Hannah Wallace

All Aboard the Electric School Bus!

 

This story ran on Reasons to be Cheerful September 16, 2024.

Across the country, fall is synonymous with the new school year: sharpened pencils, new bento-style lunch boxes and, for many, the return of the iconic yellow school bus. Only this year, millions of students will be transported by yellow school buses that are electric. 

This change was several years in the making, and it’s a welcome one: Diesel buses — which comprise the majority of school buses in use today — spew exhaust that has been linked to serious physical and cognitive issues in children. 

“Diesel school buses are incredibly polluting, not just for the environment — for air quality — but for children’s health. They are very harmful to children’s respiratory health, lung health, you name it,” says Carolina Chacon, the coalition manager for the Alliance for  Electric School Buses. Studies have shown that diesel fumes, one of the most toxic forms of air pollution, are associated with heart and lung conditions such as asthma as well as cognitive performance issues. Even students who ride buses that have been retrofitted with cheap engine modifications like “diesel particulate filters” perform better on tests, according to researchers at Georgia State University. “The science behind it is really clear that diesel is harmful, period. But for kids, whose lungs and brains are still developing, it is especially bad,” Chacon says. 

The transition from diesel school buses to electric ones has been several years in the making.
Credit: California Energy Commission

When the Alliance for Electric School Buses formed in 2018, members were focused on demanding governors use the Volkswagen settlement funds [from the Volkswagen emissions scandal, aka Dieselgate] to purchase electric school buses. But in most states, the governors or their environmental departments chose to use the funds to swap out older diesel buses for “clean diesel” buses. This was a move in the right direction, but a lower bar than what the Alliance for Electric School Buses was fighting for. 

Then, in 2019, the Alliance switched its focus to policy. It began working with the office of then-Senator Kamala Harris to introduce the first electric school bus bill to Congress. “Her office actually drafted the Clean School Bus Act of 2019,” Chacon says. The bill didn’t advance far, though, and Harris ended up running for president in 2020. “But the need for electric school buses did become a talking point during the primary,” Chacon says. “It was something Harris brought to the table, and that [Washington] Governor Jay Inslee brought to the table.” 

 

 

Eventually, when Biden and Harris were elected, they made electric school buses a priority of their administration. Members of the Alliance for Electric School Buses continued to work with members of Congress to help create a program modeled on the Clean School Bus Act. That ultimately became the EPA Clean School Bus Program, a $5 billion program that was part of Biden’s signature Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021.  Its funding, which ends in fiscal year 2026, is being used to replace diesel school buses with either zero-emission buses (electric) or low-emission buses (alternative fuel buses, powered by propane or natural gas).

Chacon and all the members of the Alliance have been thrilled by how successful the program has been. The EPA has done three funding rounds since April of 2022 and each time, it has been inundated with applications. “To date, the federal government has distributed nearly $3 billion that has resulted in 8,500 new clean school buses,” Chacon says. (Some of those are propane or compressed natural gas, but 90 percent of the requests for funds have been for electric school buses.)  

 

One of the grant recipients has been Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which passed a resolution last year for full fleet electrification. Daniel Kang, director of transportation for the district, says he currently has 56 electric school buses on the road with another 180 on the way — arriving in increments this fall and winter. “All 180 will be on the road starting April 2025,” Kang says.

 

These 180 electric school buses are expected to remove an estimated 780,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the environment per year. The district will also save a yearly average of $10,000 per bus in maintenance and fuel costs combined (depending on local electric rates, which fluctuate due to demand). That’s a total savings of nearly $2 million per year. 

Some school districts have noticed that charging hundreds of buses at the same time puts too much pressure on the grid. Credit: California Energy Commission

The reaction thus far has been very positive, Kang says. Not only is the air surrounding schools and children much cleaner, the buses are quieter. “It’s a night-and-day difference,” Kang says. “There are some drivers — human nature, opposed to change — who were like, ‘I love my diesel — it’s powerful, I can go up the mountain.’ But once they get in [the electric school bus] it’s really hard to deny the benefits because there’s less noise, less heat. They’re saying the experience is peaceful.”

Isaac Aquino, who has driven a bus for LAUSD for the past six years, says he prefers his Lion electric bus to diesel. He loves many things about it, but foremost is how quiet it is. “With the conventional ones that have the hood and the engine up front, the motor is loud. You have your two-way radio on, the kids are making noise — it’s hard to hear. It’s very rattly in the front,” he says. But on the electric model there is no noise. “It’s completely silent.” That is, except for the chime that turns on automatically when it goes 20 miles per hour or slower, which is a safety feature. (Like electric cars, electric school buses emit a recorded noise to alert pedestrians to their presence.) Aquino knows he and his students are breathing cleaner air because when his electric bus is getting maintenance and he has to take a spare diesel bus for the day and mops his brow with a tissue, he sees dirt on it. “It’s like dirty air!” he says. He says the Lion buses also have superior air conditioning systems, which both he and the students appreciate. 

 

Switching 236 buses to electric models comes with some challenges, though. One piece of the puzzle that LAUSD hasn’t solved for yet is infrastructure. At the moment, the district only has enough charging stations at its bus yards to charge 56 buses. That was an important learning experience for Kang and his colleagues. In the first round of EPA funding, LAUSD only applied for funding for the buses, but in subsequent rounds, they’ve requested half of the money go for new buses and the other half for charging stations. 

There may also be unanticipated issues once electric bus fleets reach a certain size. When the number of electric buses reaches into the hundreds, some school districts have noticed that charging them all at the same time puts too much pressure on the grid. “The utility partners are saying, ‘We didn’t know about this but there’s a pulsing because there’s so much demand,’” Kang says. 

Kang thinks it will be sorted out soon. It’s just that the technology is so new. “In regards to this large-scale electrification, we’re still in the iPhone 2 stage,” he says.   

Some school districts are using the electric buses to power the grid during peak energy use times. Credit: California Energy Commission

There are also sometimes compatibility issues between the buses and the chargers, which are made by different companies. “Sometimes they won’t talk. They’ll sit all night connected but in the morning the driver finds out it wasn’t charging. Everyone is scratching their head: ‘Is it the bus? Is it the charging manufacturers?’” Kang says. Because bus manufacturers don’t necessarily want to get into making charging stations — a very specialized technology — the industry answer at the moment is to introduce charging management software that will sync up bus and charging station. 

Aside from these speed bumps, the greatest limitation of electric buses is that they don’t have the longer range that diesel buses do. That’s one of the reasons that — for now at least — Kang plans to hold onto some diesel buses. “We gotta keep some of them at our yards because they are the only buses with a 300-mile range,” he says. Some of the longer field trips, like from Los Angeles to Bear Mountain, exceed the range for an electric bus (which can get only 150 to 162 miles on one charge). But this may be easily solved by better infrastructure, he says: “In short, we need chargers everywhere.” 

But for most districts, the range isn’t an issue. For the Cherokee Central School System in North Carolina, the longest route is 40 miles. “And we can do both of our runs — morning and afternoon — on one charge,” says Donnie Owle, service manager and vice president of the Cherokee Boys Club. The Boys Club, a tribal entity for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, has six electric buses right now with another 15 on the way — via EPA funding. Their first bus came via the VW settlement money and the next four came from a partnership with Duke Energy, the local electric company. The tribe bought the sixth. “Duke Energy did a pilot program and they’re testing using our buses for V2G — vehicle-to-grid,” Owle says. That is, they’re using the buses, which sit idle for many hours each day, to power the grid during peak energy use times. This practice, which LAUSD is also looking into, could be a win-win for school districts, which would be paid by the electric company for the energy. 

Currently, the greatest limitation of electric buses is that they don’t have the longer range that diesel buses do. Credit: California Energy Commission

As in Los Angeles, Owle says most Cherokee Central School System drivers have been won over by the new buses. “Some of the drivers don’t want to drive electric, then when they get on and drive it, they don’t want to get out of it!” he says, laughing. They like that the bus accelerates a lot faster, so that pulling out onto the highway is safer, he says. And he echoes LAUSD driver Aquino’s appreciation of the quiet: “You can actually hear the kids talk. You can hear what the kids are saying about you!” 

In addition to the lack of noise — and the fact that his bus is clean and brand-spanking-new — there’s something else Aquino loves about his electric school bus: It’s the talk of the town. “Our bumpers and rims are lime-green, so it makes the electric buses stand out. Everybody looks at the bus when we’re at a stop sign and you can see them talking about it!” 

And it’s fun to see the students so excited, too, he says. “Especially if they haven’t been on the electric bus before they come in and are like, ‘Oh my god! Is this a new bus?’” 

The Maker Space Where Members Are More Than Their Pasts

This article on Past Lives in Portland, Oregon appeared in Reasons to be Cheerful on July 23rd. 

 

When Brandon Morlock was released from prison in September of 2020, he wanted to create a business that would improve peoples’ lives. His crime had been a terrible accident four and a half years earlier, when he was just 21: He was in a car crash that killed his friend Ryan. Before the accident, Ryan had been trying to help Morlock build a collective space that was part private tutoring business and part carpentry/engineering incubator. 

Behind bars, Morlock worked in various prison industries. At his first prison, there was a wood shop, a metal shop, an auto shop and a garment factory. At Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla, Oregon, he worked at a furniture factory run by Oregon Corrections Enterprises. “I actually acquired valuable skills there,” he says. He also did forestry work — cutting down trees, trapping invasive species and maintaining trails and campgrounds. By the time Morlock got out of prison four years ago — in the middle of the pandemic — his focus had shifted. Wanting to honor Ryan, he set about launching a maker space in Portland.   

Past Lives currently has 200 members across 12 guilds. Courtesy of Past Lives

“Until I went to prison, I did not consider the formerly incarcerated as part of my vision,” says Morlock, who says he’s had a dream of building a collective space since he was a child. “It was after seeing the inside of the prison system and seeing the prison industries that I was inspired to make that a focal point of my business.” On his walk to work at the furniture factory, he’d see people doing metalworking, automotive, textiles and machining. “The sheer amount of talent that exists within prison industries!” he says, sounding awed. He wanted to see that talent properly rewarded. 

Morlock began to deliver on that goal when he opened his collective space, called Past Lives, in 2020. An early supporter of the project was Glenn Dahl, cofounder of local company Dave’s Killer Bread, well-known for being a proud second-chance employer. (Glenn’s brother, Dave, served 15 years in prison.) “Glenn was very interested in our mission,” says Morlock. Dahl offered to guarantee Morlock’s lease, which made conversations with prospective landlords much easier. 

Past Lives is now based in a 26,000-square-foot building in the Brooklyn neighborhood of southeast Portland. Members — there are currently 200 — pay $200 a month for unlimited use of the facilities, which include a wood shop, a metal shop (with blacksmithing, welding fabrication and metal casting), a ceramics studio, a sound studio, a textile studio, a stained glass studio and a dark room. (Members can also pay extra for a private studio.) Membership to Past Lives comes with access to all kinds of high-tech equipment including 3-D printers, a CNC (computer numerical control) lathe, leather-working equipment, a machine embroidery workshop and a jewelry-making area. Members also get a 10 percent discount on classes, which range from Blacksmithing 101 to Intro to Woodworking for Women, Femmes and Thems. About 10 percent of members are people who have been incarcerated. 

Past Lives occupies 26,000-square-foot building in southeast Portland. Courtesy of Past Lives

It’s well known that prison workforce programs help reduce recidivism. A meta-analysis released by the The Mackinac Center for Public Policy in 2023 found that an inmate’s participation in prison workforce or education programs led to a 14.8 percent decrease in the likelihood of recidivism. Though Past Lives doesn’t keep statistics on how many formerly incarcerated members have gone on to find full-time employment, Morlock says that his facilities manager, Nathan Mosley, just got his general contractor license and plans to launch his own firm. Former Past Lives member Casey Simmons is the founder of The Strong Neck, a company that makes a device that helps you strengthen your neck and jaw. “They’re selling really well,” notes Morlock. 

Morlock, who is now 30, comes from a union family — his dad and brother are both members of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, Local 196. Inspired partly by that and partly by video games he’s played (like Warcraft II and Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind), he eventually created 12 guilds at Past Lives. “It’s a collective of guilds,” Morlock says. “We have metalworkers, woodworkers, textile makers, tech people — any respected trade. The building is our Guild Hall.” Each guild determines what their own shop layout looks like, what their classes look like and what they do with their budget. 

 

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Walking through Past Lives on a recent weekday, the warehouse was a hive of activity, with people hunched over anvils in the metal shop and sawing pieces of wood in the wood shop. Impressive industrial machines like a red sandblast cabinet and a sewing machine for leather-working stood at the ready. Upstairs, in the community kitchen, people were preparing lunch and hanging out around a communal table. Morlock introduced me to his colleague, 38-year-old Phoebe Valenti, director of design/build at Past Lives Construction, the maker space’s design and construction firm.  

Spend a few minutes with Valenti and you can tell she’s a passionate advocate for giving all marginalized people the opportunity to build skills and grow. “I’m someone who has had some of my own struggles,” she says. “Not with the carceral system but I’m a single mother of two and I had to flee domestic violence and so, I have a lot of simpatico with the experience of what it is to be othered by society.” Her hope is that Past Lives Construction will give people an opportunity to further their careers in the construction trade, which is booming right now. 

Membership to Past Lives comes with access to a wide range of studios and equipment. Courtesy of Past Lives

Currently, she has 15 people on her design/build team, but the number fluctuates day to day, depending on the projects. Over one-third of them are formerly incarcerated. She also works with fantastic sub-contractors, including a plumber and an electrician, who have each spent time in prison. “It’s really cool to understand on such a deep level how much people can not be defined by those things,” she says, referring to past crimes.

Right now, the Past Lives Construction team is managing upkeep and build-outs at the Circuit Bouldering gyms, replacing a house roof and even working on some large-scale artworks for a new apartment building in Northeast Portland. One of Valenti’s project managers, Noelle, is also an accomplished muralist; another team member, Jack, has made puppets and high-end theater sets. “The cool thing is that Past Lives brings together the art and construction side of things. So there’s this unique point of view,” Valenti says. 

Case in point: Past Lives Construction just got the commission to make mushroom stools and giant insects for a Ren-fest-style event called Fantasy Fair. “So we’re sort of all over the map!” Valenti says. This kind of out-of-the-box creativity excites Valenti — and her team. 

“That’s where I really see an opportunity: Let’s make our spaces reflect our community more. As opposed to just the same old cookie-cutter, mass-produced everything. How can we make this more bespoke?” she says. 

Past Lives regularly hosts events, including art shows and live music. Courtesy of Past Lives

Morlock says this kind of synergy with fine artists of all stripes gives Past Lives Construction a competitive edge: “What general contracting firm have you ever heard of that has in-house stained glass fabrication?” 

Brandon Lamb, 44, is a recent addition to the construction team and he couldn’t be happier. Not only does the work pay well — “it’s the best money I’ve made in quite a long time,” he says — the community at Past Lives has helped him in personal ways, too. “It’s working on relationships and things like that,” he says. “I come from a different background. So I’m learning about people and how they should be treated. Equality. I hadn’t had the chance to understand it because I’ve been in prison so long.” When I ask what he means by “different background,” he doesn’t hesitate to explain: “A background of drug addiction and crime. I’ve been in prison three times.” 

