The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild

The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild by Lyanda Lynn Haupt Michael's Comments: "In her latest book, Lyanda Lynn Haupt seeks to turn around our usually negative impressions of urban animals and see them as neighbors and visitors worthy of our attention. 'The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild' is a defense of animals that essentially share our homes with us: from coyotes and moles and raccoons to pigeons and crows and owls (as Haupt describes them, The Furred and The Feathered). Each chapter shares general natural history, worldly mythology, and encourages us to be kind to our 'gracious co-inhabitants.'...Haupt drives home that urban animals are simply doing what is natural: being animals." Publisher Comments From the bestselling author of Crow Planet, a compelling journey into the secret lives of the wild animals at our back door. In The Urban Bestiary , acclaimed nature writer Lyanda Lynn Haupt journeys into the heart of the everyday wild, where coyotes, raccoons, chickens, hawks, and humans live in closer proximity than ever before. Haupt's observations bring compelling new questions to light: Whose "home" is this? Where does the wild end and the city begin? And what difference does it make to us as humans living our everyday lives? In this wholly original blend of science, story, myth, and memoir, Haupt draws us into the secret world of the wild creatures that dwell among us in our urban neighborhoods, whether we are aware of them or not. With beautiful illustrations and practical sidebars on everything from animal tracking to opossum removal, The Urban Bestiary is a lyrical book that awakens wonder, delight, and respect for the urban wild, and our place within it. Review "Animals are all around us, especially the most interesting birds of all that live with us. We can all watch them and enjoy and learn. Why go to South America and search for a quetzal sitting in a tree? Want to see real birds? Just put up a bird box and spread some seeds and watch sparrows in your back yard. The Urban Bestiary is a great read. It will get folks out there having fun." Bernd Heinrich, author of Mind of the Raven and Life Everlasting Review "The challenge of our time is the movement from rural villages to big cities where nature seems gone. Haupt's brilliant book restores nature in our lives and uplifts that relationship with stories full of wonder, awe and love." David Suzuki, author of The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature About the Author Lyanda Lynn Haupt has created and directed educational programs for Seattle Audubon, worked in raptor rehabilitation in Vermont, and is a seabird researcher for the Fish and Wildlife Service in the remote tropical Pacific. She is the author of Crow Planet, Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent, and Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds (winner of the 2002 Washington State Book Award). Her writing has appeared in Image, Open Spaces, Wild Earth, Conservation Biology Journal, Birdwatcher's Digest, and the Prairie Naturalist . Winner of the 2010 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, she lives in West Seattle with her husband and daughter.    read more about this book

Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay

Oct. 9, 7 p.m. @ Salem Public Library's Loucks Auditorium: FOOD CORPS

October's Lecture:
FoodCorps with
Curt Ellis, Co-Founder and Executive Director

Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Salem Public Library Loucks Hall
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

When Curt Ellis left Iowa after creating the Peabody-winning documentary King Corn, something didn't sit right––and it wasn't just the home-brewed high-fructose corn syrup he'd consumed. Join Curt for a lively multimedia presentation as he shares the journey that led him to leave filmmaking and launch FoodCorps: a nationwide "Peace Corps" for healthy and sustainable school food.

A little more about FoodCorps:

Mission:  Through the hands and minds of emerging leaders, FoodCorps strives to give all youth an enduring relationship with healthy food.

We envision a nation of well-nourished children: children who know what healthy food is, how it grows and where it comes from, and who have access to it every day. These children, having grown up in a healthy food environment will learn better, live longer and liberate their generation from diet-related disease.

Join us after the lecture to meet Curt and enjoy some healthy refreshments provided by LifeSource Natural Foods.

* The Lecture Series is free of charge to those attending, however, if you like what you hear, we encourage you to contribute a $5 donation so that we might continue to offer these top-notch presenters on vital issues to our community and world.

Crucial & free film at Salem Public Library -- on the American Gulag -- 8/21, 6:30 p.m.

