See you at 7:45 tonight or thereabouts!

Chickens in the Yard (CITY) is rounding up people to come to the Salem City Council meeting this Monday, February 23, to speak during the open public comment period (i.e., not limited to agenda topics) that follows the scheduled business on the agenda. (See item 10 here.) A C.I.T.Y. leader sends:

. . . Re: the agenda for the City Council Meeting on Monday. Unfortunately, it is really long (5 pages). We can't speak until item #10; see the very last page. But I spoke with the City Recorder about this and she said some of the items will go very quickly. Her best estimate is that we will be able to start between 8:00 and 8:30. If we are not finished by 10:00, the council will vote to either stay late and keep going, or continue at another time.

Note to Speakers: If you happen to be speaking when/if they decide to wrap things up and cut us off, be sure to immediately request that we be placed ON THE AGENDA for the next meeting. Hopefully, this won't happen, but I wanted to have a plan just in case.

SEE YOU ALL MONDAY NIGHT - City Hall, 555 Liberty, Room 240!

So you probably don't have to be there right at 6:30 p.m. -- 7:45 p.m. is probably fine.

But please do come, and come early enough to make sure you're there to let the city council members know that it's important to you and that, even if you don't plan to keep any laying hens yourself, you want other people in resedential zones to be able to do so, for the benefit of themselves and of the community as a whole.

Note the map of Salem neighborhood associations that have endorsed the C.I.T.Y. campaign! And also note that just because other neighborhoods haven't doesn't mean that they don't have a lot of residents who would love to keep some laying hens -- each neighborhood has its own politics and personalities.

The Great God Auto Threatens Your Children

This is what building a society around cars produces --- note that the typically bureaucratic response suggests that the problem is caused by parents or not giving enough money to the medical-industrial complex. The Sprawl Machine doesn't just produce ugly places that will be impossible to use as energy becomes scarce and expensive -- it also hurts children, who are becoming crippled and debilitated by our development patterns that make walking and biking rare activities instead of everyday acts of a healthy young person.

Initiative Takes Aim At Obesity In Children

A coalition of health groups and insurance companies yesterday unveiled an initiative, billed as the first of its kind, to help battle one of the nation's biggest health problems: childhood obesity.

Officials of the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a joint effort of the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation, said the initiative is designed to give children better access to health care to fight obesity. Participating insurance companies would pay for at least four visits to a dietitian and four visits to a physician each year to provide guidance to children and their parents on how to eat better and take other steps to reduce and control their weight.

More than one-third of children in the United States are overweight or obese, raising fears that they could constitute the first generation in recent history to have shorter life spans than their parents. One of the biggest problems many families face in fighting obesity is getting insurance companies to pay for doctor visits and other care to help deal with the problem. . . .

And to this we say "Amen, brother, Aaaaaamen."

Post-Carbon Oregon has a great post talking about the weird inversion of priorities that makes us do more to guarantee a place for cars in Salem than people.

As an example, in Salem residential zones, you are mandated, by law, to maintain two off-street parking spaces for cars --- even if you don't have a car. This can include garage spaces or driveway spaces, or both. Think about what this says about our priorities and the way that cars have dominated our thinking for the past 60 years:

• You're not required to have a garden, even though it's a certainty that residents must eat. In fact, you are prohibited by law from tearing up your driveway and growing food to feed your family in that space, even if it's the best spot you have for growing food.
  
  
• And no matter how much southern exposure you have, you're not required to have a solar hot water heater, even though it's a certainty that you use hot water.
  
  
• You're not required to have a bike, even though most trips we take are easily walked or biked.
  

Nope, one of the few things you MUST have is two cars full of parking, because the mindset reflected in our city code is that the Great God Auto Must Be Served.

So we're in a situation where the global economy is melting down and hunger is rising all across the state, but if you put a chicken coop on your driveway and an enclosure on the unpaved area next to the driveway to give the hens some room to roam, you are not only going to be fined for the heinous crime of trying to provide your family with safe, affordable food, you're also going to be ordered to remove the coop because you have infringed on Great God Auto's privileged position in Salem society.

Estimates are that, for every car kept overnight in the typical American community, there are fully seven parking spaces distributed around town to serve that car. If anything, that's probably low: Look at the sea of asphalt next to every big box building and strip mall, then add the two spaces per residence, then add the oceans of parking next to most newer churches, then add the acres of parking surrounding our high schools, then add the parking ramps and the big lots for office complexes, and the vast lots designed to serve auto commuters, then add all the on-street parking . . . .

