Like to watch things circle the drain?

Better take your bike with you, because the buses will stop so early (7 p.m.) that you're likely to be stranded otherwise. Image via Wikipedia

If you can ignore the infuriating passive voice ("service reduction is needed," "a system redesign is being proposed"), you can notice that there's still a few days left to weigh in on the service amputations that will render our already anemic bus system even scrawnier and less able to support the community.

For the Salem-Keizer Transit Board Meeting of June 25, 2009 Agenda Item #F.4

You can contact all the Transit Board Members use board@cherriots.org

An overall service reduction is needed by September 2009 in order for the cost of service provided by the Salem Area Mass Transit District to be covered by annual revenues received and to stay within budget. As a result a system redesign is being proposed to not only address the budget issue also long-term ongoing issues with inefficiencies in the current system

Salem Area Mass Transit District
Bus Routes Redesign – Information for our Customers

The following information is for use with customers who have questions about the bus system redesign or specific questions about their routes.

Questions & Answers

When will the final decision on the bus routes redesign be made?

• No decision has been made yet.
  
  
• The Board of Directors will make a final decision at their Thursday, June 25 meeting (6:30 PM, Senator Hearing Room, Courthouse Square, 555 Court Street NE.)
  
  
• Everyone is welcome to come to this meeting
  
  
• No formal public testimony on the bus routes redesign will be taken at this meeting.
  
  
• The meeting can also be watched on CCTV Channel 21 or by video streaming on their website at www.cctvsalem.org at 6:30 PM
  

Where can I get more information?

• The Board agenda packet with information about the bus routes redesign will be available on our website by Friday, June 19: www.cherriots.org.
  
  
• Maps showing bus routes redesign scenarios can be seen on our website: www.cherriots.org. Go to the Current Updates section to view a redesign presentation.
  

How can I talk with Cherriots staff or board members about the bus routes redesign process?

Appointments to talk or meet with staff can be made. A representative from the Transportation Development Division will contact customers to make appointments. (Get the caller/visitors contact information.)

• Name: ________________________________________
  
  
• Phone number and/or email address: ___________________

• Best time to call them back: _________________________
  

Customers can email Board or staff directly with their opinions, questions or concerns: Staff email: skt@cherriots.org
Board of Directors email: board@cherriots.org

How will I be informed of the new bus system routes?

The Salem Area Mass Transit District Board will make a decision about the bus system redesign on June 25. Information will be:

• Posted on our website www.cherriots.org
• Available on the buses and at bus stops
• Mailed to customers
• Available at the Transit Mall Customer Service Center

Important Upcoming Dates for the Bus Routes Redesign to be aware of:

• June 19 -- Board meeting agenda packet with information about bus routes redesign options available on our website: www.cherriots.org.

• June 25 -- Board picks a bus routes scenario.

• July–August Information distributed to public about new routes.

• September 4 Last day of bus service on existing routes.

• September 8 First day of new bus service with new routes and frequencies.

Yes, appears so: Threat to Minto Ag acreage pulled from June 22 agenda?

2nd Update: Transportation and Parks Director Mark Becktel sends:

This is to let you and your folks know that the staff report to Council has been pulled and will not go before the Council tonight (Monday 6/22/09). We have requested additional time from the USDA/NRCS to work through some issues regarding the conservation easement, both related to issues your group brought up and concerns our legal department has with the easement language itself.

I will let you know when the staff report is scheduled to go before the Council in the future.

ORIGINAL: It's not clear why or how it happened, but the agenda for Monday night's City Council meeting (June 22) has chickens (action in the consent agenda to refer it over to the planning commission, as was decided some three weeks ago on May 26) but nothing about the proposed easement-for-cash trade that would lock up precious farm land on Minto Island.

Note that there already a Master Plan for Minto that calls for continuation of agriculture. (Oddly, not available on the city website.) More than that, there's also a City of Salem Parks Master Plan, which proposed more trails on the island, trails that this easement deal would prohibit.