In prison, Lamb also worked for Oregon Corrections Enterprises — in the call center, the garment factory and as a wildland firefighter. “It changed my life,” he says. “I learned work ethic, accountability. You have to be on time.” That’s where he met Mosley, now facilities director at Past Lives.

The two stayed in touch after Mosley’s release, and Lamb saw him as a beacon of hope. “You see somebody, and their example is showing success…” he pauses. “Nathan showed constant success with the steps he was making and he was working here.” When Lamb got out, he had heard so much about the community at Past Lives “and all the amazing artists it holds inside its walls.” He started hanging around the place — helping in any way he could. “It led to a full-time job with Design/Build at a great wage,” he says. 

Now Lamb is very much a part of the community. “He’s a joy,” says Valenti. He also does maintenance on machinery in the wood shop as a work-trade, which gives him access to the equipment. He’s even picked up smaller jobs from other members. “There’s a camaraderie here,” Lamb says. “Everybody treats one another with respect.”  

Could You Transform Your Yard into a Flourishing Wildlife Haven?

Through Backyard Habitat Certification, individuals strive to make even the smallest outdoor spaces more biodiverse. Those changes add up. 

I wrote this article for Reasons to be Cheerful in late April, 2024.

 

Four years ago, Melody Murray started noticing these cute signs in her Portland, Oregon neighborhood of Sullivan’s Gulch. Posted in residents’ front yards, the signs read: “Certified Backyard Habitat” with a drawing of a black, red and white spotted towhee sitting on a leafy branch. 

“I didn’t know what they were for,” says the Ohio native who moved to Oregon in 1994. Her curiosity piqued, she went online and quickly found out: The Backyard Habitat Certification began as a joint project of Columbia Land Trust and Portland Audubon (now called the Bird Alliance of Oregon) to encourage urban residents to garden without pesticides, plant native plants and remove invasive species. All of these practices support a flourishing community of native birds, insects and other wildlife. 

Trillium in Melody Murray’s yard. Courtesy of Melody Murray

When Murray lucked into a one-acre property in the Cully neighborhood in 2021, she joined the Facebook group “Friends of Backyard Habitats,” where she lurked for a while until she felt ready to sign up. Because she and her partner had already cleared away invasive plants like ivy and vinca (periwinkles) — and planted an array of native trees, shrubs and plants — they got certified at the “Silver” level as soon as the Backyard Habitat technician could come for a site visit.  

“It was super easy for me because I had already made an effort to remove the ‘bad guys,’” says Murray, who was already a skilled gardener. “There were other bad guys. But I had enough native stuff that it tipped the balance.”

Since the Backyard Habitat program launched in 2009, 14,000 properties have enrolled in the Portland metro area. (It covers Clackamas, Clark, Multnomah and Washington counties.) The program began as a pilot project in the Southwest hills neighborhood as a way to get neighbors to keep their ivy and blackberry plants from crawling over fences. The habitat signs were a helpful incentive from the start, along with certification, resources and discounts. It worked so well, says Peterson, that the city of Portland wanted to take it city-wide. That’s when Portland Audubon came in as a partner.

After Melody Murray and her partner cleared away invasive plants and planted an array of native trees, shrubs and plants, they got certified at the “Silver” level. Credit: Backyard Habitat Certification Program

 The program, which costs no more than $45 to join, is relatively straightforward. (There’s a sliding scale so that people who can’t afford $45 can pay less. There’s also an option to pay more than $45 to pay it forward.) Once a resident fills out an enrollment form and pays the fee, a habitat technician will come to their house for a site visit. They’ll look closely at the resident’s yards — contrary to the name, the certification covers not just a person’s backyard but front and side yards, as well — and give pro tips on creating habitat for wildlife, managing stormwater, decreasing pesticide use and removing nuisance weeds. They also recommend ways to increase the percentage of “naturescaped areas.” Naturescaping is a gardening practice which emulates nature, so the idea is to select plants that are native, in this case, to the Willamette Valley ecoregion. These plants have adapted to the local climate and are naturally resistant to pests and diseases. They also provide food and shelter to support the entire life cycles of pollinators and birds they have evolved with. As a bonus — and a win for lazy gardeners — they require less maintenance and help manage stormwater. The Backyard Habitat program also asks that each participant have at least three native canopy layers present. (Canopy layers are composed of tall shrubs, small shrubs, and groundcover.) 

Getting rid of nuisance weeds is important because they smother and kill native plants, which local wildlife depend on. One of the most commonly found in gardens in the Portland area is ivy (all cultivars). Though it can look beautiful — who doesn’t like an ivy-draped railing? — it can damage trees and shrubs (which it can completely engulf, eventually killing them), increase erosion and degrade habitat. The one habitat they’re good for is rodents, which love to hide in the ivy.  A good native alternative to ivy is oxalis (a.k.a. redwood sorrel), an edible perennial that flowers, or wild strawberry (though it requires full sun to fruit). 

All these changes and additions can be intimidating at first. Patrice Ball first applied for certification in 2015. She had just been widowed and she wanted to honor her late husband, who had been a gardener. But after the site visit she felt overwhelmed by all the requirements. She didn’t tackle the invasive plants and eventually sold that house and moved to a smaller one that fit her needs better. 

Patrice Ball was pleasantly surprised to learn that her non-native hibiscus tree was not a
deal-breaker for certification. Courtesy of Patrice Ball

At the new property, she began gardening in earnest, with more attention to natives. “I thought, ‘Maybe someday I’ll apply for that,’” she says. One day, she was visiting a friend who had Backyard Habitat Certification and saw a banana tree in her yard. “I said, ‘Now wait a minute. That’s not native,’” she recalls. The friend informed her that certification doesn’t require you to have all native plants, just a certain percentage of your plantable yard. For Silver, that’s just five percent. (Gold is 15 percent and Platinum — much harder to reach — is 50 percent.) In 2022, when a technician came to do a site visit, Ball was pleasantly surprised to hear that she only had to do a few more things. 

“When she left, I thought, OK, I have a shot at this!” That fall and the spring of 2023, Ball added the things the technician suggested. In the summer another technician came out to do the second inspection. “I was a little nervous,” Ball recalls. “I thought I’d get the lowest of the three rankings. At the end of the visit, he was like, ‘Congratulations: you got the Gold certification!’” 

Ball had lived in Belize and for nostalgia’s sake she had also planted a hibiscus tree (not native to the Pacific Northwest). Hers was in full bloom at the time of the second site visit, and the technician asked if she could pose in front of it for the official photo, which he’d then put up on the Backyard Habitat social media. “I said, ‘But it’s not native!’ And he said, ‘That’s OK!’” recalls Ball. “Mainly he was like, ‘You’ve done a really good job, you have a water feature, there’s no lights to confuse the birds at night, you have really happy birds.’”  

A flicker nesting in Melody’s yard. Courtesy of Melody Murray

At the initial assessment, the technician provides a folder full of materials including a native plants brochure, a native plant tracking sheet and coupons for discounts at local nurseries. When they send their site report, the technician also includes a bunch of resources including a link to the Portland Plant List, which is a great way to find native plants and identify nuisance plants, and a link to the Friends of Backyard Habitats Facebook group. 

It was a fun project for Murray, who may sign up for Backyard Habitat’s Open Garden tour (where others can tour your garden). “I have a ton of vine maple. I’ve got a couple if native roses. Every variety of Oregon grape you can imagine, Kinnikinnick, a lot of manzanita,” she says. “I’ve also got camas, penstemon, and Oregon white oak.” As if she couldn’t contain her excitement, Murray went on: “I’ve got huckleberry, native blueberries, native blackberries — not the Himalayan ones. Native rhododendrons, serviceberry. Cascara. A whole bunch of different kinds of ferns — every kind of fern you could imagine.” 

Having a flourishing yard is just one reward. The other? “My birds and insects have really ticked upwards in a big way!”  

The Movement To 'Make America Rake Again'

The roar of leaf blowers has long been ubiquitous in fall. But as more US cities ban the gas-powered devices, that’s starting to change. 

I wrote this piece for Reasons to be Cheerful in January.  

Ten years ago, when Michael Hall retired as dean of students at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and began to spend more time at home, he noticed an ear-splitting noise — something he’d never been around during the day to hear. “The neighbor’s contractor was rattling my windows and assaulting my ears!” he says. One day, he went out and met the contractor at the curb and said, “Can you dial back on the leaf blower? There’s only 10 feet between our houses and it’s really a nuisance.” The contractor responded, “If you kept better care of that side of your house, I wouldn’t have to do that.”  

That launched Hall on a mission that he’s still leading to this day. “At first I started out as Don Quixote out there, tilting at windmills,” says Hall, who describes himself as an old Berkeley hippie. Today he’s not only a co-chair of Quiet Clean PDX, a grassroots organization that’s pushing to ban the use of gas-powered leaf blowers city-wide, but part of a growing national movement. More than 100 US cities have banned gas-powered leaf blowers and over 45 different organizations across the country are part of the Quiet Clean Alliance, from Quiet Clean Philly to Quiet Clean Seattle.  

Michael Hall. Courtesy of Quiet Clean PDX

Not only do gas-powered leaf blowers create extreme noise pollution — the most powerful can produce sounds of up to 100 decibels of low-frequency noise, around the same as a Boeing 737 taking off — they are also an environmental menace and a threat to human health. Most have what’s called a “two-stroke engine,” an outmoded design that burns a mix of gas and oil (for lubrication). It’s been shown that because this type of equipment doesn’t have catalytic converters, only two-thirds of the gas and oil mix is burned as fuel. The rest is emitted as toxic fumes of nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), two of the main ingredients in ground-level ozone, which both trigger asthma attacks and contribute to premature death. In fact, according to the California Air Resources Board, a single operator using a gas leaf blower for one hour generates the same smog-forming emissions as one car driving 1,100 miles. These small devices also leak formaldehyde and benzene, both of which are known carcinogens. And the people who are most impacted by these toxic fumes? The lawn care workers who use them, many of whom are from lower socio-economic backgrounds. After that, children, the elderly and anyone who is ill are the most impacted — and unlike landscapers, they aren’t wearing protective gear. 

Finally, these relatively small devices also emit tons (literally) of carbon dioxide, the leading cause of global warming. According to the latest data from the EPA, fossil fuel-powered lawn equipment (including not just leaf blowers but trimmers, mowers, weedwackers, etc.) emits 30 million tons of carbon dioxide in the US each year — more than the amount of greenhouse gases that Los Angeles produced in 2021. 

The Portland Airport's Astonishing New Roof Tells a Local Timber Story

I wrote this article on the stunning new design for PDX for Reasons to be Cheerful in November.  

 

When passengers pass through the newly remodeled Portland International Airport in spring 2024, they’ll be able to point up to specific Douglas fir beams around the oval skylights and know that they came from the ancestral lands of the Coquille Indian Tribe in Southwestern Oregon. 

This will be the first major US airport to have a mass timber roof, and all the timber for the project came from sustainably managed forests that are located less than 300 miles away. The soaring, nine-acre ceiling — which will have lots of natural sunlight streaming in through the skylights and windows — will feel a bit like a forest. (The renovation will also include the addition of 70 or so living trees that will be growing in recessed and above-ground planters.) 

The process of sourcing the wood took six years of planning, research, forest visits and many, many phone calls between the Port of Portland, Portland-based ZGF Architects, regional tribes, family-run forests, mill owners and brokers.

All the wood for the nine-acre ceiling came from within 300 miles of the airport. Courtesy of Port of Portland

When ZGF principal Jacob Dunn joined the firm in 2017, his colleagues were already considering going with an all-wood roof. The Port of Portland, the public authority that oversees the airport and marine terminals in Portland, loved the idea. “The Port’s mandate was: We want it to be a mass timber roof. We’re the front door to the region, we really want to showcase this industry that is critical to managing and stewarding one of our region’s most precious natural resources,” recalls Dunn, who is ZGF’s sustainability lead for the PDX airport project.

 

The Port of Portland also wanted the roof to be the most sustainable version of a mass timber roof that it could possibly be — which meant traceability. “Most of the voices in the room said, ‘That can’t be done, that’s not the way the industry works,’” Ryan Temple, founder and owner of Sustainable Northwest Wood recalls. He was one of a handful of people who said that not only was it possible, it might even help redefine the timber industry — by making timber more traceable. He saw the project as a chance to identify and celebrate the people who are sustainably managing their forestland.

Continue reading here. 

 

Portland's Art of Feel-good Densification

I wrote this piece back in June for Reasons to be Cheerful, David Byrne's publication.  

When it comes to the US housing crisis, Portland was early to the party. Well over a decade ago, in 2009 and 2010, Oregon’s biggest city had the lowest rental vacancy rate in the country. The years since have brought little relief: From 2013 to 2018, median rent in Portland rose 29 percent, and the average home price rose 46 percent. Since 2015, the city has been under an official housing state of emergency.

Portland’s housing crunch has many roots, from multi-decade population growth to the broader affordability crisis sweeping the nation. But one factor stands out: Most of the city’s residential neighborhoods had been zoned exclusively for single-family homes since the late 1950s. That is, in most neighborhoods, new duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes (let alone apartment buildings) have not been allowed.   

Four new townhomes built using Portland’s Residential Infill Project in the city’s Woodlawn neighborhood. Credit: Cheryl Juetten

But in 2020, all that changed when Portland’s city council tossed out 60-plus years of low-density mandates by voting in favor of housing reform that ended single-family zoning. The new rules were game-changing: a package of zoning shifts known as the Residential Infill Project (RIP for short) laid the groundwork for more residential density than in most American cities. RIP made new single-family homes of over 2,500 square feet illegal. It erased bans on “middle housing” — a term describing duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and townhomes — across the city. And it allowed for two accessory dwelling units (ADUs) on any lot, removed residential parking mandates, and permitted three-story apartment buildings of up to six homes on any lot as long as they met deep affordability standards. It amounted to a transformation in Portland’s approach to urban density, and is, to this day, one of the most pro-housing reforms that any US city has passed.

“This reform ultimately became the most permissive update to low-density single-dwelling zones in the country,” urban planning consultant Neil Heller, who helped do some of the financial modeling for RIP, writes in the latest issue of Southern Urbanism Quarterly. 

This is the story of how Portland got it done.

 

Many cities have attempted to increase density. Nearly all have been met with fierce opposition. 

The reasons behind these objections are many. Sometimes it’s a fear that proximity to denser housing will decrease the value of single-family homes. Other times opposition stems from a desire to preserve historic neighborhoods. (“Stop Demolishing Portland” was a popular yard sign among the city’s anti-RIP contingent.) But objection to density is often racially coded. Multi-unit buildings, because they cost less to rent, often attract more low-income and non-white residents to neighborhoods. 

Portland at the turn of the century, when the city was still developing. Credit: TriMet

Explicitly racial zoning has been illegal since 1917, but racial covenants — clauses written into deeds that bar the (white) owner from selling to non-whites — existed for decades beyond that. In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled that racial covenants couldn’t be enforced, and in 1968, the Fair Housing Act made them illegal.

But that didn’t stop racist zoning practices — cities that couldn’t ban non-white homeowners instead started banning the types of housing they believed non-white homeowners would buy. In some cities, duplex bans and even apartment bans became popular in wealthier neighborhoods. In 1959, Portland went even further, banning construction of duplexes and other attached housing in almost every neighborhood. (Portland’s loophole to this was that duplexes were allowed on corners.) “One effect, in many cities a primary goal, was to segregate people by class, race, age and income,” writes Michael Andersen, a senior housing researcher with the Sightline Institute, a progressive Seattle-based think tank. These bans on so-called “middle housing” remain in force in many cities to this day.

