Monday Mailing 101419

Monday Mailing

Year 26 • Issue 6 14 October 2019 1. We Need Growth. But Only If It Generates Real Wealth.

2. Pacific Northwest Tribes Face Climate Change With Agricultural Ancient Practice (Katie McFall) 3. This Tiny Country Feeds the World (Katie McFall) 4. New Hiking Permits For Three Sisters, Mount Jefferson Proposed For $4 To $11 Per Day (Michael Hoch) 5. UO Researcher Offers Roadmap For Fixing Wildfire Management 6. 'Not One Drop Of Blood': Cattle Mysteriously Mutilated In Oregon (Katie McFall) 7. National Politics Put California’s Air Quality In The Crosshairs 8. No Youth Exodus From Cities: WSJ Is Detecting Noise, Not Signal 9. Activists Move To Put Climate Change Policy On The Ballot After Oregon Lawmakers Fail On Legislation 10. WEBINAR - Unlocking the Power of Your Data to Build Consensus

1. We Need Growth. But Only If It Generates Real Wealth.

We are the inheritors of a profound cultural misunderstanding about growth.

Quote of the Week:

“Please remember, especially in these times of group-think and the right-on chorus, that no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended.

– Alice Walker

Oregon Fast Fact #25

Eugene is rated by "Bicycling Magazine" as one of the top ten cycling communities in the United States.

Those born in much of the 20th century grew up immersed in the gospel of growth as an unqualified good—the simple result of the march of progress. The swelling suburbia of the postwar era was a self-evident good, mass car ownership a self-evident good, a rising stock market a self-evident good. We had more elbow room than our parents and their parents. We had ever-bigger houses, bigger yards, a higher material standard of living. And if we were uncomfortable with the way strip malls stomped across a oncepastoral landscape, we saw it as part and parcel of that same progress: This is the price of a society getting richer.

This post won't be devoted to refuting the gospel of growth-asprogress, because that would likely be preaching to the choir. It's not hard in 2019 to find people who have rejected the idea that a sane economic system can be premised on indefinite growth. The world millennials have grown up in is one in which economic recession, growing inequality, failing infrastructure and looming environmental catastrophe are the backdrop. And the hollowness of material affluence—its lack of connection to a meaningful, happy life, beyond a certain point of having enough to subsist comfortably—is, to many, more obvious truth than provocative heresy these days.

To access the full story, click here.

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2. Pacific Northwest Tribes Face Climate Change With Agricultural Ancient Practice Tribes in the Puget Sound region have a problem.

Many of them live on low-lying reservations surrounded by water. So, as climate change causes the oceans to rise, tribal land is disappearing. Climate change also threatens the fish and shellfish these groups rely on for food and income. Now, some tribes are looking at a surprising solution to these problems: clam gardens On a rocky beach on Whidbey Island — a densely forested island in Puget Sound — John Cayou watches for the telltale squirt that reveals a clam's location.

Then he takes what looks like a tiny pitchfork full of sand and rocks, turns it over, and tosses any clams he finds into a bucket.

Cayou's a member of the Swinomish Tribe. He's 72, and has been harvesting clams since he was a little kid.

He remembers a time when there were a lot more clams.

To access the full story, click here.

3. This Tiny Country Feeds the World

In a potato field near the Netherlands’ border with Belgium, Dutch farmer Jacob van den Borne is seated in the cabin of an immense harvester before an instrument panel worthy of the starship Enterprise.

From his perch 10 feet above the ground, he’s monitoring two drones—a driverless tractor roaming the fields and a quadcopter in the air—that provide detailed readings on soil chemistry, water content, nutrients, and growth, measuring the progress of every plant down to the individual potato. Van den Borne’s production numbers testify to the power of this “precision farming,” as it’s known. The global average yield of potatoes per acre is about nine tons. Van den Borne’s fields reliably produce more than 20.

That copious output is made all the more remarkable by the other side of the balance sheet: inputs. Almost two decades ago, the Dutch made a national commitment to sustainable agriculture under the rallying cry “Twice as much food using half as many resources.” Since 2000, van den Borne and many of his fellow farmers have reduced dependence on water for key crops by as much as 90 percent. They’ve almost completely eliminated the use of chemical pesticides on plants in greenhouses, and since 2009 Dutch poultry and livestock producers have cut their use of antibiotics by as much as 60 percent.

