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Dribs
and Drabs It's gettin' steamy in Salem, and I ain't talkin' about the weather. We've been in session now for 200 days with no end in sight. I hope it's not too late to resuscitate Admiral "Pointyheaded" Poindexter's novel creation: DARPA. His Pentagon office — Defense Advance Research Projects Agency — created the Policy Analysis Market: an online futures market in which speculators bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups. Boy, could we use that in Salem! Maybe someone will predict when the hostage situation in the Legislature will end. Or figure out when to overthrow the theocratic minority who's destroying education and human services in Salem. And we could make money off it besides: pork bellies when pigs fly! The only thing that could prolong this session any further would be a recall effort of Gov. Kulongoski (just kidding: witness California). The enviros are so mad at the governor right now; they'd probably consider it. The pesticide use reporting system appears to be headed for total de-funding this biennium, which means that a reporting law that has been in statute since 1999 will not be enforced. Most of the blame can be laid at the foot of Paulette "Pesticide Queen" Pyle of Oregonians for Food and Shelter. But the governor is also catching some heat for his lack of support of the program. Senate Bill 752: two cops, no stereotypes. At the request of the Attorney General's Sexual Assault Task Force, a fund was established to provide for medical assessment of rape victims, including emergency contraception. Senate Judiciary Chair John Minnis, a Portland cop, amended out the emergency contraception in his committee, probably because of his religious convictions. The Senate voted unanimously to send the bill over to the House anyway, just to keep it alive. Enter freshman Rep. Jeff Barker, a retired Portland cop. He amended the bill to reinsert language including emergency contraception in the definition of "medical assessment." The bill passed the House 49-4, with only the ultraconservatives (Betsy Close, Cliff Zauner and two Smiths) voting against it. Ironically, even the speaker, the spouse of Senator Minnis, voted for it. But because it was amended in the House, the bill was returned, by custom — not rule — to Sen. Minnis, as chair of Senate Judiciary, for concurrence. As of this writing, he hasn't agreed to concur. The Oregon Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence points out: A traumatized rape victim should not be made to ask for or pay for preventative measures that can help avoid tragic consequences like pregnancy, STDs or HIV. Victims of sexual assault should be empowered to make the best decisions for their lives. The farmworker collective bargaining bill is heating up again as we approach the end of the session. But this time it's not directly about PCUN, Oregon's farmworker union. Workers at Threemile Farms in Eastern Oregon — Boardman — one of the largest dairies in the Northwest, have been seeking representation by the United Farm Workers since February. Workers have complained about having to work while sick, laboring long hours without getting paid for all their time and dangerous working conditions. Some wage claims were recently settled on the workers' behalf. But OSHA recently cited the dairies for 12 violations, 11 of which were classified as serious. These dairies were established through generous support
from the state of Oregon; $30 million in state bonds were used to help
the dairies get started on state land three years ago. The UFW is staging
a very successful secondary boycott, and has succeeded in convincing
McDonald's to refuse to use Threemile Farms milk in any of their Northwest
franchises. And Tillamook Dairy also seems a bit nervous and sweaty
You know the UFW strategy is working when the employer hires Portland TV "political analyst" and public relations guy, Len Bergstein, to do damage control — and sends him in with one of Salem's most influential lobbyists to visit with me about the need for a farmworker collective bargaining bill. Unfortunately for Threemile Farms, the other influential employer agricultural interest — the growers — won't agree to binding arbitration, which kills the deal for PCUN and the UFW. Note: These dairies have nearly 20,000 head of cattle and produce 500,000 tons of waste each year. That puts them in second place, behind the Legislature, so to speak … dairy air … indeed. Sen. Tony Corcoran of Cottage Grove represents portions of Lane and Douglas counties in Senate District 4, which includes the UO area. He can be reached at sen.tonycorcoran@state.or.us
Roadkill Next week the Board of County Commissioners will pass an ordinance limiting the use of herbicides to a "last resort." Our ordinance will be the most progressive of its kind in Oregon. Here are the highlights: 1) Say it, don't spray it. Under the new ordinance, county staff must provide compelling reasons before the Board of Health will authorize the use of herbicide on county roadways. The Board of Health won't allow any herbicides unless staff shows that alternatives have proven ineffective. By the way, who is the Board of Health? It's actually the county commissioners. Years ago the commissioners decided we should give ourselves another name when we're talking about health-related matters. Just padding our resumes, I guess. 