No wonder our economy is so tattered --- we've taken a huge amount of Willamette Valley soil --- some of the finest in the world, in one of the best growing areas in the world --- and paved it over to serve autos. Providing all that parking makes things spread so far apart that people feel that they have to use a car, thus powering the cycle further down the drain.

In return for this weird act of auto worship, we get to deal with the pollution and runoff issues, and we get a distorted tax system because speculators holding valuable prime land off the market pay artificially low taxes on that land because it's not "developed" -- in other words, they throw down some gravel and use the land for parking because we assess property based on current use rather than on the land value if developed appropriately.

This means that people who do develop their land further pay more in taxes, while those who keep land right in the heart of town as parking lots pay very little.

How to get involved with STIR

If you can' t make the initial launch meeting on Wednesday, February 25, but want to be involved with the Salem Transition Initiative for Relocalization (STIR), drop a line with your contact information and your main areas of concern to STIR at Salem.Transition@gmail.com.

What are some of the areas that might be of concern to people as they consider how we can transition to a low-energy/low-waste lifestyle? Things like

• Food -- how can we feed our families if it's no longer possible to use diesel powered trucks to bring in foodstuffs on a continuous basis?
  
  
• Home economy -- how can we afford our shelter if utility bills keep climbing up and unemployment rates keep following along?
  
  
• Climate -- what kind of world will we be passing on to the next generation if we've destabilized the climate that has been fairly stable and benign for all of recorded history?
  
  
• Education -- what will schools look like when massive buildings that require constant heating or cooling are unaffordable, like the fleets of polluting yellow buses? What will secondary (and post-secondary education) need to be when a far greater share of daily life must be devoted to growing food?
  
  
• Transportation -- how are we going to remain connected to friends and family when we no longer enjoy an abundance of cheap energy and most families can no longer afford the family car, while most cities can't keep up with the costs of maintaining roads?
  
  
• Long-term care -- how we will be able to care for elders and people with disabilities if the desires for community-based care runs into the fast-diminishing resource base of families and governments unable to provide for the care of people still working or struggling with subsistence and unemployment?
  
  
• Faith communities -- how will churches, temples, and mosques built during a time of cheap and abundant energy operate when people are no longer able to afford to travel great distances to mega-sized facilities or to heat and cool them?
  
  
• Public safety -- how will police, fire, and ambulance services be provided when energy costs hamstring their vehicles and taxes can't keep up with energy costs? Will Oregon be able to keep spending more and more on prisons when the cost of utilities shoots up?
  
  
• Medical care -- how will we provide access to medical care when energy costs keep shrinking the available resources and undermining the economy that is not even able to keep up with health care expenses now, before the energy pinch really takes hold?
  
  
• Environmental protections -- how will we pay to treat and pump wastewater and maintain waste treatment facilities in a shrinking rather than expanding economy?
  
  
• How will we cope with increasing frequency and severity of crop-destroying severe weather events, both floods and droughts?
  
  
• Etc. etc. etc.
  

You get the idea.

Our society has, since WWII, been organized almost entirely on the implicit assumption that there will always be an abundance of cheap energy, and that fundamental assumption has colored every other public and private decision. We have built a society that appears robust but is actually quite fragile, as the recent fling with $4 gas showed --- a few months of high gas prices brought the world economy to its knees and revealed what a house of cards our real estate/finance system actually was. The price shock is causing so much demand destruction --- a/k/a economic pain --- that oil prices have plummeted, but they will remain low only so long as the economy is tanking.

If any or all of these concerns make you think that it's time that someone took some action to prepare answers to them, then please come to the STIR launch and join in. But if you can't, at least drop a line and note which issues are the top ones for you (especially ones not mentioned above).

An outstanding explanation of our credit collapse

Since the Salem economy is being rocked hard by the real estate meltdown and the resulting wave of bank collapses, it's helpful for us to understand how we got here, and this outstanding short video does a tremendous job simplifying the explanation without leaving out important parts of it. From the site:

"The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California."

Oregon Bike Summit -- be there, aloha!

Watching Salem's mayor and someone from Gov. Ted's office accept two very cool Sanyo "Eneloop" (energy looping) power-assist bikes --- the first two in the US from Sanyo --- today, I saw a flyer for the Oregon Bike Summit, to be held right here in Salem in April. Cool.

Joe at The Bike Peddler reports that he has ridden the very-similar hybrid power-assist bike from Giant and that it's a very nice bike and that he is happy to order it for those interested.

