Throwing garbage on people's porches -- perfectly OK if you're a corporation

Doesn't that brick of dead tree and petroleum-derived plastic junk add to the beauty of the lavender?

Here at LOVESalem HQ, we're pretty conscious of using less stuff and less energy. We work hard at reducing waste, conserving energy, and reducing intake of new stuff that would become waste and require energy to make, move, and remove.

So we're pretty aggressive about signing up for every stop-the-junk-mail service there is, including the services that promise to stop the yellow pages dead-tree-phone-books.

But, once again, as if to prove Ambrose Bierce's observation that a corporation is just a device for capturing private profit while avoiding private responsibility, Verizon has just graced LOVESalem with a totally unwanted piece of garbage, a phone book that will never be used, made from heavy paper. Making that piece of crap and ferrying it to my door in a plastic bag made of petroleum has consumed a huge amount of energy and caused a huge amount of pollution.

WHY IS THIS LEGAL? If I go to a Verizon store and dump my trash in the store, I risk a civil penalty, if not arrest for disorderly conduct.

Why does Salem not have an ordinance that requires anyone putting unsolicited materials on my porch to come pick those materials up if they haven't been accepted (i.e., taken inside) in two days? What is it going to take? I'm looking at you, City Council. For those who are afraid of the First Amendment boogieman, let's review:

There is no First Amendment right to litter.

Any neutral city ordinance -- one that does not make content-based distinctions but simply regulates the time, place, and manner of delivery and requires that anyone distributing unsolicited materials collect them if they are not accepted --- will survive a corporate challenge.

In fact, an ordinance that prohibited distribution of junk like that without a positive "opt-in" request from residents would likely be upheld too. It would be pretty straightforward to require that anyone who plans to distribute anything more extensive than a single-sheet or card would first have to mail or deliver a request form to the targeted addresses (on paper or online), and only deliver the ultimate object to those residences that complete and return the request form or request the object online.

But hey, it's just the health of the environment -- who give a rip about that compared to Verizon's profits?

Greybeards in Feedcaps: another reason to preserve public farmlands

Image via WikipediaBecause the biggest barrier to young people getting into farming is access to affordable land. Thus, when places like Salem sell an easement that will prevent farming 200+ precious acres of fabulous farmland located right in the City, they sold out young farmers. As Wendell Berry says, "Eating is an agricultural act."

WORD: Why the (vanishing) sea ice matters

Image via WikipediaWhy the disappearance of the sea ice matters to Salem.

(Or, "Why it matters that the President of Willamette University sits on the board of the utility that is Oregon's biggest polluter and biggest emitter of gases that are causing the ice to vanish and how that is going to screw Willamette students' future.")

Salem Progressive Film Series Fall 2010 Schedule

Thursday, Sept. 9
7 PM

"Before being dubbed the Motor City, Detroit was once home to the nation's most extensive streetcar system. In fact, it was that vast network of streetcars that carried workers to the area's many car factories. And it was the cars made in those factories that would soon displace the streetcars in Detroit — and in every major American city.

Over the last 30 years, much of the world has moved on, choosing faster, cleaner, more modern transportation and leaving America — and Detroit — behind. Viewers are taken on a journey beyond Detroit's blighted urban landscape to Spain, home to one of the world's most modern and extensive transit systems; to California, where voters recently said yes to America's first high speed rail system; and to Washington, where Congress will soon decide whether to finally push America's transportation into the 21st century."

The Golden Pioneer, Improved Edition

Barb Palermo has worked tirelessly to try to bring about a return to common sense in a very unforgiving and wearying setting, the labyrinth that is public policy making in the City of Salem, Oregon.

The current recall of eggs nationwide -- some half billion or more -- due to salmonella concerns brings home again

a) how insane the industrial food system is
b) how wasteful it is
c) how vulnerable it is

So it's important that we permit ordinary people to go back to what was a pretty common practice everywhere (and in Salem until the 70s!) -- keeping a few hens for eggs and garden upkeep services.

The current backyard hens proposal by the city is a screwy Rube Goldberg set-up of rules driven by unnecessary paranoia and outright race and class bias, but none of that is Barb's fault or the fault of any Chickens in the Yard stalwarts, most of whom live in West Salem (where the neighborhood association overwhelmingly supports backyard hens, and where the City Councilor, Dan Clem, has adamantly opposed them).

CITY folks have devoted themselves to helping the rest of us, and we should be grateful. The image above will be on the new version of CITY's extensive research report on the ins and outs of backyard henkeeping. If you feel like tossing a few bucks into the hat -- and getting some cool swag in return -- you can do so here.

The passive voice was used

Image by catheroo via FlickrOne of the great losses with the collapse of newspapers is the end of editors. Newspapers are stretched so thin that the editing function has essentially disappeared or is being handled by unqualified people or, worse, software. This creates a vicious cycle, where the product put onto the page is so poorly crafted that readers conclude that there really is no reason to pay a corporation for stale news. When the writing in the only daily in town wouldn't cut it in the local high school paper, you know things are in a bad state. Today's example:

"A Salem man has been arrested for allegedly shooting another man during an apparent attempt to steal medical marijuana Monday."

I bet being allegedly shot doesn't hurt a bit. The writer makes a hash of the lede by casting it into the passive voice, which is why "alleged" -- a fifty-cent word for "said" that journalists clearly don't understand and toss into all their police and legal stories haphazardly -- has to be converted to the bizarre modifier "allegedly," which makes no sense when attached to "shooting."