One more reason to marvel: The Netherlands is a small, densely populated country, with more than 1,300 inhabitants per square mile. It’s bereft of almost every resource long thought to be necessary for large-scale agriculture. Yet it’s the globe’s number two exporter of food as measured by value, second only to the United States, which has 270 times its landmass. How on Earth have the Dutch done it?

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To access the full story, click here.

4. New Hiking Permits For Three Sisters, Mount Jefferson Proposed For $4 To $11 Per Day Hiking and camping in three of Oregon's most popular wilderness areas will cost a bit more beginning in 2020.

Any overnight trip and some day-hikes would cost at least $4 to $11 for a permit to enter the Three Sisters, Mount Jefferson and Mount Washington wilderness areas, under a proposal from the U.S. Forest Service issued Tuesday.

But longer backpacking trips, especially with a family, could get a lot more expensive.

The cost is the final step in a years-long process intended to reduce crowds on 450,000 acres of Oregon’s most iconic backcountry by using a permit system to limit numbers.

The proposed fees break down this way: $5 per person, per night for an overnight group permit, plus a $6 processing fee. An individual day-use permit for 19 of the most popular trailheads would cost $3, plus a $1 processing fee.

No fee is required for those 12 years and under, but they would still need a permit.

Public comment on the cost of permits begins Wednesday and lasts until Nov. 25. The public can email comments to: WillametteRecFeeComments@usda.gov.

To access the full story, click here.

5. UO Researcher Offers Roadmap For Fixing Wildfire Management

As wildfire managers face increasing challenges brought about by climate change and increasing development in the wildland-urban interface, the most effective measures will be those that take a more collaborative approach to embracing and navigating the growing complexities.

That’s the message from two experts — including the University of Oregon’s Cassandra Moseley — who argue, in a Policy Forum article published in the Oct. 4 issue of the journal Science, that improved fire management will require attention to governance at multiple levels.

In the paper, "Collaborations and Capacities to Transform Fire Management,” Moseley and Courtney A. Schultz of Colorado State University take a 38,000-foot view of the lessons being learned from emerging fire management practices in the U.S. West.

They examine how widely agreed upon scientific recommendations of fire management are being carried out, look at some of the ways those recommendations are failing in practice, point to some examples of successful programs that are in existence and provide a framework for a new model of collective action to address the global challenge of living with wildfire.

To access the full story, click here.

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6. 'Not One Drop Of Blood': Cattle Mysteriously Mutilated In Oregon In the early morning light, dust from hooves creates a fog at Silvies Valley Ranch in remote eastern Oregon. Cowboys whistle and talk low to their eager herding dogs. They're moving the cattle from one vast, sage-studded range to another.

Five young purebred bulls mysteriously showed up dead on the ranch this past summer, drained of blood and with body parts precisely removed.

The ranch's vice president, Colby Marshall, drives his truck down a U.S. Forest Service road.

"Then we'll get out and take a little walk to where one of the bulls was found. And the carcass is still there," Marshall says.

Coming upon one of the dead bulls is an eerie scene. The forest is hot and still, apart from a raven's repeating caw. The bull looks like a giant, deflated plush toy. It smells. Weirdly, there are no signs of buzzards, coyotes or other scavengers. His red coat is as shiny as if he were going to the fair, but he's bloodless and his tongue and genitals have been surgically cut out.

Marshall says these young livestock were just reaching their top value as breeding bulls. The animals are worth around $6,000 each. And since these were breeding bulls, hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of future calves were lost too.

To access the full story, click here.

7. National Politics Put California’s Air Quality In The Crosshairs

Kieshaun White says that he doesn’t like to talk politics when it comes to the environment. He prefers to stick to the data.

A year ago, as a high school senior, he launched a network of air-pollution sensors and real-time app to monitor breathability around his native Fresno. White founded Healthy Fresno Air, using grant funds from the city’s Boys and Men of Color group, which was recently awarded $50,000 by former President Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative.

At first, he deployed a handful of monitors at high schools on Fresno’s heavily polluted southwest side; since then, he has expanded the network to other quadrants of the city. This spring, he launched a public-facing app that shows real-time information gathered by the sensors about levels of PM 2.5 and PM 10—the fine particulate matter (PM) that blow off freeways and smokestacks and into mouths and noses.