So it may be that there's good news, and the city staff has realized that you can't just junk the master plans created with lots of citizen participation just because the feds wave some freshly-printed borrowed money at you.

Updates posted here as soon as available. Meanwhile, the map above is Figure 4 from the City of Salem Parks Master Plan. Note the proposed "primary" trails on Minto that have yet to be developed -- and could never be if we accept this "stimulus."

Garden and Other Transition Assets Tour -- can we come by your place?

Good big label and a sign with information about the crops -- nice! Image by Annie&John via Flickr

WANTED: You to show off your garden [or other sustainability assets]!

Transition Salem is planning a series of self-guided bicycle tour maps to highlight local food gardens and sustainable living assets. Many of Salem's bicyclers share our interests in gardening and healthy living, and are active participants in our community. The tour will be free of charge to all bicyclers. Transition Salem is in the initial stages of planning how the tour will unfold, so suggestions are welcome.

We anticipate having several bike routes, allowing riders to chose different difficulty level for the ride. We would still like to plan routes which will allow riders to see as many of our gardens as can be seen, and speak with garden owners when possible. This will be be a great opportunity to cross pollinate ideas, skills, and possibly even resources.

What do I need in order to display my garden as part of the tour?

• Provide your address [and any information you have about best biking routes to it]
  

• Is your garden viewable to people driving by and viewing from the street, or do you need to be present to guide people?

• What days would you be available to talk about your garden? (At this point this is of less importance, as we haven't narrowed down the time frame further than July – September. We are intending that the tour be ongoing for a number of weekends, or perhaps even weekdays, so we're not thinking that someone would have to be there at all times.)

• Give us a quick description of your garden, or list items of interest in your garden. Perhaps list the gardening techniques you are using (for example: square foot gardening, permaculture, biointensive, raised beds, gray water irrigation, etc.)

• Anything else of interest. [We're thinking of features that will be assets during the Transition period we're entering: For example, your chicken coop, solar panels, solar hot water heater, rainwater harvesting systems, solar or manually powered water well, passive solar design features on your house, your greenhouse, your container gardens, etc.]
  

It would also be helpful if you could label the plants in your garden, and in any other way provide visual clues to items of interest. As a bonus, it may also be helpful if a few people could:

• Provide water/liquid to bicyclers

• Provide printed material on other events, gardening tips, and items of community interest.

And last of all, be prepared to meet lots of interesting new people, and perhaps a few of your neighbors you haven't had a chance to talk with before!

If you want to know more, to help plan the tour, or to offer your place as a stop along the way, shoot us an email.

Transition Salem will begin developing a new webpage at transitionsalem.org, but until then, go here for to learn more about us.

If you know of someone else who might be interested in displaying their garden or other features of interest, or if you have ideas of how I can contact other gardeners please let us know.

Happy Growing!

The promise of the future: Voided by our cleverness

When they dig up the bones of people from this era, will they think of us kindly? Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Since time immemorial, the promise of the future has always been that, overall, on a global scale, each generation will be better off than the prior ones. Humans are clever, and they share what they have learned with other humans, so even young humans can access the hard-won knowledge and experience of many generations of prior learning. Moreover, our lives are short but material goods last a long time -- meaning that the wealth of the ages slowly builds up and people enjoy the results of prior generations' efforts that way too.

Earth, the only habitable planet known, is perfectly suited to support human life in relative ease and comfort. Every day, unfathomable riches of solar energy arrive, for free. Reserves of solar energy, concentrated and distilled over millions and millions of years were provided under the ground, for free. Plants and animals in symbiotic relationship maintain the atmosphere at just the right level of oxygen. If used judiciously, those solar energy reserves (known as fossil fuels) can provide all the energy needed to provide an abundance of comfort and decent livelihood for all people.

But alas! Humans are clever, rather than wise.

As a result, we have voided the promise of the future.

Because of the way we use energy, the future for many generations will be much worse than the present.