 

“There’s this pretty big presumption that you don’t mess with single-family zones,” says Eli Spevak, a developer of small-scale housing and one of the Portlanders who pushed for zoning reform. “People love their homes to be investments they make. Understandably people get attached to things not changing.” 

Not all of the opposition to Portland’s reforms was self-serving. Some objected to tearing down beautiful historic homes—and the resulting environmental impact, since most tear-down detritus goes to a landfill. Others worried that the RIP would encourage developers to tear down affordable single-family homes in outer neighborhoods—where people of color have long owned their own homes—and build market-rate townhouses instead. Since the RIP wasn’t tied to comprehensive affordability mandates, these people feared that “affordability” would be an elusive promise, dictated by invisible market forces, and inadvertently fuel gentrification in these areas. 

 

Houses of Portland. Credit: Cheryl Juetten

These reservations aside, a loose-knit coalition that included developers, pro-tenant rights groups, an anti-displacement coalition, environmental groups, and transit and mobility advocates came together under one unified voice. This group, Portland for Everyone, helped to change the tenor of the conversation and persuade the City Council that more density was exactly what Portland needed to alleviate its housing crisis. 

One of the leaders of Portland’s zoning reform was Spevak, who had worked for Habitat for Humanity and consulted for other affordable housing projects. In 2014, Spevak, wanting to see a broader palette of housing choices in Portland, drafted a letter to the director of the city’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS) asking for a code update to meet Portland’s future housing needs. 

The letter, signed by nearly 40 building professionals, local organizations and Portland residents, asked the Bureau to encourage accessory dwelling units (ADUs), permit existing homes to be divided internally, allow small “cottage cluster” developments, eliminate household size definitions from the zoning code, and more. Demographic shifts had left Portland with smaller households that looked different than traditional nuclear families, the letter argued, and the city code needed to catch up. 

The letter was an opening gambit to the BPS, where both the then-director and her long-range planner were looking for ways to increase density and discourage so-called McMansions. 

In 2016, Spevak came to the realization that if they wanted to win the fight for zoning reform, they needed a dedicated advocate who would lead the fight. “The people who were going to oppose the changes have a lot of time and are self-organized. If we were going to create a ground game, we had to have a staff organizer,” says Spevak. “So that was pivotal. We were going to lose unless we had staff.”

Spevak saw the ideal coalition organizer in his employee, Madeline Kovacs. A then 29-year-old Portland State University grad student interested in the links between density and decarbonization, Kovacs had been active in the youth climate movement, eventually becoming co-director of a group called Project Survival Media. After graduate work in urban and regional planning, she interned for two years at BPS and then came to work for Spevak at his firm Orange Splot, LLC.

Kovacs, a passionate organizer, also had affordable housing connections. “Plus, everyone likes her,” Spevak adds.  The anti-sprawl nonprofit 1,000 Friends of Oregon was willing to host Kovacs and her emerging coalition of pro-housing groups under its banner. (Eventually the organization even helped fund her position.)

Kovacs set to work launching a coalition called Portland for Everyone. She and representatives from nonprofits and organizations throughout the city met frequently and determined what they had in common. “One of the things I’m very proud of is that the pro-housing advocates really un-siloed ourselves,” says Kovacs. Indeed, Kovacs gathered some unlikely bedfellows: affordable housing providers and nonprofit land trusts sat at the table with members of the Portland Homebuilders Association, a trade association representing builders and remodelers of single-family homes. Environmental groups like Sunrise PDX started talking to folks from Anti-Displacement PDX. The coalition even included a handful of progressive neighborhood associations, which historically have not been supportive of denser zoning.

“So I think when people look and they’re like, ‘Oh! You have affordable housing builders, tree canopy advocates and bicycle advocates — and they’re all signing the same letter?’ That makes a policy maker pay attention,” Kovacs says. 

 “We all worked and talked together and we adopted a very holistic approach. It’s not just upzoning and it’s not just funding, it’s not just stability — it’s all three of those things,” she says. “And we need a housing strategy that’s going to provide a range of solutions working across that spectrum.”

 

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There was seemingly no one that Kovacs and her coalition members wouldn’t talk to. They did education and outreach with neighborhood, business and community-based associations. “We presented to 3,000 Portlanders face-to-face!” she says, laughing. They also partnered with and presented to organizations as varied as AARP, OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon, and Business for a Better PDX. They got inspiration from the YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) movement. “It was nice to be able to learn some lessons from colleagues in other places — share ideas, share strategies,” Kovacs says.

By 2018, when the project came before the city’s Planning Commission, some 38 organizations had already endorsed the coalition’s principles in advance. The result? Over half of the testimonials before the Commission were pro-density — a dramatic departure from such meetings in many other cities, where anti-density voices are often the loudest in the room. 

The same thing was true at two City Council meetings in early 2020, where people in favor of the new law outnumbered anti-housing testimony more than six to one.

Portland for Everyone had successfully educated Portlanders en masse about the benefits of the zoning changes. (Kovacs left Portland for Everyone to work on state zoning reform at the end of 2018.)

In August of 2020, the City Council passed the RIP by a vote of three to one. It no doubt helped that two of the newer City Council members — Chloe Eudaly and Jo Ann Hardesty — were both renters. 

Meanwhile, down at the State Capitol in Salem, then-Speaker of the House Tina Kotek had just helped push through a groundbreaking zoning bill, making Oregon the first state in the nation to effectively ban single-family zoning. House Bill 2001, passed in 2019, required cities larger than 10,000 residents to allow duplexes in single-family zones and cities larger than 25,000 to allow even more types of multi-family housing like triplexes, fourplexes and “cottage clusters.”

“I think this is really brilliant legislation that will have long-term impact,” says Steve Messinetti, the President and CEO of Habitat for Humanity Portland Region.

“The neat thing about the timing is that Portland passed residential infill in 2020, and there were neighborhood associations on the west side raising money to sue the city over that,” Spevak says. But by the time Portland adopted the RIP, the state’s own zoning reform required cities of Portland’s size to densify, defanging the legal challenges being prepared by some of the city’s neighborhood associations. “So the city was never sued. That worked out nicely,” Spevak says. Kotek, who is still a vocal champion of density, is now Oregon’s governor.

Other cities and states around the country have passed similar reforms. Statewide “middle-housing” bills have been introduced in nearly 20 states since 2019 and have passed in at least two beyond Oregon: Maine and California. Minneapolis and Vancouver, Washington both re-legalized duplexes and triplexes citywide before Portland did. Seattle eliminated single-family zoning in 27 neighborhoods in 2019. And Austin passed a zoning reform allowing sixplexes with affordability the year before Portland’s RIP passed.

“That presumption [that you don’t mess with single-family zones] is getting blown away faster than you’d ever guess,” says Spevak. Now, roughly a dozen states allow cities to add ADUs to residential lots, even red states like Montana. (Texas’ state house just narrowly voted down a bill that would’ve allowed ADUs statewide.)  

Most developers and city planners say it will take at least a decade before we see measurable results of Portland’s RIP. That said, from August 2021 to July 2022 — the first 12 months the RIP was in effect — 367 middle housing units were built, according to Morgan Tracy, Senior Planner at the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. During that same time period, just 107 single-dwelling houses were built. (28 of those had a single ADU on the property, but those were permitted prior to RIP passing.) So, in the first year of the RIP, 3.4 times more middle housing units were built than single-family houses.

“I think this is really brilliant legislation that will have long-term impact,” says Steve Messinetti, the President and CEO of Habitat for Humanity Portland Region. “Where I think we’ll see the greatest impact is in the 10 to 20 year horizon.”

Development — especially for affordable housing projects — can be slow. You have to buy the property, get funding approved, clear additional zoning hurdles, and so on. That said, Messinetti is overseeing two low-income housing projects that wouldn’t have been possible prior to these zoning changes. In Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood, Habitat bought a three-quarter acre lot that had a derelict home on it. Prior to the RIP, a developer might have torn down the home and subdivided the lot for five expensive single-family homes. Now, however, Habitat will be able to build 15 affordable units on that parcel — a mix of duplexes and triplexes. The second project, in Southwest Portland, was a former church on 1.9 acres. Habitat is currently building 17 detached homes there. (Cottage clusters, which state legislation allowed in 2019, were added in an update to the RIP in 2022.) “This is a good example of an area where not a lot of affordable housing has been built,” he says. 

While he acknowledges that some of the triplexes and townhomes are not as affordable as the activists who helped push through RIP probably would have liked, he does think they will be the most affordable housing in the city in the future.

“The long-term benefit is we’re creating more housing for middle and low-income folks, helping to desegregate neighborhoods,” Messinetti says. “And that’s a good thing overall.” 

When Tackling Homelessness, Prevention is Often the Best Medicine

By intervening early, often with small rent payments, a Portland shelter kept nearly 100 families out of homelessness last year, saving thousands of dollars in future rehousing costs.   

I wrote this for Reasons to be Cheerful on April 20, 2023. 

 

Like many nonprofits that help people experiencing homelessness in the US, Path Home in Portland, Oregon provides temporary shelter and meals to those in need. But five years ago, the organization launched a separate program with hopes of making such services unnecessary someday. The Homelessness Prevention Program helps families about to lose their homes by paying back rent and past due utilities in emergency situations.  

“It really only takes a few days of missed work to start a snowball effect,” says Samuel Freni-Rothschild, Path Home’s prevention specialist. 

The number one reason that Freni-Rothschild hears from clients who need help paying their rent is that an adult missed some work because someone in the family was sick and therefore they lost income.

Evictions have spiked in Oregon. In January alone, the state had 2,244 evictions, according to the Oregon Law Center Eviction Defense Project. Of these, 847 were in the county where Portland is located. At Path Home, which offers 17 emergency shelter units for families experiencing homelessness, there is a massive waitlist for housing with 800 families. 

Portland’s Path Home has a waitlist of 800 families for its emergency shelter units.
Credit: Path Home

But with the prevention program, Path was able to keep 93 families in their homes in 2022 — serving a total of 155 kids and 140 adults. 

The average spent per family? Just $3,180. 

Freni-Rothschild says he often uses the metaphor of preventative health care to explain his job. “The housing program and the shelter program are like acute medical care. It’s like going to the ER when your bone is broken and you need to fix it. What I’m doing is preventative medicine,” he says.

Stress and trauma prevention

Giving rent assistance to a family who is struggling financially and allowing them to remain housed prevents both the stress and trauma of homelessness, which can be challenging to recover from. The approach also costs a fraction of what we now spend to rehouse and shelter houseless individuals. 

According to Brandi Tuck, Path Home’s executive director, rehousing people who have been homeless can cost as much as $50,000 in rent assistance over the course of a few years. Tuck argues that prevention is not only more effective — it’s a better investment.

The prevention program focuses on people who have not been involved with the social services system yet. “We are trying to catch people at the very beginning of what could potentially be a much larger crisis,” explains Freni-Rothschild. Part of the reason for this is that the organization wants to be reasonably sure that a one-time intervention will be sufficient to get people on track to being self-sufficient. 

The application process is quick and straightforward. There must be a child in the household (as with all Path Home services), and once families qualify, Freni-Rothschild will contact their landlord. If the family is in arrears from the previous month, he’ll pay the bill or hammer out a payment plan that’s both agreeable to the landlord and reasonable for the family. Sometimes he will provide some light-touch case management: help with budgeting, connecting the family to other resources — like food pantries or childcare — that they don’t know how to look for. 

Path Home’s focus on homelessness prevention also accords with the brain science that Tuck has studied and cites extensively. 

“We are literally preventing the crisis and trauma of homelessness for people, so the children don’t have adverse childhood experiences, so the parents can stay in the logical/critical thinking part of their brain and not have to go through that trauma,” Tuck says. 

 

Most of the government resources that are dedicated to prevention, Tuck explains, are for families or individuals who have already experienced homelessness at least one. As a result of being houseless, these people may have complex trauma, acute mental health issues, and/or substance abuse issues. 

“They have been rehoused using rapid rehousing dollars, which are very short-term resources but the complications that have arisen in their life that led to the homelessness or the trauma that came from the episode of homelessness makes it so that one year is not enough time to get stable on their feet,” Tuck says.

‘Nimble and adaptive’

Path Home’s prevention program is currently funded via grants and individual donations. There are benefits to that. Government funding often comes with strings attached, and Freni-Rothschild said they have had independence to experiment and “be very nimble and adaptive.” 

That said, Path has reached a point where it could use a larger injection of funds, he says. Freni-Rothschild is the sole staffer focused on prevention, and he can only do so much. 

“Last month, I picked up 10 new families in the county where 800 were evicted,” Freni-Rothschild says, his voice trailing off. “The ratios I’m working with are a little daunting.”

Usually he has about 20 families at a time. Sometimes he works with clients for a few months. He says that he typically reaches capacity by the middle of each month. 

Meanwhile, Path Home continues addressing homelessness from many angles. They are currently running a basic guaranteed income pilot with six families receiving $575 a month for two years. The results of this trial, which is nearing its end, are telling, says Tuck. “People are going back to school, getting higher paying jobs. They are spending more time together as a family, they are participating in kids’ activities and cooking dinner and all those kinds of things,” she says. Path Home also provides life skills and parenting classes as well as budgeting support. And they’re creating more affordable housing with support services adjacent to their offices in southeast Portland. 

A Path Home shelter play room. Credit: Aaron Leitz

According to Housing Oregon, someone in the state making minimum wage needs to work 82 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom apartment. Tuck notes that many of the single moms who end up in Path Home apartments have lost their housekeeping jobs when — during spring or summer break — the kids are out of school and the mom has no choice but to bring them to work with her. “She takes the kids to work until her manager finds out, and then she gets fired. And she can’t even look for another job until the kids go back to school,” Tuck says.  

This is one of the reasons that Path Home’s new capital campaign — which includes the construction of a new four-story building containing 25 affordable two- and three-bedroom apartments — will include on-site childcare as well as employment services and mental health counseling. Tuck expects to break ground in 2025. For now, the organization’s offices and nine of the emergency shelter units are located in a former Russian Orthodox church that’s been beautifully renovated by architect Jessica Helgerson using concepts of trauma-informed design. The high-ceilinged space — which has a library, a computer lab, and a shared living room with Netflix and VR games — contains lots of circles and curves, plants, and natural light, all of which combine to create a safe and calming atmosphere for families. 

Black Joy Is Propelling a Rural Racial Justice Movement

In conservative parts of Oregon, one protest group is betting that a celebration of Black culture will capture more hearts than anger.

This story appeared in Reasons to be Cheerful on Jan. 20th. 

 

In the summer of 2020, when protests against police brutality were taking place in Portland and Salem, Oregon, Julianne Jackson was there with the crowds on the streets, chanting for justice. But something nagged at her. Jackson, a Black woman with a loud voice and an infectious laugh, began to feel that she was not being accurately represented.

“There was a lot of hatred, a lot of vitriol and a lot of things I didn’t necessarily identify with,” she says. “And while I understand those feelings — I have them, too — it didn’t represent me as a Black woman. Black women throughout time have really been known for our ability to find joy in all kinds of situations, our ability to nurture, our ability to stand firm in the face of things that are really, really difficult.”  