The House I Live In

The Partnership for Safety and Justice proudly invites you to a free film screening of "The House I Live In." This documentary has received critical recognition for the scope it provides in America's failed war on drugs.

The film takes a comprehensive look at drug abuse as public health matter while investigating public policies, law enforcement and individual lives affected by the so-called "War on Drugs."

You can watch the film trailer online by clicking here.

We hope you can take a summer evening to join PSJ staff, members and supporters to watch this documentary with us. Seats are limited, so please let me know by phone or email if you can join us to one of the following film screenings:

Wed., Aug. 21st: 6:30 pm @ Louck's Auditorium located at Salem Public Library. 585 Liberty Ave., Salem, OR

I'm looking forward to seeing you there,

Cassandra Villanueva
Director of Organizing and Advocacy
Office: (503) 335-8449
www.safetyandjustice.org


PSJ is a membership organization. We rely on the support of our members so we can advocate for programs and policies that create community safety without sacrificing justice. Please make a contribution today to renew your membership.

Free chances to learn both vital & fascinating things

A local massage instructor has broadened her range to add teaching others how to grow food for the future; she has licensed some fascinating films and will be showing them in both Salem and Oregon City to kick off a series of classes (offered on a sliding scale) on the most vital topic of all:  how we can grow more food with fewer inputs.

The Downtown Rubik's Cube

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When it comes to finding an answer for the downtown parking meter question, the biggest mistake Salem can make is trying to answer the parking meter question.  
 

That’s because Salem doesn’t have a problem for which parking meters are a solution.  Indeed, because we have for so long refused to grapple with our real problem, parking meters are very likely only to aggravate and accelerate downtown’s decline.

The best metaphor for Salem’s downtown and our approach to it is a Rubik’s Cube, that maddening three-dimensional puzzle where the challenge is to twist and rotate the small multi-colored cubes into one larger cube with six, one-color faces.  You can’t solve a Rubik’s Cube by attacking one color at a time. The puzzle forces you to keep all six sides in mind as you make a move, and you must often be willing to misalign several faces temporarily to move the whole puzzle towards a solution. Impatient attempts to attack each side as an isolated problem always produce greater frustration later, if not complete defeat.

If we want to solve Salem’s downtown conundrum and re-create an attractive, thriving city that again offers the benefits that urban places provide for residents and those in surrounding areas, we have to stop trying to address Salem’s problems in isolation.  We need to realize our problems are as connected as the faces of a Rubik’s Cube, and that we will not make progress unless we are willing to think about the puzzle as a whole. 

And thinking about the puzzle as a whole starts with recognizing the main issue:  Why did Salem change from a thriving and attractive small urban center to one that seems to present nothing but insoluble problems, problems that regularly defeat the best efforts of well-intended people and investments of millions of dollars?

I submit that the main cause of Salem’s decline is that, to a very great extent, we stopped planning and building in Salem as a place for people, and started concentrating all our efforts on serving only a particular kind of people: people in cars.

The differences between a place built for people and a place built for cars are both profound and pervasive, showing up in ways big and small, far and wide. In Salem’s downtown, our focus on cars first has almost entirely displaced and depleted the graceful social capital that was built up and built into Salem before the post-WWII era of auto-mobility. And our failure to come to grips with the way that people—even people who arrive in cars—dislike and avoid places built to privilege cars is an important reason that so much of what we try to do for or to downtown Salem is fruitless wheel-spinning.

Like a Rubik’s Cube, our challenge has six faces and a hub, around which the faces revolve.  The hub of Salem’s downtown puzzle is putting people first, not just people in cars. That is the central hub because that’s what connects all of the six faces, none of which can safely be ignored.

Around that hub, imagine a cube with four sides, a top, and a bottom.   