Worse, our response to this sickening realization -- that we are the first generation in 200 million years of human evolution to leave our posterity with a degraded future prospect at every point on the globe -- is a combination of angry or sullen denial and magical thinking, where we lunge after "solutions" that are really just doing more of what has gotten us into this mess in the first place. Meaning that each generation will not only be worse off than we are, for the foreseeable future, but that the degrading trend will continue, with each generation leaving their own progeny (and the progeny of all other humans alive at the time) with an increasingly unstable climate, in an environment of increasingly scarce energy, with increasingly short food and water supplies.

We cannot avoid some of this. Earth's climate is far too vast to right itself immediately, even if we were to stop pumping millions of years worth of carbon into it entirely in an instant -- the carbon we've already pumped in will continue to make itself increasingly felt for a thousand years.

But we can stop making it worse. But it would require living as if we owed something to the future, rather than only to ourselves. So, while there is little cause for hope, there is something we can do: Transition. Not a guaranteed solution or even a "solution" at all -- but a way of adapting to our predicament and learning to live so that we don't leave our children an even more limited and difficult future life.

Here in Salem, a small group (the Salem Transition Initiative for Relocalization) has begun to meet to organize the necessary transition to a more local, low-energy, low-emissions future, as part of a global network of Transition Towns that is growing every day.

STIR is poised to become Transition Salem and to begin developing strategies for the transition and an energy descent action plan for our region. We are meeting every other Wednesday at Tea Party Bookshop (corner of Liberty and Ferry in downtown Salem) at 7 p.m. with the next meeting on July 1. If you would like to become an active participant in helping with the transition, you are invited to join us.

Celebrate Summer's Arrival!!

Wonderful! See you there!

To kick off the summer in positive fashion, we are planning a celebration this Saturday (6/20) from 1-4 pm at the Garden on 19th St. SE, between Oak & Bellevue streets. Please join us for music, food, and activities for all!

Sincerely,

Jordan Blake
Garden Project Manager
Marion Polk Food Share

Email: jblake@foodbanksalem.org
Work cell: (503)798-0457
Web: www.marionpolkfoodshare.org

Ruh-roh -- you mean we can't ignore natural resource limits? Who knew?!

Eola Hills. Image via Wikipedia

A member of Salem City Watch writes:

Note the lengthy article in today's Oregonian ( "Reliable water data running dry in Oregon," by Les Zaitz, page A1). Apparently, underfunding the Water Resources Department over the last several years has left us without the data, resources or manpower to intelligently plan for the next million people expected to be living here by 2030.

Here's a classic quote, "If we had known in the 1960s what we know now, the department would not have issued as many groundwater permits." Brenda Bateman, Senior Policy Advisor, Oregon Water Resources Department.

Of course this information is coming out just as the Legislature passed the Big Look bill which in all likelihood will increase rural development and Metolius Protection is fighting for its life.

In 2009, many believe we have already overcommitted our water resources and we're still behaving as if it were the 60s.

Yes Salem has an abundance of water, until we're asked to divert it to "create jobs" and "improve the economy" by developing Eola Hills.

Richard

Of course, there is reason for extreme skepticism about projected growth in population; those numbers are based on total obliviousness to the reality that we've hit Peak Oil and that the end of easy, cheap energy is going to permanently rewrite our economic rules, such as how much we move around (and how many jobs there will be to move for, etc.) But the underlying point is good: the first thing the developers and corporations want is for the public to be without good data on natural resource limits, because then they can sell "growth" and "jobs" much easier.

Excellent visual explanation: How big are the bailouts to the banks and insurance companies?

click on image to see whole thing; hat tip to "The Big Picture"

The Zombie Project: A third auto bridge over the Willamette in Salem

This guy is in Iraq because we use 25% of the world's daily oil consumption rather than building transit systems and providing options for people that don't involve driving. A third auto bridge in Salem would be a monument to our failure to recognize the end of the carburban way of life and our willingness to let others die overseas so that we can keep right on driving multi-thousand pound vehicles for our every trip here at home. Image via Wikipedia

Road miles traveled going down? Gas prices going up? Country bankrupting itself by printing money it doesn't have to fund projects it can't afford to maintain a car-centered way of life it can't sustain? Check, check, and check again!!