Credit: Black Joy Oregon

One night, she woke with an epiphany. She and her wife had met folks at Portland’s protests who were from the state’s rural areas. “They asked, ‘If we were to do something like this [a march], who would come and stand with me?’” Jackson decided that Oregon’s rural towns could be the perfect place to benefit from a different kind of racial justice march — one oriented around joy instead of anger. 

The next day, with the help of her friend Emily Terry, Black Joy Oregon was born, a nonviolent organization that shows up in rural areas to demonstrate loving and joyful celebrations of Black culture. When they travel to rural towns they stand at busy intersections and hold up signs emblazoned with messages of love for the Black community — Black is beautiful, Black is revolutionary, Black lives uplift, and so on.  “We smile and wave at folks, dance and just spread love and joy,” Jackson says. They also build connections with community leaders and provide access to resources and assistance for Black folks. 

Since then, the group, composed of seven member-leaders and an informal “travel team” of around 14, has traveled to 170 towns across the state, from the Southern coastal hamlet of Coos Bay to Pendleton, where the famous wool blankets are made. 

Credit: Black Joy Oregon

Many of these are places where virtually everyone is white. “I’ve met people who are like, ‘I’ve never seen a Black person in real life,’” Jackson says. “And if all you’ve seen is a Black person on Fox news, burning up Portland, what does that say to you?”

Jackson, who is biracial, has seen the white members of her family learn and grow. “I think that’s really where Black Joy comes from is this desire to help turn the lightbulb on for people to do better,” she says.

This lack of exposure can make even the simplest of positive interactions profoundly impactful. One of the most memorable experiences for Jackson was early in the pandemic, in August of 2020. She and a core group of Black Joy women were trying to find ways to help people escape the fast-moving Beachie Creek Fire. Jackson was scrolling through Facebook and heard about a couple who needed help evacuating their entire farm in Stayton, Oregon, a farming community 16 miles southeast of Salem. 

“We found this one post and they needed help evacuating. They sent us their address. And when we pulled up to their farm it literally was like: Trump, Trump, Trump. Trump on a bald eagle, Trump with abs — I mean, it was crazy.”

Upon seeing the signs, she and her Black Joy compatriots exchanged nervous glances. Jackson was wearing a Black Lives Matter sweatshirt and had BLM stickers covering her car. Her friend wore a shirt that said “Humanize Being Black.”

“We were all looking at each other like, what the fuck? And we just got right to work. We were like, ‘Whaddya need?’”

The 60-something white man and his wife who owned the farm asked the women for help corralling the farm animals. Within no time, everyone was grabbing sheep, turkeys, ducks and other livestock. “We were catching chickens with nets. I mean, it was wild!” Jackson laughs. “And I’m not a farm girl by any means.” To prove her point, she flashes me her long, curved nails over our Zoom call. “Then there was a bull. This bull is scared, you know. We are trying to wrangle this bull into this little trailer. And it is not working at all. Luckily these amazing cowboys came out of nowhere and just lassoed it. It was phenomenal.” 

They ended up getting all of the farmer’s animals to safety, even helping to drive some of them in their own vehicles down to a farm in Salem that was willing to take them temporarily. “When we had gotten everything completed, this dude kinda looked at us, and his eyes were welling up and he said, ‘This is what America needs. This is what works.’” 

Credit: Black Joy Oregon

Not everyone agrees. Jackson says that she and the Black Joy Oregon crew have been criticized by other Black Lives Matter activists for helping people perceived to be antagonistic to the cause. 

“That’s a really important concept to me,” Jackson says. “If you’re on fire, I’m not going to ask you if you voted for Trump first before I put you out. I’m going to put you out and we can talk about all of that later, if that’s what needs to happen. For me, it’s so imperative that we be human first.”

She goes on, “That couple, I bet you they were like, ‘Antifa just rolled up to our house,’” when they saw Jackson and her assembled group of women emerge from their cars. “They thought anybody on the left was there for doom and gloom and destruction. And you know, to be able to put a different face to that for them…I don’t know the end result. I hope we were able to enlighten them. I hope when people around them were like, ‘Antifa is starting fires in Portland,’ that they were like, ‘No, Antifa actually just moved our sheep!’”

Not all of their experiences have been positive. In Coos Bay, a local Black activist who had been receiving death threats invited them to town to host a nonviolent march. They were met by a large group of aggressive counter protesters, many of them armed. The group of white locals followed participants of the march, clearly trying to intimidate them. “Coos Bay was the only one where I thought we might actually die,” she says.

A few times, they’ve been in small towns where something they initially perceived as sinister turned out to be a warm welcome. A few towns away from Coos Bay, a white man pulled his truck over by the group of women, recalls Jackson, “He came in hot and we were hella worried. With tears in his eyes, he said, ‘My son is biracial, my grandson is biracial. We’ve never seen Black people here. Thank you for coming and thank you for standing up for my grandson.”

Something similar occurred in the coastal town of Otis (population: 3,450). “We were on the side of the road. This dude from the pizzeria comes out and he’s like, ‘I never thought I’d see anybody stand up for people who look like me.’ The lady came out and gave us Pronto Pups! We had a great time!” In the town of Sisters, a group of residents got together and bought the Black Joy volunteers dinner. 

The nonprofit has been financed almost entirely by donations and one small grant from Willamette University. This winter, they’re taking a short break from travel. (All of the volunteer leaders have families and full-time jobs.) Jackson, who works in criminal justice reform, says they’re thinking of broadening the organization’s scope to include more advocacy work. But she also expects they will resume travel to remote parts of the state in the spring.

Cara Turnquist couldn’t go to the 2020 protests because she’d just had a double knee replacement. But Jackson was a friend of a friend of hers, and Turnquist was drawn to her approach. “I loved that she led with love,” says Turnquist, who is white. “I really believe that that is the way that we’re going to make change because I don’t see a lot of progress happening when people are called out. But I do see progress happening when people are called in. And so I wanted to put my efforts behind something that I believed in so much like that.” 

The owner of Push Fitness, Turnquist realized that even if she couldn’t join a march, she could organize a fundraiser for Black Joy. She called it Squats for Social Justice. The first year, it took place on Zoom, and in 2021, in the parking lot of a gym. This past November they held it at Willamette University. Participants were pledged a certain amount of money per squat.

Member-leader Emily Terry, who is also biracial, says Black Joy has created this kind of supportive community. It started at the protests, which she attended by herself until she got to know Jackson and other women who were showing up. “We can talk about how we impact our community around us, but one of the best things is the community we have created for each other,” says Terry. “I know that it doesn’t matter what happens — they will be here when I need them. With any amount of bail money!” 

The Spectacular Comeback of the American Farmers Market

Once ubiquitous, farmers markets nearly vanished in the mid 20th century — until an array of forces converged to bring about their modern-day renaissance.

Fennel, beets, and parsley, at the PSU Farmers' Market; Brussels sprouts on the vine 

Visit the main Portland Farmers Market on any given Saturday morning and you’ll see tables spilling over with rainbow chard, beets, leeks and all kinds of lettuce. You’ll see vendors selling homemade salsa and tortilla chips, and cheesemakers plying their brie. It’s a scene that’s become part of America’s urban fabric. Today, there are over 8,140 farmers markets around the country.

But it wasn’t always this way.

 America’s interest in fresh, local food was well underway by the time Michael Pollan’s influential The Omnivore’s Dilemma became a bestseller in 2006 and Michelle Obama started a kitchen garden at the White House. But just a few decades prior, the beloved farmers’ market was all but extinct in the US. Its near death — and spectacular comeback — shows how social movements, economic shifts and government policy can converge to resurrect a food system that’s healthier for people, the planet and cities themselves.

To continue reading, go to Reasons to be Cheerful. 

 

How San Francisco Cracked the Urban Composting Code

California’s environmental achievements are something to behold. The state ranks first in the U.S. for growth in solar power generation and battery storage. It’s the national leader in cumulative electric vehicle sales and public EV charging stations. And it’s one of a growing number of states that aim to run entirely on carbon-free energy in the coming decades – a goal it briefly met, for about 15 minutes, on April 30.

Now, California is once again setting the pace on a critically important (if somewhat less glamorous) climate imperative: urban composting.

On January 1, a law went into effect making it mandatory for every city and county in California to provide residents a means to separate and recycle their organic waste. The impacts could be enormous – according to climate experts, composting is one of the simplest low-tech measures humans can take to reverse climate change. Allowing food waste to decompose in landfills creates methane, a greenhouse gas dozens of times more potent than carbon dioxide. And landfills are the third-largest source of methane in the U.S. Composting has other benefits as well, from sequestering carbon and helping farmers create drought-resistant crops to creating long-term revenue streams for city governments.  

Yet few big American cities have successful city-wide composting programs, particularly on the East Coast. How does a city fully integrate composting into its sanitation stream? Perhaps nowhere offers as clear a path forward as San Francisco, the first big U.S. city to offer composting to all of its residents. Twenty-six years later, its system remains the gold standard.

Building a system scrap by scrap

In 1990, when curbside recycling was still new to many communities, San Francisco was already recycling over 25 percent of its trash. Nevertheless, the city’s Department of the Environment was concerned about all the garbage still being sent to faraway landfills, so it authorized a “waste characterization” study in 1996 in which engineers looked at exactly what was being sent to the dump. What they found was shocking: 33 percent of it was organic material that could have been composted.

“It was a combination of food scraps, sticks and leaves,” says Robert Reed, public relations manager at Recology, a resource recovery company that partners with the city. “We have 5,000 restaurants here, so we’re generating a lot of food scraps.”

All those scraps add up to a heap of emissions, plus the associated costs of disposal. “When you put materials in a landfill, you eventually fill that landfill and you have to build another landfill. And now you have to ship to greater distances,” says Reed.

So, at the city’s request, Recology, which has collected San Francisco’s refuse since 1921, launched a compost pilot program. It started at the San Francisco Wholesale Produce Market and on residential routes in the Richmond District. Soon after, it expanded to include some large convention hotels. By 2000, it had gone citywide. 

Nine years later, when cities like Seattle were just beginning their voluntary residential composting programs, San Francisco made composting and recycling mandatory for all residents and businesses. 

Mandatory participation scaled things up dramatically. Recology began offering free composting pails, bin labels, signs, multilingual trainings and toolkits for commercial buildings. It also meant occasional fines from the city for non-compliance. All of it was part of the city’s ambitious plan to be “Zero Waste” by 2020.

Today, San Francisco’s pioneering program is world renowned. Over 135 countries have sent delegations to study the city’s compost and recycling systems first hand. The city collects more than 500 tons of compostable materials from its ubiquitous green bins every day, according to Reed, helping to divert some 80 percent of the city’s waste from landfills. All these organic scraps are turned into high-quality compost in just 60 days at a Blossom Valley Organics facility east of the city, and then sold to local farms, vineyards and orchards.

The curbside composting and recycling bins used in San Francisco. Credit: Recology

The revenue from these sales helps offset the cost of the program. “If something goes into the landfill, there’s no sale!” laughs Reed. The system also creates jobs. According to a study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, composting sustains four times the number of jobs as landfill or incineration disposal operations. In Maryland, a 2013 study found that composting operations provided more total jobs than the state’s three trash incinerators combined. 

And of course, all that compost enriches the region’s soil with nutrients, minerals and microbes, helping farmers grow healthy crops with fewer commercial fertilizers. Compost also acts as a natural sponge – Pennsylvania’s Rodale Institute found that farms can grow up to 40 percent more food in times of drought when they use compost and follow other organic practices. In the West, where drought is common, this is a boon to both commercial farmers and backyard gardeners. Compost can even mitigate the threat of wildfire by retaining moisture from rain and irrigation. 

All of which begs the question: With the many obvious benefits and few apparent downsides, why, 26 years after San Francisco started composting, haven’t other major cities like New York, Boston, or Chicago followed suit?

New York’s composting conundrum

Not long ago, New York City briefly had its own in-home composting program. In 2015, then New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio introduced a Zero Waste initiative similar to San Francisco’s. Composting was its cornerstone. Pandemic-related budget cuts forced the city to suspend the service in May 2020. But even before that, the program was anemic, only diverting 43,000 tons of food scraps in 2017 – just five percent of the city’s total food waste. 

A New York City curbside composting bin in 2017 before the program was discontinued. Credit: Wikipedia

Theories abound as to what went wrong. One big one has to do with a lack of public outreach. Even the chairman of the city council’s sanitation committee admitted that no one in his own building knew how the system worked. “In my building, we received the brown bins, and some fliers,” he told the New York Times. “I guarantee I’m the only person in my building who knows how to use them.” 

Simply convincing residents to change their long-standing garbage habits was another hurdle. Former NYC Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia told the Times, “The biggest challenge is asking New Yorkers to do something different.” She related a story about how, when the department was handing out brown bins one man didn’t want one. “But we were handing out compost at the same time, and he definitely wanted the compost. We said, ‘We really need your banana peels in order to make this in the future.’” The man took one of the bins, illustrating the importance of education and outreach.

New York re-launched its composting program in August 2021 in neighborhoods where interest was most concentrated, according to Vincent Gragnani, press secretary at the city’s Department of Sanitation. Soon, there will be 100 bins at schools across the city that can be accessed with a smartphone app or a key card. “Within the next two years, every public school in the city will be separating their organic waste for collection,” Gragnani told RTBC. New Sanitation Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch is in the process of reviewing what has and has not worked with the city’s program in the past, but is not ready to share this publicly.

Can California strike ‘black gold’?

Now, inspired by San Francisco’s trailblazing composting success, California is set to enact statewide composting for all. (Only a small handful of states mandate statewide composting). The goal of the law is to reduce the landfilling of compostable materials by 75 percent by 2025, thereby reducing methane emissions on a massive scale. CalRecycle, the department that oversees the state’s recycling and waste reduction programs, estimates about half of the state’s communities had food and yard waste collection programs at the start of 2022.

“We all have the same goal: to send as little as possible to the landfill,” says Reed. Credit: Sacramento State

There are several things the remaining cities and counties around California can do to emulate San Francisco’s success. One is to stay on message. In 2000, when Recology made green bins available to every resident in San Francisco, the response was mixed. “Some people said, ‘Come and take it back.’ Other people embraced it right away,” recalls Reed. “We were doing a lot of outreach and education in promoting the program and why we think it’s important for people to participate.” 

For instance, San Franciscans speak over 100 different languages, so Recology opted to put photographs on the green bins (in addition to a few words in English, Spanish, and Chinese), showing what can and can’t be composted. The company also produces a customer newsletter that comes with its bills, filled with articles about the benefits of composting and recycling. In addition, Reed, a former reporter, worked closely with journalists to get stories published early on about restaurants embracing composting and vineyards relying on compost from the city. 

But according to Reed, the key to composting success is getting kids on board. “The best way to get adults to compost is to get composting programs running in schools,” he says. Recology donates compost to school gardens, which makes a big impression on children. “Those kids go home and say, ‘Why don’t we compost at home?’ The very next day the dad has a pail on the kitchen counter, and they’re rolling.” 

Prior to the pandemic, classrooms would visit the Recology Environmental Learning Center and even take tours of the composting and recycling plants. During Covid, Recology’s programming for students has shifted online. The company leads virtual field trips via Zoom and has produced educational videos and games about composting and recycling for kids from pre-K to high school. There’s even a “Better at the Bin” coloring book.