You know what's great about the active voice? It immediately points up what's missing from that lede (which is pretty much everything in this instance). Good journalism answers this question: Who did what to whom. Convert that lede to active voice and the gaps stand out:

(Jurisdiction) police arrested a Salem man, (name), on (date) (in place, if not same as jurisdiction or is otherwise significant). Police believe (name) shot (victim's name) while trying to steal (victim's last name)'s medical marijuana. . . .

The original garbled lede is 20 words of nonsense. Recast in the active voice and with the gaps filled in, it takes just 23 words to deliver a whole lot more news:

Salem police arrested a Salem man, Scott Farler, on Tuesday. They believe Farler shot Jamison Nguyen, while trying to steal Nguyen's medical marijuana. . . .

The terribly rude thing to bring up

Image via WikipediaThe NYTimes ran a big story about the University of Oregon's sustainable city project that has picked Salem as its project for the year. In the story, they lavish the kind of love on Willamette University that gets PR folks promotions:

Karen Arabas, a professor of environmental science at Willamette University in downtown Salem, said private schools such as hers share that mission. She points to the 168-year-old institution's motto: "Not unto ourselves alone are we born."

"We have a strong sense of service on campus, and sustainability transcends every field," Arabas added. "When students graduate, these are some of the skills and knowledge they'll need in the world, whether they go into law, business or medicine."

Willamette -- which topped a 2008 National Wildlife Federation ranking of U.S. schools that engage in sustainability activities -- uses its Center for Sustainable Communities to foster campus-community collaboration. The 2,600-student university began hosting regular sustainability retreats for students, faculty and administrators in 2005 and is now working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to restore habitat in a 300-acre research forest west of Salem.

The school looks at everything from how much locally harvested, organic food it serves to how many tons of greenhouse gases it emits.

Having a small environmental footprint is a big bragging right in these parts.

The Princeton Review and U.S. Green Building Council ranked Willamette, the University of Oregon and four other Oregon universities among the top 286 "green" colleges for 2011, based on the schools' practices, policies and curricula. The mere existence of such a list is evidence that universities, students and prospective employers are paying increasing attention to sustainability issues, said David Soto, the Princeton Review's director of college ratings.

The publisher surveyed 12,000 college applicants and parents earlier this year, and 64 percent of respondents said they would value having information about a school's environmental commitment. Almost a fifth of those respondents said such information would "very much" influence which school they choose.

"A lot of schools are starting to give guidance on green jobs -- what a green job is and how to secure one," Soto added.

Of course what they didn't mention is the never-mentioned-secret at Willamette: its President, M. Lee Pelton, sits on the board and collects handsome checks from Portland General Electric, owners of the single biggest polluter in Oregon, the Boardman coal plant, the single largest source of CO2 and (now that the Durkee cement plant is down) toxic mercury emissions.

In other words, everything that Willamette students do right for the environment in their entire careers is wiped out in an hour or two of operations at President Pelton's power plant at Boardman:

As Oregon works to brand the state as a clean-energy trailblazer, an inescapable irony hangs over the Gorge: PGE’s coal-fired power plant in Boardman, the state’s largest source of air pollution, is emitting carbon dioxide, mercury, soot, smog and haze-causing pollutants into a National Scenic Area.

PGE’s Boardman plant pollutes more than 10 protected National Parks, Scenic Areas and Wilderness Areas, including the Columbia River Gorge. Pollution from the plant causes acid rain and fog in the Gorge and is a major source of haze. A study released last year by the Yakama Nation revealed that PGE Boardman is responsible for up to 50% of the air pollution in the Columbia Gorge during times when air quality in the Gorge is at its worst.

Here's what is still the best short video treatment -- made several years ago -- of why this oh-so-impolite point needs to be raised. Every single point about positive feedback loops is coming true with a vengeance -- we've recently seen that phytoplankton is collapsing worldwide, massive, continent scale fires in Asia, drought and flooding in mid-continental regions, intense heat waves, and disappearing sea-ice in the Arctic.

All because utilities -- utilities like PGE, led by President Pelton and his fellow directors -- choose to continue burning coal, and even fighting for the "right" to continue burning coal for decades longer than is sane.

Jus' saying.

What we need to do.

Sharrows: The inferior non-solution

Cycle-tracks -- putting bikes at the curb, protected from traffic by parked cars -- are much better. Why should bikes be put between the cars moving at speed and doors flying open on the drivers' side of parked cars?

Sharrows are a sham solution for bike lanes

These faux-lanes for bikes are ambiguous and do little more than enable politicians to claim more bike miles. Here's a better solution.

Worth your time: How the Criminal Justice Systems Gets it Wrong, Again and Again

Image via WikipediaLeave aside the human toll if you like -- the lost decades stolen from innocent people, the fact that the real perpetrator is hidden behind the perfect shield (the fact that someone else has already been convicted of the crime) -- and just focus on the staggering fiscal costs to Oregon caused by imprisoning people for serious crimes that they didn't do.

As the layoffs roll out through Salem, one might ask: are we spending enough on making sure we're not spending way-too-much on incarceration of innocent people?

WORD

Image via WikipediaA perfect description of our ongoing highway-building folly:

Everywhere along the route, shovel-ready highway improvement projects from the late stimulus crusade were now underway, and you wondered exactly what kind of future they were intended to serve -- or was it all a kind of weird national potlatch ceremony in which we were literally throwing away our wealth to memorialize what seemed normal the day before yesterday and never will be again.