2) An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of glyphosate. The new ordinance will decrease our reliance on herbicides by increasing the use of preventative measures. But desk jockeys like me aren't known for our imagination. How do we control vegetation without poison? Hmmm, let's see. Could we pave all the roadsides? Could we chain up a goat every 50 feet? Could we block out the sun? Fortunately there are wise people with the Northwest Coalition Against Pesticides (a group based here in Eugene) who have identified viable preventative measures: planting native vegetation, controlling weeds with new high-tech machines, etc. 3) Pick your poison. In the rare circumstances when herbicides are necessary as a last resort, the new ordinance will require staff to choose from a list of herbicides approved by the Board of Health. Once again, that's the BCC incognito. I'm glad that elected officials will retain the ultimate control in deciding whether certain herbicides can be used in Lane County. We're making a list, we're checking it twice, and we're gonna find out which chemicals are naughty and nice. 4) She blinded me with science. Aimee Code of NCAP has provided us with helpful scientific research on the effects of herbicide. Oregon also has some impressive expertise in our public university system. Lane County's new ordinance will require periodic consultation with the experts to update our understanding of the harms (and benefits) of herbicides. You can't just rely on the research provided by the chemical industry. In the 1960s, the manufacturers of DDT arranged for their own employees to eat a huge quantity of DDT in order to prove it wasn't harmful to humans. Remember that the next time you think you have crummy job. 5) Take five. Every year, we'll take 5 percent away from the total road-miles where herbicides may be used. This annual goal will help us to achieve a stepwise reduction over time. We won't lose sight of the forest through the trees — or the weeds, as it were. By the way, the exercise of updating our herbicide policy has given me renewed appreciation for the great staff in Lane County's Public Works Department. They've already been more cautious than staff in most other Oregon counties. The new ordinance will require some adjustments in their practices, but I think in the long run, county staff will find it to be workable. The only one who may be disappointed is the guy who drives the spray truck. Like the Maytag repairman, he shouldn't get much sympathy when he's idle, because that's a sign our system is working well. Tom Lininger is the county commissioner for the East Lane District. Rumors that Tom ate huge quantities of DDT when he was younger are greatly exaggerated. For more information on roadside spraying, see EW's award-winning report in the www.eugeneweekly.com archives of April 18, 2002.
Livestock-Free Six of us were resting after a day and a half of building a rock jack fence to keep cattle off the Vance Knoll mounds in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest (W-WNF) of northeast Oregon. These mounds are strange swellings in the ground, sporting bunchgrasses on their tops and flanked by rock-strewn flats that appear barren in the summer, but in springtime hold thousands of colorful flowers. The mounds and their rocky necklaces are being drowned in weeds, abetted by 1,000-pound cattle feeding and trampling on them. Hence the fencing project. Rick Smith, long-time Forest Service range conservationist for the area, and chief designer/builder of this three-mile fence, was gazing into the gold-and-green bunchgrass draw below us. "Indian, trapper, homesteader, rancher," he said gently. "When I'm out here, I look and wonder who all has passed through there. " To Smith, I thought, this draw must seem lonely. The Indians, trappers and homesteaders are gone, and in this economy and dry region, one seldom-seen ranch hand will run cattle over thousands of acres. I didn't say it aloud, but the draw seemed lonely to me, too. The ghosts of Grizzly, Beaver, and Wolf were passing before me. Smith and I were aware that earlier in the week, something remarkable had happened in this national forest: Almost a quarter million acres of designated livestock rangeland were transformed into protected native bunchgrass lands. These particular acres were currently "vacant" of livestock, but had been at risk of being "reactivated" for cattle or sheep. That won't happen now. With Supervisor Karyn Wood's July 22 decision on the new Hells Canyon Comprehensive Management Plan (CMP), 100 years of marginal livestock grazing came to an end on one-half of Hells Canyon's steep, dry, spectacular, but battered, grasslands. For 10 years, I had worked for this day with the Hells Canyon CMP Tracking Group and the Nez Perce Tribe. I hadn't been sure we would succeed. The saga "began" in 1994 when the W-WNF announced it would develop a new CMP for the 662,000-acre Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, to replace the then 12-year old plan. At the time a staff ecologist for the Hells Canyon Preservation Council, I gathered individuals and representatives of two tribes and 10 local, regional, and national conservation and hunting organizations that were convinced we could, as a coalition, profoundly affect the future of Hells Canyon. We submitted an 80-page "Native Ecosystem Alternative" for consideration in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the new plan. We knew the National Environmental Policy Act requires that "all reasonable alternatives" be considered in an EIS. Our alternative proposed management for recreation, roads, fire, forestry, livestock grazing, mining, aquatic and terrestrial wildlife habitat, and European and non-European cultural features in Hells Canyon. When the first Draft EIS came out, then-Supervisor Bob Richmond had left our alternative out. Karyn Wood became the new supervisor, but she, too, refused to consider our alternative, as did the regional forester. Six days before her hefty, two-volume Final EIS was to go to the printer in 1998, I was granted a meeting with Washington, D.C., Forest Service and White House representatives. I laid out the case that our alternative was both reasonable and different from the W-WNF's alternatives, and