• One side is market-sector economic goods and services, which are normally allocated by ability to pay;
   
• a second face is public-sector goods, like buses, streets, bridges, roads, schools, libraries, and parks, which are very often allocated by other means;
   
• a third face is public health and safety, which is usually seen as a cost only, and is often an unrecognized victim of choices in other areas;
   
• and the fourth face is our natural capital: the renewable and nonrenewable natural resources, including places for pollution to “go,” and which provides the real basis for our wealth and well-being.

The bottom of the box, which is supposed to support the sides firmly and evenly, is our method for deciding the relationship between the sides of the box: what we will provide for Salem via the market sector, what the public sector should do, how much weight we will give to public health and safety concerns, and how much of our finite stock of natural capital we will spend, and how much we should leave for the people who will follow us.  

And the top of the box, which might be thought of as the lid, or the opening that lets us access what’s inside, is our time horizon: are we patient, willing to study a problem long enough to consider how it looks from each of the four sides, or are we impatient, petulantly demanding on aligning the green squares on one side, no matter what that does to the rest?

Until Salem recognizes the central hub of our downtown dilemma—overindulgence of the automobile at the expense of the habitability and livability of downtown—and the way in which premature, single-focus solutions to one problem just creates bigger problems to deal with elsewhere, we are doomed to spin and twist at our little cube, while downtown suffers and the last remnants of the once-thriving city dwindle away.

What IS the "Salem Alternative" anyway?

You've probably heard that the Salem City Council voted unanimously to pour additional millions on the bonfire where over $7 millions have already been incinerated . . .  and yet, thanks to the complete news blackout on anything that citizens could actually use to understand this so-called slapdash smoke-and-mirrors job known as the "Salem Alternative," you may not understand what it is.

(Aside:  At work, I often deal with clients who were ripped off at used car shops.  When I show them how they got screwed by a fast-talking salesman who hid the true price, they invariably say something like "Yeah, I wondered why there was still paint drying on the sides if it hadn't been in any accidents."  The absolutely infallible hallmark of scam is a deal that can't be delayed, no sir! Gotta rush rush rush now now now, this deal is just too good to pass up, no time for looking around, if you don't sign right here right now, why I'll just have to sell this sweet little beauty to someone else!!)

At one level, what the Salem Alternative is, mainly, is marketing BS speak designed to get a route onto the transportation plan so that, later, when the eye-popping price tags comes out of hiding, the string-pullers trying to wire this deal up can say "Hey, it's too late to talk about other options, this is already in the plan.  The only question is who bends over for the beating."

But we need not be so compliant.  Because what "The Salem Alternative" is, also, is a way to understand the priorities of the contractors and consultants who are controlling what the ODOT (formerly known as and forever in spirit the Highway Department) and Willamette Valley Council of Government staff are allowed to produce.

So, from now on, as you go through life in Salem, be sure to notice all the ways in which you are being forced to pay for the things that formerly were birthrights in American cities:

Things like

• Lighted streets
• A bus system that wouldn't be a laughing stock in your average third-world country
• Abundant library hours
• Round-the-clock fire coverage
• Sidewalks an elder could use without falling and breaking a hip
• Parks and recreation programming
• City pools.
• Etc. etc.

And whenever you notice that Salem doesn't seem to be able to provide ANY of those things any more, you'll see that there's something seriously f'd up with the Salem Alternative way of doing things.  Indeed, pay close attention and after a while, you'll realize that Salem Alternative, in the big picture level, is this:

Cutting public services and raising taxes on the poor and middle class,  just so we can provide more for the politically wired-in contractors.

You can already see the Salem Alternative thinking at work, not just in the millions poured into the pockets of CH2M-Hill, but at McNary Airport, where we -- meaning the taxpayers -- have spent, I kid you not, millions of dollars to upgrade passenger facilities: for an airport with no scheduled airline service and about as much chance of getting any as we are to host the Winter Olympics. 


If we pay attention and notice what the council is doing, and name it, again and again and again, everyone will notice what the Salem Alternative is -- a way to funnel money from the poor and middle class into the pockets of the sprawl lobby contractors and the engineering/planning consultants.

