryosphere, for policymakers after more than 100 scientists reviewed thousands of scientific papers. The findings are immense and comprehensive, and seeing them all in one place is sobering. In all, “over the 21st century, the ocean is projected to transition to unprecedented conditions,” the report warns. The ocean will be warmer, more acidic, hold less oxygen, be more greatly stratified (i.e. the top and bottom layers won’t mix as much). Ocean heat waves are growing more common, and it’s likely extreme El Niño and La Niña systems will form, leading to more extreme weather around the globe. To access the full story, click here.
8. Symphony For Policy Experimentation: The Innovation Quartet In a world of increasing automation and changing occupation schemes, interpersonal skills undoubtedly emerge as key determinants in our ability to cope. One of these essential skills is the ability to foster partnerships and collaborative problem solving, linked to traits such as empathy and adaptability. As our colleagues from the Inclusive Innovation team summarised it in a recent paper, “Theories of collective intelligence and cognitive diversity show that more diverse groups are better at solving problems." Collaboration is also key for innovation, since it allows us to look at challenges and opportunities from a different angle and come up with fresh ideas and a coordinated vision for change. Finally, collaboration is essential for our ability to put these ideas to the test: partnerships in policy experimentation allow players to combine their unique knowledge, skills and resources. While collaboration may sound like a simple quest, any of us who have ever worked in teams and tried to agree on a joint vision (or timeline) know that translating this into practice can be anything but straightforward. And while it may be challenging to foster collaboration between individuals, it is even trickier to create partnerships at organisation level, especially when these organisations are very different in nature, eg linked to different disciplines, sectors, or ecosystems. So what makes collaborations an undertaking worth pursuing despite the difficulties? We can gauge the potential gains from cross-sectoral collaborations by reviewing a recent successful example that involved partners from across the ecosystem. Our flagship example, presented later in detail, is the fruitful partnership between an NGO, MicroMentor (a programme of Mercy Corps), and academics from the University of Oregon and the Old Dominion University. This collaboration resulted in a randomised controlled trial, supported
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through the IGL Grants Programme, that unpacked the black box of matchmaking on an online mentoring platform for small businesses. To access the full story, click here.
9. Real Native History In A Video Game: An Indigenous Take On The Oregon Trail 20 Indigenous writers and music by Supaman and Michael Charette combine efforts to create a decision-based roleplaying game, 'When Rivers Were Trails' While the popular Oregon Trail series computer game of the 1980s and ’90s had narratives from the point of view of settlers traveling from Independence, Missouri to Oregon, it neglected the stories of the very people who lived on those lands. ot The original "The Oregon Trail" game. Enter a new game: When Rivers Were Trails, a Native-themed decision-based roleplaying video game created with the help of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation and Michigan State University’s Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab and financial support from the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians. The game came together due to the contributions of indigenous artist Weshoyot Alvitre, 20 indigenous writers, and thematic music by artists Supaman and Michael Charette. In the game, an Anishinaabeg player in the 1890s is displaced from Fond du Lac in Minnesota due to the impact of land allotments. They make their way to the Northwest and eventually venture into California. To access the full story, click here. 10. WEBINAR - Radical Candor for Today’s Teams (Thursday, October 3, 2019 8am PDT) New ways of working require a whole new suite of performance development tools. Feedback, leaders have realized, needs to be immediate, frequent, and frank. And, leaders are also welcoming diversity and inclusion as mandates that lead to more effective and creative teams. How do these two concepts work together for optimal performance development? Please join Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor, and MIT SMR guest editor Michael Schrage as they discuss the concept of radical candor in today's environment of data-driven performance management, AI-fueled PM tools, and sensitivities around diversity and inclusion. In this webinar, you’ll learn: • What is—and most definitely is NOT—Radical Candor • How to incorporate Radical Candor into your performance development processes • How to balance candor and sensitivity with employees • Where the Radical Candor journey can go astray, and how to recover To register for the webinar, click here.
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