Finally, Reed says regular and frequent communication with the city is key to the composting program’s success. Every week, Recology staff members meet with a team from the Department of the Environment. “We all have the same goal: to send as little as possible to the landfill,” Reed says. At these meetings, they compare the tonnage that the city is sending to compost versus sending to the landfill, brainstorm ways of getting more residents to compost, and discuss messaging. 

One conundrum recently tackled in these meetings was how to encourage more participation in apartment buildings, which have lower rates of composting and recycling, and where 65 percent of San Franciscans live. Their solution: recruit volunteers at these buildings to distribute Recology’s monthly newsletter, as well as encourage composting in neighborly ways, like with composting contests or quizzes. “These are very creative people!” says Reed. “They keep composting part of the conversation.” There are now advocates in 100 buildings around the city.  

One of these is Madeleine Trembley, who lives at the Gateway Complex in the city’s Financial District. A year ago, Trembley, who refers to compost reverently as black gold, started a newsletter for her 1,255-unit building called Trash Talk. “The newsletter immediately got a lot of peoples’ attention,” Trembley says. “It was educational, practical. We give tips that people can implement easily, understand easily.” As a result of her newsletter and the topics it covered, more young residents have gotten involved in the Board — and one of them is even making video tutorials about composting to share with residents. “It just makes no sense to create more methane gas to stow it away in the landfill. And I think a lot of people realize that.” 

 

California’s Floodplains Are Coming Back, and So Are Their Salmon

Farmers and ecologists are partnering to restore the state’s natural flooding patterns, allowing native fish to thrive.

I wrote this story for Reasons to be Cheerful. 

Until just a couple of centuries ago, inland California was a lush tapestry of wetlands and floodplains that nourished a thriving ecosystem of fish. But as the state — and its vast agriculture industry — has grown, its waterways have been modified drastically. Rivers have been drained, fields dried out, levees and dams constructed. These engineering feats, coupled with extreme drought, have decimated natural habitats. Today, a shocking 83 percent of native fish species in the state are in decline.

Chinook salmon is one of these. “Winter runs used to have returns in the hundreds of thousands. Now a good year would be 10,000 fish,” says Andrew L. Rypel, a professor of fish ecology at UC Davis where he co-directs the Center for Watershed Sciences. Today, two of California’s three recognized Chinook salmon runs are listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. “We have had years that have just been in the hundreds. It’s a species on the precipice of extinction.”

Now, Rypel and his colleagues are helping the Chinook rebound by working with California rice farmers to recreate the natural floodplains in which the fish used to thrive.

“One of the critical parameters that salmon managers are interested in is out-migration survival. Do they make it to the ocean? And how many?” Credit: Center for Watershed Sciences

The so-called “salmon-rice project” began a decade ago, when a motley group of scientists, rice farmers and conservationists joined together to answer a simple question: if they were to flood rice fields with water from the Sacramento River — effectively mimicking the region’s original ecological rhythms — would juvenile salmon take to the fields and grow? 

First, they conducted some basic experiments to see whether salmon even lived in floodplains. Turns out, they did. The Nigiri Project – which began in the early 2000s, is still ongoing and involves some of the same people working on Rypel’s project — set out to determine whether salmon can survive on rice fields. In Asian countries, freshwater fish are often raised on flooded rice paddies, but it wasn’t known if salmon in particular were suited to that environment.

“The answer was that they not only survive, they grow extremely well,” Rypel says. “The fish were feeding on lush zooplankton that develop off the decomposed rice straws.” Rice straw is a rich source of carbon, and Rypel says that the density of zooplankton (normally microscopic) that develops in these winter-flooded rice plains is so high that you can actually see them with the naked eye, swimming around. 

“It turns out that this kind of food is like an awesome steak for the growing salmon,” he says. UC Davis scientists found that these juvenile salmon survived at high rates in the flooded rice fields — 50 to 80 percent over the course of a month. “That’s excellent for baby fish,” Rypel says. They also grew two to five times faster than they grow in the Sacramento River.

With these data points in hand, Rypel and his colleagues teamed up with the California Rice Commission and California Trout in 2018 and began studying the viability of raising juvenile salmon in small experimental fields. The work was funded, in part, by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a wing of the United States Department of Agriculture that pays farmers and ranchers to do conservation work. 

The researchers found that juvenile salmon grew two to five times faster on the rice fields than they grow in the Sacramento River. Credit: Center for Watershed Sciences

In 2021 the California Rice Commission and the UC Davis scientists got an additional $550,000 grant from NRCS to continue and expand upon their work. (The California Rice Commission and its partners are matching this grant.) Though this is the first year scientists are trying this out on production-scale rice farms, preliminary data is encouraging. For instance, in years like the past one, when the rice fields around the Sacramento River don’t flood naturally, farmers flood their fields with water from the adjacent canals and then scientists stock them with hatchery fish. They then track the fishes’ growth, survival and movements. Data so far indicates that these fish survive at a rate four to five times higher than lab-raised fish. 

In the coming months, they’ll continue to track these hatchery salmon with tiny acoustic transmitters as they make their way out to sea. “One of the critical parameters that salmon managers are interested in is out-migration survival,” Rypel says. “That is: do they make it to the ocean? And how many?” The plan is to track 600 of the salmon to see if they make it to the Golden Gate Bridge and conduct a side-by-side comparison with lab-reared fish of out-migration survival.

 

Rypel says it boils down to two words: Big and early. “Being a baby salmon kind of sucks!” he laughs. “It’s really hard. Most of the fish die. You are dodging predators, you have to migrate a super-long distance. You need fat reserves.” Giving the salmon a head start while they’re still very young can have huge knock-on effects. “We think that by rearing them on these rice fields, we can get fish very big, very quick. If the fish can become smolts [juvenile salmon] earlier in the winter, they can ride the flows better and have better survivorship.”

Raising fish in rice paddies is nothing new. Rice farmers from China, Thailand, India and Northern Vietnam have been doing it for centuries – according to some evidence, for as long as 2,000 years. 

According to Rypel, the unusual collaboration between farmers and ecologists is “a good example of how farms can work together with conservation scientists to make a difference.” Credit: Center for Watershed Science

But the project in California is actually more directly inspired by a series of bird conservation efforts dating back to the late 1980s and early ’90s. At the time, Pacific flyway birds — ducks, snow geese, egrets and all the other migratory birds that over-summer up in Alaska or Canada, and over-winter in the Central Valley — were in decline. For decades, rice farmers in the area regularly burned their leftover rice straw after the fall harvest. “People who lived in the area at that time will remember when the skies were black with smoke,” Rypel says. The air quality was poor, and carbon was being released into the atmosphere, as well.

Residents frustrated by poor air quality campaigned to stop this practice, and in 1991 a state law banned it. “Some smart people got together at that time and figured out that if you re-flooded the rice fields, you could naturally decompose the rice straw,” Rypel says. “At the same time, you could potentially provide habitat for the migratory birds that were on the Pacific flyway.” The NRCS began a program where they paid rice farmers to flood their fields instead of burn them, which was a win for the locals, a win for the birds and a win for the farmers, as it gave them a new revenue stream.

“I’m not a bird ecologist, but I work with a lot of bird scientists who have worked on this, and it’s probably one of the big conservation success stories in our country’s history,” Rypel says.

It was that program’s success that got fish ecologists scratching their heads. “Hey, if you can do this for birds, why can’t you do that for fish?” Rypel recounts. “We’ve got 83 percent of species declining in California. We know salmon use the floodplains. Is there a way to do this with fish?” 

The answer appears to be a resounding yes. There are roughly 500,000 acres of rice under cultivation in the Sacramento Valley. “That’s a lot of habitat that’s potentially on the table there,” notes Rypel. He and his colleagues at UC Davis hope to replicate the model on more farms in years to come. “It’s a good example of how farms can work together with conservation scientists to make a difference.”

The Anti-Displacement Repair Team of Portland

By fixing up homes in Black neighborhoods, one group is slowing down harmful gentrification and keeping communities intact.

 

I wrote this piece for Reasons to be Cheerful. My friend Cheryl Juetten took the photos.  

A former professional boxer who has spent 30-plus years training young men how to fight, J.C. Wade wasn’t exactly used to asking for help.

“I’m the proud man guy, you know?” says the resident of Woodlawn in Northeast Portland. “Don’t want to let nobody know I need help.” But now he freely admits that he needed it. 

J.C. Wade in front of his house in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Portland 

Wade, 68, has four types of arthritis and recently went through prostate cancer treatment. The chemotherapy exhausted him and he had to quit his job as a city bus driver. Stuff piled up around his house. But his biggest issue was the kitchen sink. The pipe had clogged, and because the sink was built into the cabinets they’d have to replace the whole thing, which he couldn’t afford. “So for about four years, I had a big pot up under the sink that the water would run in,” he chuckles, “and I would filter the garbage out and pour the water down the toilet.”

Then, in August 2020, Wade got a call from a friend who told him about Taking Ownership PDX, an organization that helps Black homeowners age in place. Taking Ownership PDX is oriented toward longtime residents like Wade, who bought his ranch-style house in Woodlawn in the mid 1980s. Six of his ten kids grew up there. 

The group focuses on maintenance to keep houses livable, making long-needed repairs and renovations to decaying decks, sagging roofs and failing plumbing. In so doing, the organization aims to generate wealth for Black homeowners, deter predatory investors and realtors, and prevent communities from being splintered by gentrification. 

Woodlawn is just one of Northeast Portland’s historically Black neighborhoods that, over the past decade, has seen an influx of younger, wealthier and mostly white homeowners. Residents who grew up in Woodlawn now can’t afford to live there; median home prices are $551,000, according to Zillow. Longtime homeowners like Wade are more than just property owners, then. They’re an essential part of the city’s fabric whose presence gives the neighborhood a sense of continuity. 

When he applied for help with Taking Ownership PDX, Wade had no idea what to expect. “I wasn’t used to people helping me,” he says. Then a team of eight showed up at his house. They dismantled a rotting shed, fixed up the yard, cleaned the basement and repaired that sink — without even needing to replace the whole thing.   

“They helped for days!” Wade says, astonished. “My yard was overgrown — I had dumpsters worth of overgrowth. But they cut it, cleaned it. I haven’t really seen my yard in years. It looked like a jungle. And they kept coming back, you know? It relieved a lot of pressure off of me. I get a little teary-eyed thinking about it. Let me get my man-up stuff!”

 

Wade’s house was one of Taking Ownership’s first projects. Since then, the group, founded by 36-year-old Randal Wyatt in July 2020, has helped over 50 Black homeowners across Portland. The organization has raised over half a million dollars and maintains a database of 250 local volunteers who are eager to pitch in on the projects whenever they arise. 

Wyatt, a native Portlander, has always been a helper. Before Taking Ownership, he was a student advocate at Portland YouthBuilders, worked with teenagers at the Latino Network, and served as a residential treatment counselor at the Salvation Army. When he had twin boys at 19, he learned the importance of strong communities.

“Becoming a father so young, I realized real quickly that life is much bigger than me,” Wyatt says. “We live in a capitalist society where we think very individualistically. I thought, ‘I have to contribute to the community.’ I care about other people.” For the past 16 years, he has used hip-hop to address social issues, reaching teens with rhythm and poetry workshops, and holds benefit concerts for various causes. After the murder of George Floyd, friends and neighbors reached out to see how they could be stronger allies to Portland’s Black community.

Since he was 11, Wyatt has lived in Northeast Portland and watched it gentrify. “I know that white supremacy is based on land ownership. So I just thought, if we pool our money together and come together as a community and fix up Black-owned homes, we might be able to alleviate the financial burden, bridge the wealth gap, raise property values and help people stay in their homes.”

When he launched Taking Ownership he posted about it on Instagram. Donations started pouring in. After the first two projects, word spread quickly. “It blew up almost overnight,” he says. After that, Black homeowners interested in getting help filled out referral forms on the Taking Ownership website. Then they’d go onto the waitlist. Wyatt says senior citizens, people on a fixed income and single parents get priority.

“We prioritize people who make $20,000 or less a year. We’re very clear about that,” he says. There are currently 120 people on the waitlist.

Wyatt has partnered with other organizations and companies that donate appliances and services so that people waiting can get things they desperately need like new water heaters or air conditioners. After June’s record-breaking heat waves, Taking Ownership sponsored an AC and fan drive and collected nearly 200 fans and air conditioning units in a single day. For some Black Portlanders, like J.C. Wade, it was the first time they had ever had AC. “It was just a small air conditioner and it’s in one room, but it was enough for me and my dogs to make it,” he says.

The new stove installed by Taking Ownership PDX volunteers in J.C. Wade’s kitchen. Credit: Cheryl Juetten

In addition to the hundreds of volunteers who do yard work, sorting, cleaning and other tough, non-skilled labor, Wyatt works with four licensed contractors who handle structural projects like decks, windows and roofs. He also works with two Black-owned landscaping companies, an electrician and a plumbing company, and has, on several occasions, partnered with a Latino-owned roofing company and a green design/build firm called Birdsmouth. All the contractors are paid, unless, like Birdsmouth, they donate some of their labor.

One of his contractors is James Mwas Njoroge of Jenga Construction LLC. Njoroge, who moved to Portland from Kenya in 2005, has been a contractor for 10 years and recently launched his own company. He’d been following Wyatt on social media when he read about Taking Ownership. “What he is doing is very very important, and not just for the homeowners,” Njoroge says. “He’s trying to get Black people more opportunities to work.” There aren’t many licensed Black contractors in the Portland area, but Njoroge is hoping that will change. Over the next year, he aims to help Wyatt reach out to Black youth and encourage them to enter the trades.

 Jed Overly was Taking Ownership’s first volunteer before becoming the organization’s volunteer coordinator. A Black man who grew up in rural Pennsylvania, he’d experienced racism up close. “Everything that was going on at that time [after George Floyd’s murder] triggered my internal convictions,” he says. “Taking Ownership gave me an outlet to make things better. I attended a lot of protests. But I’d ask myself, ‘But what are we doing, though?’” Instead of tearing something down, he wanted to build something up. “And that’s literally what Randal was doing.”

Overly says that even now, 16 months after Taking Ownership launched, he still gets 10 to 15 new volunteers a week. About 25 percent are Black, compared to just six percent of the city at large. Volunteers often work alongside homeowners, or homeowners’ children or grandchildren. One of the things Overly loves about the work events is that people make long-lasting connections. “Volunteers are swapping numbers. People are becoming friends,” he says. Some people even become friends with the homeowners. “So you have little old ladies who need help rearranging their house. They get the volunteer’s number. It really is community-building.” 

J.C. Wade in his restored backyard. Credit: Cheryl Juetten

Samantha Guss, who has worked on four projects, says she’s ripped out a lot of blackberry bushes. “I’m pretty sure every project has a blackberry bush,” she says. She’s also dismantled fences, scrubbed floors and helped sort through personal belongings. But all the hard work is worth it, she says, when you see how happy the homeowner is. This volunteer opportunity also came at a time when she really needed community.  “I was deep into depression with the pandemic, very isolated. So it was really great for me to be able to feel useful. To help someone else that needed it. It really helped my mental health.”

One of the negative consequences of gentrification is that when wealthier people move into a neighborhood, they tend to report their less-well-off neighbors for minor code violations like peeling paint or overgrown grass. A recent analysis by the city’s Ombudsman’s Office showed that Portland neighborhoods with the fastest rising home prices and those with the most racially diverse residents tend to have the most property violation reports. This often results in residents facing escalating fines — and eventually liens — putting families at risk of foreclosure. In Portland, this complaint-driven system disproportionately impacts homeowners of color. 