shouldn't have been ignored. That afternoon the Forest Service phoned Supervisor Wood to say that her EIS would likely fail in court because it had not considered our reasonable alternative. It was time to start all over. Asecond Draft EIS was published in 2000, and the W-WNF then carefully analyzed the more than 2,000 public responses to the Draft. Wood assembled teams within her staff, and a multi-stakeholder group, to consider the comments. Her July 2003 decisions on the final EIS were astounding, including the following: Half of Hells Canyon is now designated grasslands free of livestock; one-third of old logging roads will be closed; vehicles will no longer be free to drive a football-field's length out from either side of every open road for purposes of camping; all roads will be closed unless posted open; and three ridge roads key to wildlife will be closed to motorized vehicles from before August archery season through late spring. And so, on July 22, Hells Canyon got some relief — because citizens concerned about their public lands had worked hard, because public land managers were willing to consider changes in entrenched habits, and maybe, just maybe, because Hells Canyon had so eloquently made her own case for healing. Mary O'Brien of Eugene has worked as a public interest scientist for the past 22 years. She can be reached at mob@efn.org
Reclaim
the Dream Back in the 1950s, a political movement began that we see today reaching its ultimate goals. Part of this movement was the creation of the CIA. Since its inception, the CIA has had, in one or more of its top three positions, a leader from either a major banking institution or the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is possible that the CIA, in the guise of protecting national security, was actually established to protect American economic interests throughout the world. The current administration is so brazen that these covert motives are becoming obvious. Multi-national corporations and the U.S. oil industry have become the sole world super-power. Another movement began at about the same time, focused on civil rights and the inclusion into our democracy of the disenfranchised. Relieving poverty and creation of social services became the dream. One could feel the country moving forward, and then came the assassinations — John Kennedy, then Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In just five short years, from 1963 to 1968, this movement lost its most powerful leaders. The shock threw it into a despair from which our generation has never really recovered. Later, as the Vietnam War waged on, we marched and protested, only to go home and watch TV and see the death and destruction continue. The grieving grew and no new leader would step up to bring us back together. Here we are today. As the other movement has continued to reach for its goals, we have spent 40 years in grief and shock. Our inaction has resulted in the eminent destruction of our democracy, the loss of our civil rights and the imprisonment of foreign-born citizens. It has been long enough. It's time for the baby boomer generation to reclaim its dreams. It's time for us to move out of our cozy, middle class comfort zone and remember who we were meant to be. Our movement didn't die. It rested, it healed. And we have a battle ahead for which we have been preparing for 50 years. There are many ways to re-immerse oneself into the passion of social justice and the exhilaration of having a say in the world in which we live. With the "Big Brother" eyes of the USA PARTIOT Act lurking around every corner, the five open seats on our own Human Rights Commission could put you on the frontline in protecting civil liberties. (Contact the City Manager's office at 682-5017 to receive an application.) The obscene priorities that are running the country have also gripped our state, as our Legislature cuts funding from programs that assist the most vulnerable among us. Take the short drive up to Salem. Join in on already organized protests or drop in to speak with your representatives. Tell them what you think. If these budget cuts have broken your heart, as they have broken mine, adopt an affected organization and make a commitment to send a check every month for a year. Give until you feel it. Remind yourself what it's like to do without. Look into being a war tax resister. There are thousands of people around the country who redirect a portion of their federal taxes to social service organizations. If Congress won't perform its duty and stop the insanity of the Bush administration by choking off its money, then we must. You can contact the Military Tax Resistance of Lane County for more information (342-1953 and 342-2914). One thing I remember from the 1960s and '70s is that we were less afraid to get into trouble. OK, a lot has changed since then. We have homes we can lose, and the police seem less tolerant of old fashioned civil disobedience. But, remember what's at stake. When Daniel Berrigan, a man who waged peace for more than 50 years, was sent to jail one more time, a friend asked, "What are you doing in there?" Berrigan responded, "What are you doing out there?" Those who would deprive our grandchildren of the future promised them in our Constitution and the Bill of Rights had better beware. Our movement has awakened. The revolution we sang about has arrived. Today, we have a choice. We can either, throw off the mourners' black and become active members of our democracy once again, or we can sit back, complacent, watching our freedoms dwindle as our stock portfolios grow. Which choice will you make? Which choice can you live with? Carol Horne of Eugene writes and directs educational videos. She says her current goal is to make her FBI file at least two inches thick.
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