Here in Salem, the group organized to push through a $600+ million bridge project was finally shamed into remembering that they were not supposed to be locked into planning a bridge as order of business one and only.

Naturally, they have only grudgingly begin to begin thinking about pondering alternatives to more autosprawl (meanwhile, busily beavering away on their dream plan, involving hundreds of millions of dollars, massive construction, etc.), while totally ignoring the spate of recent reports that suggest that our precarious climate is destabilizing faster than even the most pessimistic scientists imagined it would five years ago.

Funny, the "alternate modes" study --- (you'd think that the cheapest ways of solving the problem would be the MAIN line of attack, rather than the grudging afterthought only tossed in because they feared a challenge to the validity of their environmental impact statement) --- has been going since April, but they're just now getting around to alerting the public.

As always, there will only be two modes responses for all public concerns about this boondoggle of a project:

"It's too soon to say" and
"It's too late to stop now."

DEIS Update and Alternate Modes Study

The Salem River Crossing project team is busy working on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS). Soon we will begin sending email updates describing the document's progress and how you can get involved once the draft is complete.

In the mean time, we'd like to tell you about an important study being conducted in parallel with the DEIS, called the Salem Willamette River Crossing Alternate Modes study. This study, begun in April, will identify needs and opportunities for improving transit service across the river in Salem. It will also cover related needs and opportunities for carpool/vanpool users, bicyclists, and pedestrians. This study will help assure that any improvements identified will be coordinated with the Salem River Crossing project, as needed.

The first Stakeholder Advisory Committee (SAC) meeting for the study will be held on Monday, June 22nd from 4:00-6:00 pm at the Mid-Willamette Valley Council of Governments office (105 High St. SE, Salem). At this meeting, the Alternate Modes study team will provide an overview of the study, discuss the current system, and outline potential improvements that will be considered. This meeting is open to the public and will include a brief period for public comments.

Another reason to love Truitt Bros.

They think about life-cycle energy use.

The pressure cooker: the secret to radically reducing the time and energy needed to cook dried beans and save all the life-cycle energy used to process canned beans. Image via Wikipedia

Salem's own Truitt Brothers, one of the last remaining canneries in a once-robust sector of Salem business, is cited in Slate in a story about whether canned or bulk dried beans consume less energy to prepare overall:

According to an analysis done at one Oregon processing facility (PDF), canning 10.5 ounces of green beans—the amount you'd find in a typical grocery store can, after draining out the water—requires roughly 1,500 British thermal units of natural gas. (That's about as much energy as it takes to drive a car one-quarter of a mile.) Since kidneys and pintos are tougher and take longer to cook—about 75 percent longer than green beans, according to Truitt Brothers, the cannery that commissioned the study—processing them would require more energy.

Not to diss Truitt Bros. but dried beans are actually hands-down winner, assuming you have access to a kitchen when you're making your meal, which lets you use a pressure cooker. This magical device makes cooking dried beans fast and easy, even if they have not soaked overnight, which also slashes the time and, thus, energy, needed to make dishes with beans.

But the article does get the big picture right: whether canned by Truitt Brothers or bought in bulk from someone like LifeSource, cutting down on meat and increasing the amount of beans you eat is a huge win for the environment and significantly reduces your energy/greenhouse gas footprint.

(For some inexplicable reason, the Sightline Institute left the Pressure Cooker off its list of Seven Sustainable Wonders, while including microchips, which we know are actually much more problematic than pressure cookers from a sustainability perspective.)

Urban Agriculture as a career (recession-proof at that)

Image by xmascarol via Flickr

Energy Bulletin links to a great piece on making a life (and a living) in urban ag. The wave of the future, you heard it hear first (after I lifted it from somewhere else, that is).