“Becoming a father so young, I realized real quickly that life is much bigger than me. I thought, ‘I have to contribute to the community.’” Credit: Cheryl Juetten

Wyatt hopes to inspire Portlanders to be more compassionate, more community-minded. “As neighborhoods get more affluent, the standard of upkeep changes and maybe some of the homeowners who have owned their homes for 30 years don’t have the same financial abilities as some of their neighbors to maintain their homes,” he says. “I want people to understand: instead of calling the city, why not go over there and meet your neighbor? Why aren’t they able to keep up on their house?  Why not lend a hand?”

From a Prison Garden Sprouts Real Growth

I wrote this story for Reasons to be Cheerful.

 

Amid rows of snap peas and summer squash, incarcerated gardeners cultivate job skills, inner peace and fresh produce for the cafeteria.

On her most recent stay at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Oregon, 45-year-old Adria White knew that she needed more than a drug treatment program. She was up for release soon, and while that program, which she’d participated in twice before, included useful tools like mindfulness training and behavioral therapy, it did little to prepare her for getting a job on the outside.  

“You learn coping skills,” says White, who became dependent on methamphetamines at around age 30. “But when you get out and you’re poor and struggling, that doesn’t solve your life problems.”

So when her cellmate told her about Lettuce Grow, a sustainable gardening program that takes place at 16 Oregon prisons and juvenile detention centers, she signed up, hoping the skills she’d gain would help her land a job at a nursery or start a community garden in her hometown. 

Though she had zero prior gardening experience, White, it turns out, has a green thumb. Soon she was digging her hands into the small garden plot on the medium security side of the prison, planting mainly flowers and herbs. “I spent a lot of hours out there — as many as I was allowed. I fell in love with my plants. There’s a bond,” she says. Dahlias became her favorite flower. “They are fast and they are so eye-catching!” She also loved the aroma of the herbs — particularly lavender and sage — and shared them with others. “Women started rubbing lavender on their Covid masks,” she laughs. 

One of the privileges of the gardening program is that participants are permitted to go outside when the yard isn’t officially open.

“I was like, ‘This is cool. I can go outside and no one is out there!’” she says. Over time, her gardening work became more than just a chance for some limited freedom from confinement. It grew into a full-fledged passion. 

White was scheduled to take the next sustainable gardening class in September, right after she’d moved to minimum security, but the entire prison was evacuated due to wildfires. When prisoners and staff returned to the facility, a Covid outbreak resulted in a lockdown that barred all visitors including the Lettuce Grow staff and volunteers. “As a precaution we had provided the class with the text books and class materials, just in case we got shut out,” says Lettuce Grow director Rima Green. White, undeterred, worked her way through the class materials on her own. “That’s no mean feat,” emphasizes Green. The curriculum, from Oregon State University’s Extension Service, is a college-level class.

Green and staff were finally allowed back into Coffee Creek in March, and got to know White as they gardened with her, side by side. Green was so impressed by White’s skills and determination that she hired White, who was released in May, to be a part-time employee at Lettuce Grow, which is a program of the Portland-based nonprofit Growing Gardens. In her new job, White is doing office work such as correspondence, surveys and coordination with volunteers. Other graduates of the Lettuce Grow program have gone on to find jobs at Portland Nursery, a family-run garden center with two locations, and other horticultural-related businesses in Oregon. 

Adria White in the garden she planted at her sister’s house after being released from prison. Photo courtesy Adria White

Lettuce Grow was founded by attorney and master gardener Sarah Van Roo in 2009 with 15 incarcerated people in two Oregon prisons. Van Roo’s original intent was to improve the nutritional quality of the meals served to residents, some of whom she’d befriended while teaching yoga at Coffee Creek. 

In 2015, Lettuce Grow merged with Growing Gardens, which promotes food security by building gardens at schools and in residents’ backyards. Today, 11 years later, Lettuce Grow serves 200 incarcerated people in Oregon each year, providing them with valuable job skills and a respite from the drudgery of prison life. Those enrolled in the program are able to take classes like the Oregon Food Bank’s Seed to Supper class, Oregon State University’s Sustainable Gardening class and an advanced Greenhouse Management class.

Because participants cultivate a vegetable garden on site, Lettuce Grow also gives prisoners access to healthy, delicious food, like fresh-from-the-garden tomatoes, spinach, snap peas, kale, lettuce, summer squash and broccoli. In 2020, even amid the pandemic, the State Corrections system grew 365,536 pounds of food. Some 97 percent of that went into the institutions’ kitchens. (The rest was delivered to food banks across the state.) This total does not include the produce grown in federal prisons in Oregon like the one in Sheridan, where residents harvested 100,000 pounds of food in 2020, all of which was consumed at the prison cafeteria. But the program’s most impressive data may be that which shows participants have just a four percent recidivism rate — the national average at state correctional systems, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, is 68 percent within three years.

White was hired as a prison gardener when she moved to the minimum security facility within Coffee Creek. When she got there in September, the garden had seen better days due to staffing shortages and one uncooperative correction officer. “It had been neglected, with the quarantine and the fires,” she says. “And the voles!” Despite being a menace to the garden, the voles became popular with the gardeners, who gave them names and treated them like pets. Meanwhile, White spent so much time weeding that at night she dreamt she was pulling weeds. She was paid $50 per month for four 40-hour weeks — a very small sum, but one that is fairly typical for what incarcerated folks earn.

There’s a lot of creativity at Coffee Creek’s minimum security garden. One woman has designed a “Three Sisters” garden of corn, beans and squash. Another used flowers to recreate the album cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. White grew flowers and herbs, and with other gardeners harvested vegetables and fruits for Coffee Creek’s cafeteria. That was probably the most rewarding part of the job, White says.

Adria White’s grandson sampling the garden’s berries. Photo courtesy Adria White

“When we got the fruits and vegetables on the trays, every single woman was grateful. You could hear every woman talk about it. They would tell us thank you,” she says. “I also had people come up to me throughout the day while I was working and say how much the garden means to them — how seeing the flowers, having a place to sit down and see something natural instead of cement and barbed wire were good for the soul.”

Coffee Creek currently has about 800 residents, all of whom are women. At the cafeteria, the lines were always longer in summer, when the women knew that the garden’s abundance would show up on their trays. The tomatoes were the most popular item.

“In prison, they don’t ever serve tomatoes,” says White. “Some people — especially if they were lifers — when they got fresh organic tomatoes on their tray, it was an overwhelming sensory experience. There is a lot of emotion in eating a fresh tomato when you haven’t in ten years.” 

For White, the garden had the added bonus of soothing her anxiety.

“I’m kind of reclusive. Being social is challenging for me,” she says. “I thought, ‘I’ll never be able to get a job, I’m so weird in public.’”

But gardening, of course, is a solitary pursuit, and White says getting better at it gave her confidence and made her realize that she can do something to make money. The first thing she did after being released this May, she says, was plant a garden at her daughter’s house.

“Every time I get anxious, I go into the garden,” she says. “The transition from prison life can be really tough. For me, to have something positive — something new to keep my mind busy until I have my perspective back — that has been huge.”

Unsurprisingly, the pandemic had a big impact on the program. None of Lettuce Grow’s 32 volunteers statewide were able to visit the facilities for months, and a number of the sustainable gardening and greenhouse management classes were cancelled. At some sites, classes were conducted by members of the prison staff or even by incarcerated tutors themselves. At facilities like Coffee Creek — which had a number of lockdowns — there were no classes. Everything White learned while in minimum security was from getting her hands dirty and from gleaning tips from fellow gardeners, or from Green and Mirabai Collins from Lettuce Grow, who were finally allowed in in March

But with vaccination rates increasing in Oregon prisons — at press time the prison vaccination rate was 71 percent, higher than the statewide rate — some facilities are starting to pilot face-to-face visitations, and Green is hopeful that volunteers will soon be allowed back in. 

For White, learning how to garden has been nothing short of transformational. She’s already found another gardening project to sink her hands into — she recently stumbled upon a community garden near her daughter’s house that was overgrown and neglected. When she called the number for the volunteer organizer, the fellow who answered said he’d moved to California. Would she like to take it over? White accepted the task, and is now eager to get in there and start weeding. She envisions a zen garden with lots of flowers. “I want it to be a healing space,” she says. “It creates a healing energy instead of stress.” 

The Tiny-House Village That’s Changing Lives

I wrote this story about Agape Village in Portland, Oregon for Reasons to be Cheerful. 

Agape Village is a place where people find community, structure, stability — and a path to permanent housing

Urban/Transportation

Photo courtesy Sarah Chapman

 

Brittany ran away from home when she was eight years old to escape an abusive situation and has lived without a permanent home in Portland, Oregon for much of the time since. During these years, she resided under bridges, in yurts in the forest, in a self-governed encampment for people experiencing homelessness and even in a treehouse before landing in a community called Agape Village.

After just four months of living at Agape, Brittany, now 36 years old, transitioned into her own two-bedroom apartment.

“Agape Village gave me a safe space to just be me,” she says. “It showed me that I needed to really get a hold of my life. I had been in the wind a long time.” 

Agape Village, located on the grounds of the city’s Central Nazarene Church, consists of 13 simple wooden huts. Sarah Chapman, outreach coordinator at Agape, calls them sleeping pods, but they are more like tiny homes — only without electricity or plumbing. “It’s rustic,” says Chapman. “A step up from camping, but definitely not like living indoors.” But to the people who live there, it is the community and the stability that are life-changing. 

Getting people into housing quickly requires sufficient affordable housing inventory, something Portland lacks. Smaller, cheaper shelters like Agape Village help fill the gap. Credit: Hannah Wallace

Chapman refers to Agape Village as a “transitional housing village” designed to bridge the gap between homelessness and permanent housing. Typically, transitional housing consists of a conventional house or apartment and is accompanied by intensive case management and other services for addiction and mental health issues. These days, though, the term has broadened to include low-cost, low-barrier-to-entry shelters such as sanctioned campgrounds or certain tiny-house villages. The people who live in them say having a roof over their heads has allowed them to address the challenges that have kept them chronically homeless in the past.  

Tiny homes, transformational community

Living on the streets or in unsanctioned campgrounds means risking having your belongings stolen or or confiscated by city officials who routinely sweep through to “clean up” such encampments. And though homeless shelters are warm and mostly safe from crime, they have their own downsides: a lack of privacy, risk of infection and strict limitations on belongings.    

Continue reading at Reasons to be Cheerful.

The Casino That Farms Its Own Food

I wrote this piece for Reasons to be Cheerful in November.

A stone’s throw from the blackjack tables, bison are grazing, beehives are buzzing, crops are growing — and nature is winning.

 

On the surface, Oklahoma’s Downstream Casino Resort looks like any other: lines of brightly lit slot machines snake past entrances to steakhouses and sports bars, while cocktail waitresses shuttle trays to craps and blackjack tables. A takeaway cafe serves gourmet coffee, and an all-you-can-eat buffet is stacked with prime rib on Saturday nights.  

But beneath this familiar facade is a very different kind of system — one that applies traditional Indigenous food and farming principles to modern hotel operations. The Quapaw tribe, which runs the Downstream Casino Resort, operates seven greenhouses and two sprawling gardens that provide the hotel with 20 varieties of vegetables and herbs. The tribe also has an apiary with 80 beehives, as well as a craft brewery and a coffee roaster that supplies the hotel and casino. The Quapaw is also the only tribe in the United States with its own USDA-certified meat packing and processing plant, where it processes bison and cattle that it raises on open pastures, selling the bulk of it to the casino’s five restaurants. (The rest is provided to the two tribal-run daycares, the Quapaw Farmers Market, the Quapaw Mercantile and a few other tribally-run shops.) 

Cattle grazing on pastureland behind the Downstream Casino Resort. Photo courtesy Downstream Casino Resort

With all these businesses — plus a construction firm — the Quapaw Nation is one of the largest employers in this part of Oklahoma, employing 2,000 tribal and non-tribal workers, while paying above-average wages and offering a full benefits package to all full-time employees. It’s a business model that preserves cultural heritage while providing a profit. 

Lucus Setterfield, director of food and beverage at Downstream, says 50 percent of the food served at the resort’s Red Oak Steakhouse comes from the Quapaw land. Even the mint in the restaurant’s mojitos is grown in the greenhouses.  

“The Quapaw are one of the most innovative tribes in the country when it comes to food sovereignty,” says Maria Givens, the communications director of the Native American Agricultural Fund (NAAF). 

Innovative as it may be, the Quapaw are essentially resurrecting a way of life — living off the land that sustained them before they were driven off of it by American settlers. Colonization — and the policies that created Indian reservations — deprived them of their traditional foodways of foraging, fishing and hunting and disrupted their long-established patterns of intense physical activity. Public health experts believe that these are two of the reasons Indigenous people have some of the highest rates of diabetes in the U.S. According to the CDC, Native American adults are three times more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than white adults, and 1.6 times more likely to be obese. 

With seven greenhouses and two gardens, the Quapaw gardeners harvest about 6,000 pounds of food per year. Each morning, the resort’s chefs stop by and place their orders. Photo courtesy Downstream Casino Resort

By retrofitting a modern resort with a system of locally sourced, sustainably raised food, the Quapaw are reclaiming their food sovereignty and, at the same time, benefitting every guest who visits their resort, whether those guests know it or not.

Bringing bison back

It all started in 2010 when then tribe chairman John Berrey, a fifth-generation cattle rancher, had a vision to reintroduce bison to this part of Oklahoma. The bison is the state mammal, but it’s also a traditional food for the Quapaw people, who lived in Northeastern Arkansas and then western Missouri before eventually moving to Oklahoma.

That year, the tribe was given eight bison from Yellowstone National Park via the InterTribal Buffalo Council. Now, ten years later, the tribe has a bison herd of close to 200 as well as a herd of 385 Black Angus cattle. (The bison have been breeding, but the tribe has also gotten additional bison from other national parks.) Both are pastured on fields of native grasses and the ones that are headed for slaughter are finished on grains and mushrooms. The tribe processes only five to 15 bison per year and doesn’t slaughter until they’ve sold out of every type of meat: steaks, ground bison, chuck roast and bison jerky. “We use the whole animal,” explains Quapaw Nation grants coordinator Shelby Crum — even the hides, which a Quapaw artist decorates with tribal paintings and sells at the farmers’ market. 

The 25,000-square-foot meatpacking plant, which opened in 2017, was designed to conform to renowned animal scientist Dr. Temple Grandin’s blueprint for humane animal handling. The Quapaw built the processing plant adjacent to the feeding facility to avoid the need for transport, which makes animals nervous. It also uses Grandin’s designs for curved chutes with high walls, which minimizes stressors, and the holding pens include extra crowd gates and bright colors. In addition to processing its own animals, the plant processes 50 to 60 head of cattle per week for nearby ranchers from Oklahoma and Missouri. 

A worker processes honey from one of the resort’s 80 beehives. Photo courtesy Downstream Casino Resort

The meat is broken apart into different cuts, smoked, flavored and packaged right there at the facility, which also has freezers and coolers for storage. Most is sold at a discounted price at tribally-owned retail outlets like the Quapaw Mercantile, the farmers’ market, the Quapaw C-Store and the Downstream Q-Store. “The whole goal is to make it affordable,” Crum says. That said, anyone from any state can order the meat via the Quapaw Cattle Company’s online store. 