I'm going to ask Joe to get one for me for Mrs. Walker because it's perfect for her needs now that we live real close in here in Salem: she needs a power boost for riding when dressed for work without working up a sweat, but a real bike for riding as a bike the rest of the time (unlike the eGo that we're selling on Salem's Craigslist, which was for commuting only).

Salem could lead: pharmacy take-back ordinance

Here's a great idea -- make pharmacies take back any unused prescription drugs and handle reissue, disposal, or other disposition properly (that is, in a way that keeps the drugs out of the water -- and NOT with incineration, which just sends the contents into the air).

For example, many expensive drugs could and should be gathered together and given out to provide meds for people who can't keep up with the exorbitant costs of medicines.

Salem, with some of the best water of any city in the world, should take the lead on this, educating people not to flush unused meds and passing an ordinance requiring pharmacies and stores dispensing meds (Costco, etc.) to take back any unused prescription meds and to ensure proper reuse or disposal.

Be rid of unused meds, just not down the drain
Wednesday, February 18, 2009

First, do not flush.

Disposal of unused medication has -- like many of the drugs themselves -- unwanted side effects. People on all sides agree that dumping leftover meds down the drain or toilet can turn them into pollutants.

An Associated Press investigation last year found trace amounts of many prescription drugs -- including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones -- in the drinking water of 41 million Americans.

What to do instead?

"It's kind of a Catch-22," says Ken Wells, a pharmacy manager at Safeway and president of the Oregon State Pharmacy Association. "You're darned if you do and darned if you don't."

Flushing drugs entails environmental risk, Wells says, yet tossing them into the trash could allow them to fall into the hands of illicit users.

Federal guidelines say: Mix prescription drugs with an unpalatable material, such as used coffee grounds or kitty litter, and put them in the trash in plain cans or sealable bags.

An unlikely coalition of the American Pharmacists Association and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued its own "crush, don't flush" rule last year: "Crush the medicines in a plastic bag, add coffee grounds, sawdust or kitty litter, seal the bag and put it in the trash."

Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality recommends keeping waste drugs in their original containers, removing the patient information label and taping the lid on if it's not child-proof. Then put the drugs in a plastic sealable bag, inside "durable packaging that masks the contents (such as a brown cardboard box)" and add to the trash as close to pickup time as possible.

But the Oregon Association of Clean Water Agencies objects to that advice, saying it can cause pollution, either by leaching from a landfill or by failing to discourage people from dumping drugs into the toilet.

"It's pretty complicated -- and it doesn't compete very well with a flush," says Janet Gillaspie, executive director. "If we don't want people to flush unused drugs down the toilet, we need to give them a system that's convenient enough to convince them to use it."

Her group touts a "product stewardship" model, based on the take-back system for recycling used electronic devices. "In other words, ask the people who make the product to be responsible for disposing of it when it doesn't get used."

Reminder: Show up and be counted next Monday night to support C.I.T.Y.

Reminder from: SalemChickens Yahoo! Group

Our formal presentation at City Hall!
Monday February 23, 2009
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Location: Council Chambers, City Hall (click link for map -- Council Chambers are in the massive Albert Speer-like structure between Commercial and Liberty, just south of Pringle Creek).

This is the big event we've all been waiting for.
We need to fill the room with supporters. Bring all your friends, PLEASE!
It starts at 6:30 pm.

You can review all the reasons for allowing urban hen-keeping here.

In an apartment or otherwise without access to space for a garden?

Then you should check this out. While there are grounds for reservations about soil-less growing systems (such as the fact that we don't fully understand how trace minerals that come from natural soil influence our health and the nutrition profile of plants), there's simply no doubt that, given a choice between no garden and an indoor soil-less garden (hydroponic or aeroponic), you are much better off with the soil-less garden.

People need to wake up to some hard facts: The economy isn't in a "downturn," and it's not going to "pick up" anytime soon. The sad truth is that we have experienced the first in what are likely to be many economic contractions driven by the fact that our demand for resources is overwhelming our ability to extract them and to manage the waste products of all that consumption. And all the theorizing in the world about economic stresses won't take your mind off the fact that you're hungry if you haven't made provisions to grow some food.

Even if your living situation means you can't take many steps for food security (such as convert your lawn to growing food, planting fruit and nut trees, learning to put food by), you can still grow fresh greens indoors, and those greens can make a positive difference, both for your family's diet and for giving you something to trade with.

Important Idea: Green our transport infrastructure with stimulus money

1000 Friends has an important letter to Gov. Kulongoski here.