We've got maybe two years to help people understand what the Salem Alternative is, and how much it hurts us.

Addendum: Just noticed that it was this very Bridgasaurus Boondogglus that gave me the impetus to start blogging, back in early 2008.  I couldn't believe that a city with as little traffic as Salem was proposing to blow hundreds of millions on a gigantic bridge to address a few minutes of congestion that would easily be fixed for $0 by having state government departments divided into thirds and staggering the start times by 20 minutes, so that one-third would start at 7:40, one-third at 8:00, and one-third at 8:20.  But, of course, that wouldn't line the pockets of any engineering contractors or Chamber of Commerce members, so that's out!

Here's what I observed when this began, having just moved to Salem from a city, also a state capital, that was absolutely destroyed by its run-amok highway department:

We must Oregon-ize to put the needs of people before the needs of cars. This requires that we live our environmental values -- that we LOVE (Live Our Values Environmentally) Salem -- by working to stop the Sprawl Machine. 

The Sprawl Machine is a ravenous beast that feeds on green space, close-in neighborhoods, and property taxes and that excretes monstrous, ugly road projects that pollute the air, increase mortality and morbidity, promote climate change, weaken families and neighborhoods, and help weaken the social fabric and civic participation.

The Sprawl Machine works by constantly luring its prey with promises that the problems created by cars can be addressed by doing more of the same -- building more lanes, more bridges, consuming ever more money. In other words, the Sprawl Machine promises that we can keep doing the same thing over and over, while expecting a different result this time.

Solar Works in Salem!

As of 2 p.m. today, June 2, 2013, LOVESalem HQ has generated 10 MegaWatt-Hours (since December 10, 2010).

Nice job on why "We're Not Buying It!" -- the $700 million Consultant's Alternative

PowToon : Traffic Relief w/o 3rd Bridge

Outstanding Encore for Salem Progressive Film Series Season: David Cay Johnston and "American Winter"

Like many a great performance, Salem Progressive Film Series saves the very best for an encore round, and the 2012-13 SPFS season is no different.

They are bringing the outstanding journalist and author David Cay Johnston to Salem along with the powerful, penetrating film "American Winter," a visual "How the Other Half Lives" for the 21st Century.

THURSDAY, June 13, 7 pm,
at Salem's outstanding community venue, the Grand Theatre, 191 High St NE.

Monsanto is winning in the war to take away Oregonians' rights

The bill to enshrine corporate power over people power, SB 633 PASSED in the Oregon Senate today on a close vote (17-12).  This evil, undemocratic and heinous assault on our rights is scheduled for a First Reading in the House tomorrow, May 2.

After that reading it will be referred to the Chief Clerk and then to the House Speaker for committee assignment and a work session that must be scheduled within 7 days.

THIS GIVES US SOME TIME TO WRITE A PERSONAL NOTE TO OUR REPRESENTATIVES. FIND YOUR REP HERE: http://www.leg.state.or.us/findlegsltr

PERSONAL NOTES ARE THE MOST EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION.

Then, as SB633 rides a river of money through the process you can keep calling and emailing.

SB 633 is what MONSANTO wants!  It is dangerous not only because it preemptively denies basic community rights, it also exposes future generations of human, animal and plant life to genetically tampered organisms, many of which are outlawed in Europe because they only benefit Monsanto and they impose the risks on society.

Representatives need reminding - By fighting SB 633, the people they represent are claiming their Constitutional right to choose the fates and futures of their communities, farms, seeds, and food.

PS - The Oregon Legislative Information System (OLIS) is an excellent way to track bills. http://www.leg.state.or.us/index.html

I called the Legislative Administration Services and got fast, courteous responses to my questions FROM "Committee Services."

Committee Services: 
Rick Berkobien, Manager
900 Court St. NE, Room 453, Salem OR 97301
Email: rick.berkobien@state.or.us
Phone: 503-986-1485