The aim is to provide students and school staff with accurate and up-to-date information about how safe it is for young people to be active outdoors. One in six children in the San Joaquin Valley suffer from asthma. So does White. “I’ve always felt it was on myself to do something,” says the 19-year-old.

But California’s air quality standards have become a major political football. Last month, the Trump administration moved to revoke the state’s ability to set its own, stricter vehicle emissions standards, which have been in place since the early days of the Clean Air Act. Days later, in a letter to the California Air Resources Board (CARB), which is the regulatory agency that Page 4 of 6

sets and enforces the state’s high standards for tailpipe emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency threatened to hold back billions in federal highway aid to the state. California, the EPA declared, has “the worst air quality in the United States.”

To access the full story, click here.

8. No Youth Exodus From Cities: WSJ Is Detecting Noise, Not Signal

There’s no statistically significant news on young adults in cities in the latest Census release Pro-tip: Ignore changes smaller than the margin of error: they’re noise, not signal It’s hard to underestimate the journalistic zeal to report a contrarian story. In the world of urbanism, a recent favorite has been “young adults are leaving cities.” We’ve repeatedly debunked previous iterations of this particular species of weed, but unsurprisingly, it’s back.

The Wall Street Journal’s Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg produced a provocative story last week: Young adults, they claim, are leaving the nation’s cities in “large numbers.” The on-line story is slugged: “Millennials Continue Their Exodus From Big U.S. Cities.” They write: Large U.S. cities lost tens of thousands of millennial and younger Gen X residents last year, according to Census figures released Thursday that offer fresh signs of cooling urban growth.

Cities with more than a half million people collectively lost almost 27,000 residents age 25 to 39 in 2018, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the figures.

The story drew on just-released data from the 2018 American Community Survey to compute the total number of 25 to 39 year-olds moving into and out of in cities with more than 500,000 residents in the past two years. The main finding: according to the WSJ analysis, the number of 25-39 year old residents declined by 27,000 in these cities between 2017 and 2018.

“Tens of thousands” sounds pretty impressive number, unless you understand that there are more than 10 million 25 to 39 year olds living in cities with a population of 500,000 or more.

(This basic contextual statistic is not included in the WSJ article.) So a decline of 27,000 represents a decrease on the order of one-quarter of one percent. That’s neither “large” nor “an exodus.”

To access the full story, click here.

9. Activists Move To Put Climate Change Policy On The Ballot After Oregon Lawmakers Fail On Legislation After failing to push a comprehensive climate policy through the Oregon Legislature last session, activists are taking their campaign to the ballot box in hopes of gaining leverage with lawmakers next year or backing from voters in the 2020 general election.

Renew Oregon, a coalition of organizations and businesses that support aggressive action on climate change, filed three proposed ballot measures Monday with the Oregon Secretary of State. They aim to establish hard limits on greenhouse gas emissions and force electric utilities to move to 100 percent renewable energy during the next two decades.

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Brad Reed, a spokesman for the group, said that after the failure of the so-called Clean Energy Jobs bill this spring, it doesn’t make sense to simply come back with similar cap and trade legislation backed by the same coalition and count on a different result. He said polling funded by his coalition shows that 60 to 70 percent of voters are ready to back climate change policy in Oregon, and if lawmakers won’t act, voters will.

To access the full story, click here.

10. WEBINAR - Unlocking the Power of Your Data to Build Consensus (Tuesday,

November 5, 2019 10am PST)

Data sharing and analysis can help break down silos and increase stakeholder engagement in agencies responsible for making safety decisions. This is particularly important in Vision Zero which emphasizes cross-agency and multisector coordination and participation to achieve a goal of zero traffic fatalities and severe injuries from crashes. Data analytics can facilitate this coordination by providing insights into existing and potential traffic scenarios that can help build consensus around investments that maximize safety. Learn from guest speakers from the New Jersey Division of Highway Traffic Safety and Numetric, which provides traffic safety analytic tools to state and local agencies, how data is being used to advance safety decisions across law enforcement agencies, municipal governments and nonprofit organizations.

To register for the webinar, click here.

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