Restaurant Workers Are Embracing Mental Wellness

I wrote this for Reasons to be Cheerful in November.

An industry that often celebrates pushing through the pain is turning its focus to mental health.

When employees clock into work at Mulvaneys B&L, a popular farm-to-table restaurant in Sacramento, California, they’re encouraged to slip one of four color-coded cards into a cardboard box. The cards have faces on them: one is happy, one is angry, one is neutral and one is stressed (in restaurant parlance, that’s “in the weeds.”)

“It’s like the pain signs at hospitals,” explains co-owner Patrick Mulvaney. Though the cards are anonymous, they give employees a chance to assess their own moods and share them with the manager or the peer helper on duty. During the staff’s pre-service meeting, the manager can share how many angry or stressed employees there are that day and ask if anyone needs additional support, empathy, or patience.

The box, which was co-owner (and Patrick’s wife) Bobbin Mulvaney’s idea, is just one measure put in place by I Got Your Back, a year-old peer-to-peer counseling program that the Mulvaneys helped start in response to several suicides in the Sacramento restaurant community in early 2018. In May of that year, Noah Zonca, the beloved, larger-than-life longtime chef of Sacramento’s the Kitchen, where Mulvaney also worked, died by suicide. He was one of 12 Sacramento restaurant workers to die by suicide that year. A month later, the issue of restaurant industry suicides was thrust into the spotlight when celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain hanged himself in a hotel in Alsace, France.  

Frankie Lopez, a manager at Mulvaneys B&L, and bartender Dan Mitchell. Photo courtesy Patrick Mulvaney

Even before Zonca’s death, the Mulvaneys had been having conversations with Sacramento chefs and restaurant owners, health care professionals, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, state senators and even Governor Gavin Newsom about how to tackle mental health issues in the hospitality industry. But the losses of Zonca and Bourdain added a sense of urgency. The final iteration of I Got Your Back came out of a design workshop at the Innovation Learning Network conference in October 2018. With the financial support of the James Beard Foundation and all four major area health systems — Dignity Health, Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health and the UC Davis Medical Center — a pilot was launched in September 2019.

Restaurant workers are especially prone to mental health and substance abuse issues. As journalist Kat Kinsman, founder of the blog Chefs with Issues, has written, “People who deal with mental health and addiction issues are drawn to this work because it has always been a haven for people who exist on the fringes; restaurant jobs have brutal hours and often pay very little and don’t offer health care; there is easy access to alcohol and illicit substances; and workers have traditionally been rewarded for their masochism — shut up and cook.” 

 

Continue reading at Reasons to be Cheerful. 

 

A New Generation of Black Farmers Is Cultivating Self-Determination

By going back to the land, Black farmers are resuming a journey toward “food sovereignty” that began centuries ago.

I wrote this piece for Reasons to be Cheerful on August 21st, 2020.  

When Malcolm Shabazz Hoover and Mirabai Collins broke ground on the Black Futures Farm in January, it was the first time either of them had farmed on their own. On their one-acre plot in Portland’s Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood, the couple — with the help of a few interns — grows everything from purple king pole beans and heirloom tomatoes (trellised on string so they’ll climb upwards) to delicata and patty-pan squash, corn, okra, cabbages and zucchinis. 

“So many zucchinis. It might as well be a zucchini farm!” Mirabai laughs. They sell their produce via a small CSA program and several BIPOC farmers’ markets around town. 

Hoover and Collins are part of a new generation of Black farmers returning to the land to exercise their right to Black food sovereignty. Formally defined in 2007 at the Nyéléni Forum for Food Sovereignty in Mali, food sovereignty is the right of people to determine their own food and agricultural systems, and have healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods. People who have food sovereignty reject the notion that food is a commodity, and support local farmers and food providers instead of large agri-businesses. Charlie Smith, co-director of the Portland-based Black Food Sovereignty Coalition, puts it more succinctly: “Food sovereignty is people, place and economic opportunities.” 

Mirabai Collins and Malcolm Shabazz Hoover on their wedding day.

Hoover, 50, found his way to farming almost by accident. A U.S. Navy veteran, he worked in city government and as a school teacher in Oakland before taking a job at the Oregon Food Bank in 2017. Adjacent to the Food Bank was a farm named Unity Farm run by Art Shavers and Shantae Johnson. During his breaks, Hoover would walk over and chat with them, and help them weed when they asked him to. “Bro, we love talking to you, but this is hard work,” Hoover remembers Shavers saying. “If you’re going to be out here, you need to help.”

Though both his parents had grown up on farms, it wasn’t until these afternoons spent digging in the soil with his friends that Hoover realized how therapeutic gardening could be. He was hooked. 

Hoover also works at Impact NW, a homelessness nonprofit with offices across the street from a 13-acre farm. “I felt a real connection to the land and asked what it would take for us to occupy it,” says Hoover. With the help of the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition, who provided advice and infrastructure, Collins and Hoover took over stewardship of one of the 13 acres, and Black Futures Farm was born.

 

The couple did have some farming experience. Hoover, who took Oregon State University’s Master Gardener program, helped run a VA pilot program to teach veterans to be farmers. Collins had interned on several organic farms and worked on cannabis farms in Humboldt County, California. She also teaches horticulture classes in prisons for a nonprofit called Growing Gardens. Though their CSA is small by most standards — only 17 families are enrolled this year — all are Black or have Black children, and one third of these members pay with SNAP assistance (food stamps). It’s important to both Hoover and Collins that their CSA benefit those most in need. Hoover’s dad was a Black Panther and his parents were involved in the Black Arts Movement. For him, farming is personal and political. 

“I love growing food. It’s incredibly healing to me,” he says. “It’s been said that if you can’t feed the people, you can’t lead the people. So in these times, we are creating something for what’s next, for Black people.”

Cultivating farmers

Black Futures Farm belongs to the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition (BFSC). Founded in 2018, it builds on a decade of work by local Black farmers, food justice activists and community organizers. It serves as a hub for Black and brown communities, helping them confront the systemic barriers that make food, place and economic opportunities inaccessible. 

BFSC provides technical and professional assistance to farms and food businesses and helps them incubate their ideas, says co-director Eddie Hill. But Hill and his team at BFSC are also looking to make systemic changes. “If we’re looking at the larger food system and best practices, it’s not just: ‘Hey, if you get Black people to start farms, that will solve the problem,’” says Hill. “No, you have to have them participating in all parts of the food system: manufacturing, composting, packaging, branding, transportation.”

Black farmers and food purveyors need concrete support for basic business and logistical challenges: storage, distribution and financing; Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) certification; and Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) training, an internationally recognized method of identifying and managing food safety-related risk. “These systems don’t exist in our community right now,” says Hill. 

In addition to helping Black-run farms with lease agreements and food safety protocols, the BFSC works with Mudbone Grown to organize an annual “Back to the Root” conference for Black growers, producers, educators, advocates and ranchers. It also runs programs like Grandma’s Hands, where Black grandmothers in Portland share family recipes and food traditions, cook together and, these days, take turns hosting a monthly community dinner on Zoom. The program, funded by the Oregon Department of Agriculture, allows the grandmas to buy all their produce for the monthly community meal from Black- or brown-run farms. BFSC is also in negotiations for a centrally located food processing facility in Portland, where Black and brown farmers and food entrepreneurs can process vegetables and make and package products like salsa, juices, and bone broth for local grocery store chains.

The roots of sovereignty

Black farmers were once far more prevalent in America than they are today. Following Emancipation, even after the “40 Acres and a Mule” promise was overturned by Andrew Johnson in 1865, formerly enslaved Blacks were able to own land — and many did. By 1920, according to the 1930 Census of Agriculture, there were roughly one million Black farmers in the U.S., comprising 14 percent of all the farmers in the nation.

Black farmworkers till a 575-acre plot of land owned by Dave Lewis, an African-American farm owner in Alabama, in 1940.

Today, there are just 48,700 Black farmers in the United States, making up roughly 1.4 percent of the country’s 3.4 million farmers. There are many reasons for this decline, but as Vann R. Newkirk II recently wrote in the Atlantic, much of the land was wrested away from Black farmers by White people via legal, coercive and sometimes violent means. “A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of Black agricultural landowners in America,” according to Newkirk. 

Perhaps surprisingly, much of that was taken away during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Black farmers lost around six million acres of land between 1950 and 1969, according to Joe Brooks, the former president of the Emergency Land Fund. “That’s a staggering amount of land loss during the heart of the Civil Rights period, when African Americans were struggling for social and political and economic rights,” says Savi Horne, founder and executive director of the Land Loss Prevention Project in North Carolina.  

There have been some attempts at land reparations, most notably a lawsuit against the USDA in 1997 that awarded a $2 billion settlement to thousands of Black farmers and their families. Horne and others who are actively helping Black farmers keep their land say that this lawsuit did not go far enough. Tens of thousands who lost their land and, along with it, their food sovereignty, have still never been compensated for it.

An encouraging sign is more localized efforts at helping Black farmers like Collins and Hoover reclaim food sovereignty in their communities. Many organizations and farms came together to help Black Futures Farm operate with almost no overhead in its first year. The property — which came with 18 fruit trees including apples, figs and cherries — is being leased to the couple at a low cost by Portland Parks and Recreation. The starts and seeds were donated by MudBone Grown, Red Barn Farms, Side Yard Farms, Portland State University, the OSU Master Gardeners and Territorial Seed, among others. The couple also has subsidized water bills this year.

“A lot of people gathered around the idea of letting go of what had long been a White-held space, and handing it over to the stewardship of Black people,” Collins says. “The farm has become what it is because people worked hard and believed in what it could be. We had no money or resources starting out, so all of what you see there is the result of people pulling together — or, essentially, what real community looks like.”  

Next season, they’ll have to buy their own seeds and starts and pay more rent. “It’ll be more organized for that reason,” Collins says. “We’ll have a crop plan, we’ll order the things we want to grow. This season was very much a space, really hard work, and community. And probably some lunacy. And definitely some arguments.”

“Yeah. We’re going to have an argument today,” Hoover teases.

“We are,” Collins agrees, both of them laughing.

The couple were married two months ago — on the farm, dressed in overalls. They often finish each other’s sentences. 

They seem ideal partners in other ways, too. Both are passionate about growing their own food and feeding Portland’s Black community. Once they are more established and have a stronger foundation (and once the pandemic is over), they plan to bring more Black and brown folks onto the farm for education, community-building, art, training, certification and other pathways to food sovereignty. Just last week, Vanessa Chambers from Grandma’s Hands came to Black Futures Farm with two of her granddaughters to pick produce and be filmed for a segment to promote Oregon-grown foods in public schools. The farm has even had interest from an investor: Tampa Bay Buccaneers football player Ndamukong Suh, who attended Portland’s Grant High School and whose mom lives in the city.  

An urban farm with a CSA in the Pacific Northwest is nothing unique, Collins points out. “But a Black-centered, Black-run horticultural space that is wide open to the imaginings, hard work and possibilities of Black people, is — and I think that is more what Black Futures is about.”

Wine Country’s Farmworkers Are Staying Healthy Against All Odds

Populated by seasonal laborers, Oregon’s Willamette Valley could have been devastated by the coronavirus. Instead, it’s become a model for how to keep workers safe. 

I wrote this story on Salud! for Reasons to be Cheerful. 

Santiago Garza Martinez, now 47, was a young man when he started working for Anne Amie Vineyards in Oregon’s Willamette Valley in 1999. He began as an equipment operator, and today, 21 years later, he’s the field manager, overseeing a crew of 38 vineyard workers, all but eight of whom are seasonal employees. They weed, plant vines, and pick Pinot Noir grapes for Anne Amie’s acclaimed bottles. And like many seasonal farmworkers, their access to health care is precarious at best.

“The majority of the farmworkers in my crew don’t have primary care physicians,” Garza Martinez says. Even if they did, paying for the care would be a challenge for many of them. There are 2.5 to 3 million farmworkers in the United States, and many lack access to health insurance, according to Silvia Partida, CEO of the Texas-based National Center for Farmworker Health. 

Since May 7, ¡Salud! has screened 400 farmworkers for Covid-19.

So when America’s first coronavirus cases were reported in January in Seattle, just four hours north of the vineyard, the need to protect the Anne Amie workers was immediately apparent. That’s where ¡Salud! came in. Founded in 1991 by two physicians who loved wine, ¡Salud! is a nonprofit health care service that runs mobile clinics in Oregon vineyards. It is supported by the state’s wine industry, which throws an annual fall gala where winemakers auction off special cases and experiences. (There’s also an online summertime auction — this year’s takes place this week July 14-16.) Last year’s two auctions brought in $1 million. Over the past 29 years, ¡Salud! has raised over $17.2 million. 

“¡Salud! is basically my crew’s primary care for wellness checks, referrals, follow-ups for any conditions they might discover in their health screenings,” says Garza Martinez. 

Over the past several months, it has also become a lifeline amid a national health crisis. Since May 7, ¡Salud! has screened 400 farmworkers for Covid-19, with roughly four percent testing positive. (Only two have been hospitalized thus far and both are recovering at home.) Leda Garside, chief nurse at ¡Salud!, estimates that roughly 70 percent of the vineyard workers she sees do not have any other healthcare.

A health care worker waits by the ¡Salud! van.

Garza Martinez himself, even though he has been on Anne Amie’s health insurance plan since 2008, has relied on ¡Salud! over the years for everything from basic physicals to vaccines. Recently, he’s availed himself of a flu vaccine, a tetanus shot and a Covid-19 nasal swab test, which he says was like having a pipe cleaner shoved up his nose until it hit the back of his tongue. “I cried!” he says, laughing at it now. (He tested negative.)

¡Salud! was excellent at educating farmworkers about Covid-19, says Garza Martinez. Not only did it send Spanish-language email and text updates from the CDC and the Oregon Health Authority on the importance of social distancing and wearing masks, it provided masks to farmworkers starting at the end of February.

In the beginning, when masks were in short supply, Garside sent out an information sheet from the CDC on how to make cloth masks. But before long, Garside’s friend, a retired nurse named Maria Michalczyk, launched the Pandemic Volunteer Mask Makers of Oregon, a group of over 500 volunteers from across the state who sewed masks for vineyard workers, donating a bunch to ¡Salud! In late April, when Governor Kate Brown received a donation of N-95 masks from China’s Fujian Province, ¡Salud! alerted field managers at all the wineries, and Garza Martinez retrieved boxes of them for his crew at Anne Amie.

“¡Salud! is really the soul of the Willamette Valley,” says Cooper Mountain Vineyard co-owner Barbara Gross, whose parents were founding members of the organization.

Leda Garside, chief nurse at ¡Salud!, estimates that roughly 70 percent of the vineyard workers she sees do not have any other healthcare.

Gross was impressed by how early ¡Salud! began testing for Covid-19 — in late March and early April, a time when many states were still struggling to implement comprehensive testing infrastructure. “I think my crew had access to testing before you, as a regular consumer, had access,” she says. “Leda and her crew proactively got out there and tested. That was 100 percent ¡Salud!”

“It’s really hard work”

Farmworkers regularly do back-breaking labor, often in harsh weather conditions. They’re out in the fields every day, picking berries, kale, asparagus and citrus — or pruning, thinning, training vines and weeding. When the Covid-19 crisis hit in mid-March, it disproportionately impacted Latinos, who comprise 72 percent of farmworkers in the U.S.

“It’s really hard work,” says Garside. “You’re exposed to the elements: cold, wind, rain — you name it.” Luckily, because most Willamette Valley vineyards farm organically or biodynamically, pesticide exposure is not a big factor. But laboring in the fields for years on end can cause health issues that accumulate over time. “And we do have workers who are in their seventies and eighties!” Garside says. A network of 174 federally funded community health centers across the country serves farmworkers, but these clinics only reach one million farmworkers and their family members, says Partida, from the National Center for Farmworker Health, leaving a big gap.

¡Salud! aims to fill that gap — at least in Oregon’s vineyards — providing healthcare to vineyard workers year-round. Spring through fall is the organization’s busiest season.

Before the pandemic, many medical procedures were conducted in the ¡Salud! van. Now, more often, they happen in the field.

“This time of year, we’re out in the vineyards every week, three to four times a week,” Garside says.

Garside, who has been working for ¡Salud! for 23 years, is its beating heart. Raptor Ridge Winery proprietor Annie Shull fondly calls her “the good witch of the Valley.” 

Garside and her team of bilingual nurses roll into vineyards in a retrofitted Sprinter Van that contains a reception area and a full examination room. Before the pandemic, they would see a patient in the van, where they’d do blood pressure checks, basic bloodwork, vision exams and vaccinations. But now, due to strict Covid protocols, the nurses set up outdoor service stations separated by dividers to maintain privacy. (They can still do basic tests and health education in the vineyard, but for other medical tests, they’re steering farmworkers to their clinic at OHSU Hillsboro Medical Center.) 

In 2019, over 900 farmworkers received wellness exams via ¡Salud! and over 500 received flu shots. Some 68 workers received free vision exams via a partnership with Oregon Health Sciences University’s Casey Eye Institute and Pacific School of Optometry. And 114 received dental services through ¡Salud!’s partnership with local dental hygiene science programs, Medical Teams International and community health centers. Until recently, most of this dental work was done in the ¡Salud! van, but that’s also on hold during the pandemic. 

Several farmworkers have tested positive for diabetes or pre-diabetes and with diet and lifestyle changes recommended by ¡Salud! nurses, have been able to manage and even reverse the condition.

Since diabetes is so prevalent in the migrant seasonal farmworker community, a blood sugar test is always done as part of routine bloodwork. Results are immediate, which allows ¡Salud! nurses to give advice on how to make diet and lifestyle changes, even if the patient is just pre-diabetic. If blood sugar levels are very high, they make an immediate referral to a primary care doctor. Garza Martinez says several of his crew have tested positive for diabetes or pre-diabetes and with diet and lifestyle changes recommended by ¡Salud! nurses, have been able to manage and even reverse the condition.

The day I spoke to Garside, she had seen 25 farmworkers on the picturesque grounds of Stoller Family Estate in Dayton. She made a dental referral for a worker whose bridge work, done in his native Guatemala a decade ago, had broken. “So he is walking around with these little stubs from four teeth and it’s super uncomfortable,” Garside says. 

“There’s a lot of conscientiousness about the land and how to maintain it and treat it well. It’s the same philosophy with health care.”

She called a local community health clinic that could squeeze him in the following day. (¡Salud! provides a dental grant if the patient cannot afford even the lower price that the health clinic charges.) Another patient had extremely high blood pressure and Garside was able to connect with his primary care doctor, who ordered a prescription he could pick up the next day. 

“We are a safety net service,” Garside says. She is grateful to the Oregon winemaking community for coming up with the idea of delivering these vital healthcare services 29 years ago. “There’s a lot of conscientiousness about the land and how to maintain it and treat it well. It’s the same philosophy with health care,” she says. “We are very fortunate that the industry has proven itself — how to take care of the land and do something for the seasonal agricultural workers.”

 

Portland's Food Hub Keeps Local Food Stocked During COVID-19

When our convoluted national supply chains broke down during COVID-19 and meatpacking facilities shuttered due to outbreaks, The Redd on Salmon was able to pivot, helping Portlanders weather the pandemic with ample supplies of local food and locally-made hand sanitizer.  I wrote about this unique food hub's myriad projects for Reasons to be Cheerful. 

It’s Friday afternoon, and people on bikes and in cars are pulling up to an enormous red-brick warehouse in Portland’s Central Eastside to pick up their “Greater Good” boxes. Packed with local food, the $50 boxes are organized by local grocery chain New Seasons and wholesaler Organically Grown Co. A similar pick-up parade occurs on Wednesdays, when people cart away “Dock Boxes” of fish, shrimp and crab from popular Oregon Coast seafood restaurant Local Ocean. And on Monday evenings, Farm Punk, a farm in nearby Gresham, drops off its 50 community-supported agriculture (CSA) shares here, to be delivered the next day to eaters’ front porches via electric-assist trikes. 

This is the “new normal” at the Redd on Salmon, an enterprise that’s optimizing Portland’s local food system and helping farmers, ranchers and fisherfolk adapt to a post-Covid reality. Even in the before times, the Redd on Salmon served as a solution to the infrastructure dilemma for small and mid-size farmers, who face all kinds of logistical challenges as they try to get food to consumers. Without the production volume to justify large-scale storage and transport systems, small farmers often spend a full day on the road each week, burning precious time and money driving to restaurants and supermarkets, dropping off their wares one at a time. They also need to market and often sell their own goods — skills many farmers don’t know the first thing about. 

With logistical and marketing support from the Redd, small food producers can scale up and eventually serve institutional outlets like schools, hospitals, grocery stores and corporate offices. Credit: The Redd

The Redd solves all these problems in one fell swoop, acting as a distribution hub, an affordable storage space and a shared industrial kitchen. Ecotrust, the environmental think tank behind the Redd, also hosts a business accelerator, helping small farmers to scale up. Currently, the Redd supports more than 150 small to mid-size food-related businesses. From 2018 to 2019, the facility’s core tenants saw a 45 percent increase in job creation and a 12 percent increase in jobs at or above the living wage. 

Medium-sizing small farms

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the failures of the industrial food system. Grocery stores have run short of pasta, canned beans, flour, yeast and meat. Farmers, unable to sell to school cafeterias and chain restaurants, are dumping their milk and plowing under their onions. When 20 gargantuan meat processing plants were shuttered by coronavirus outbreaks, farmers were left with no choice but to euthanize hundreds of thousands of pigs and millions of chickens. 

As Michael Pollan noted in his recent piece in the New York Review of Books, our industrial food chain is broken, but local food systems, like the one championed and supported by the Redd on Salmon, are proving to be more resilient. “The advantages of local food systems have never been more obvious, and their rapid growth during the past two decades has at least partly insulated many communities from the shocks to the broader food economy,” Pollan writes.

 

The Redd on Salmon is an integral part of this system. It is what is known as a food hub, a centrally located space that facilitates the aggregation, storage, processing, distribution and/or marketing of regionally produced food products. Not only does the block-long space provide farmers a 2,000-square-foot cold storage facility (half freezer, half refrigeration), it has offices and “dry storage” space so local companies like Ground Up PDX (nut butters) and Hoss Sauce (hot sauce) can stash boxes and product at a central location closer to their customers. 

The Redd solves the transport conundrum, too, with its main tenant, B-Line. A short-haul service with a fleet of electric-assist trikes, B-Line executes “last-mile” delivery without spewing carbon dioxide or jamming up the roads at delivery sites. Trike drivers load up their insulated trailers with up to 600 pounds of product and drop off food at restaurants, grocery stores and corporate cafeterias like AirBnB and Google. (B-Line also has one truck for deliveries that are further than three miles away. Founder and CEO Franklin Jones is saving up for an electric one.)  

By providing an all-in-one distribution hub to farmers who could never afford one on their own, the Redd was conceived as a way to support what food systems experts call “the agriculture of the middle.” Ag of the middle producers are larger than those who sell via local farmers’ markets or CSAs, but smaller than those supplying globalized commodity markets. With logistical and marketing support from the Redd, these producers can scale up and eventually serve institutional outlets like schools, hospitals, grocery stores and corporate offices.

A short-haul service with a fleet of electric-assist trikes, B-Line executes “last-mile” delivery without spewing carbon dioxide or jamming up the roads at delivery sites. Credit: The Redd

And lest you think this is a quirky boutique solution unique to Portlandia, know that there are over 350 food hubs around the country—from Durham, North Carolina to Traverse City, Michigan. A traditional food hub offers aggregation, marketing and often distribution for agricultural products. It might also serve as an incubator for micro-businesses. But the Redd takes it a step further, offering shared kitchens, a co-working space and even (across the street in the Redd East) an 8,000-square-foot event space with a state-of-the-art kitchen. Jim Barham, an agricultural economist at the USDA, calls the Redd a food hub on steroids.

Founded by Ecotrust, which has long been a champion of ag of the middle producers, the Redd runs a two-year Ag of the Middle Accelerator Program that helps smaller-scale farmers, ranchers and fisherfolk learn the basics of marketing, accounting, taxation and business structure — as well as helping them apply for USDA value-added producer grants. As part of their orientation, participants in the accelerator tour the Redd’s facilities; graduates often end up using the space in some way. Over 70 producers have either graduated from the accelerator program or are in it right now. The current cohort of 17 businesses increased their sales by $1.5 million, collectively, after one year in the program. 

Keeping it local

Pre-pandemic, 30 to 40 percent of B-Line’s deliveries were to restaurants, corporate cafeterias or downtown businesses like Office Depot. Now that most of those are closed, the company has had to pivot, doing more frequent deliveries to New Seasons’ 18 area grocery stores, as well as serving as a physical hub for new direct-to-consumer services like the DockBox and Greater Good boxes. 

“When the pandemic hit, there was a flurry of ‘panic buying,’” says B-Line founder and CEO Franklin Jones. As it did at many supermarket chains, demand skyrocketed at New Seasons, causing a backlog with mainline distributors like KeHE, UNFI and Supervalu. As a result, says director of brand development at New Seasons Chris Tjersland, these distributors limited the amount of product that could be shipped to each store, leaving them with empty shelves. 

But because B-Line has pre-existing relationships with local farmers and producers, Jones was able to funnel products straight from these vendors through the Redd and into the aisles at New Seasons. Working with B-Line also allowed Tjersland and Jones to work directly with the producers of New Seasons’s private label line at a moment when traditional distribution channels were breaking down. While industrial farms were dumping perfectly good fruit and milk, B-Line was storing and delivering thousands of cases of Shepherd’s Grain flour, 800 cases of Rallenti Pasta and over 400 cases of Scenic Fruit frozen berries. Tjersland even worked with local companies Brew Dr Kombucha and Straightaway Cocktails to make New Seasons hand sanitizer, which was stored at the Redd and delivered via B-Line. 

The pandemic prompted other positive developments at the Redd. Redd Campus Manager Emma Sharer was tasked with how to optimize the Redd East event space, normally booked with weddings, natural wine fairs and food-focused conferences. In late March, she was doing an ab workout on the waterfront when she ran into Jacobsen Valentine, founder of Feed the Mass, an affordable cooking school that teaches people how to make healthy meals from scratch.

For the past month, a handful of volunteers have been cooking two meals a week at the Redd’s kitchen; each meal can feed 200 people. Credit: The Redd

The two struck up a conversation. “He was like, ‘My nonprofit is really struggling and I have this idea: how can we make meals for people who are missing access to them? Who are forced to buy fast food or packaged food?” 

They cooked up a collaborative plan. Ecotrust would donate its Redd East kitchen to Valentine two days a week, and he would cook meals for unhoused and food insecure folks around town.  

The FED Project was born. For the past month, Valentine and a handful of volunteers have been cooking two meals a week at the Redd’s kitchen; each meal can feed 200 people. The meals are packed up individually and delivered to folks around town who need them. 

Ecotrust gave Valentine a small food budget and stipend. Plus, Sharer scored a huge food donation from Airbnb when the company’s Portland offices, including its cafeteria, closed in March. Since the company had been sourcing via the Redd, much of the food was high-quality and local. “There was cheese, sour cream, Camas Country flour, a lot of spices, chicken from Marion Acres, pork products from Campfire Farm, confit garlic, frozen berries,” says Airbnb’s food program manager Abby Fammartino, who estimates that the donation was worth $10,000 in total. Jacobsen and his crew made mac and cheese the first week and channa masala the next. 

Sharer and Valentine hope that this particular project will live on even after the pandemic is over. “If we were to get more funding, could some of that go towards paying BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) farmers to purchase more product, supportive of the sourcing side of farming?” asks Sharer. “That’s our next step.”

One thing is clear: the Redd campus — and its robust local food community — helped keep flour and hand sanitizer on New Seasons shelves while mainline distributors couldn’t keep up with the spike in demand. 

“What it [the pandemic] made me realize is that the supply chain infrastructure is broken,” Tjersland from New Seasons says. Jones, who hasn’t had to lay off anyone at B-Line as a result of his increased business with New Seasons, agrees. “The whole pandemic really shone a spotlight on how resilient the local supply chain could be.” 

 

 

 

This ‘Carbon-Negative’ Burger Is Fighting Climate Change

I wrote this story for Reasons to be Cheerful, David Byrne's new online magazine. 

As fake meat floods the market, some fast-food joints are insisting that their ultra-sustainably raised beef is better for the planet.

Burgerville's No. 6 Burger uses regeneratively farmed grass-fed beef, wheat from farmers who plant cover crops and practice low-till agriculture, and cheese from a creamery in Southern Oregon that gets it milk from small, family-run farms.

 

Everyone from Miley Cyrus to Trevor Noah is raving about the Impossible Burger, the vegan beef with the trademark “bleed” that debuted in 2016. It’s one of a handful of plant-based meats that have surged in popularity on claims that they can “drastically reduce humanity’s destructive impact on the global environment,” as Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown has put it.

But what if there’s another, earth-friendlier option? What if a juice-dripping burger from an actual cow could be better for the planet than vegan-but-you’d-never-know-it imitation meat? A few burger chains are tacitly suggesting as much, offering real beef burgers that, by some measures, are more sustainable, and show how farming, done correctly, can be good for the earth.

Carbon-negative beef

Burgerville, a 60-year-old fast-food chain in the Pacific Northwest, launched the No. 6 Burger in September, so named for the sixth element in the periodic table, carbon. The No. 6 is a lesson in regenerative agriculture, a holistic land management practice that reverses climate change by rebuilding soil’s organic matter and restoring its biodiversity. 

The 100-percent grass-fed beef burger is from Carman Ranch, which practices rotational grazing on pasture, sequestering carbon back into the soil. (More on that later.) The brioche bun is baked at Grand Central Bakery from wheat grown on two Northwest farms (Small’s Family Farm and Camas Country Mill) that practice minimum tillage, which prevents erosion and carbon loss. And the aged cheddar melted atop is from Face Rock Creamery, which works with small-scale dairies within 15 miles of its facility. Every one of these enterprises is based in Oregon or Washington. The burger is currently sold at nine of Burgerville’s 41 locations. (It was slated to roll out at 16 additional locations in March, but then the coronavirus pandemic hit.) 

“Soil health is the core principle of what we do,” says Cory Carman, the 40-year-old owner of Carman Ranch. The pasture at Carman Ranch is rich with deeply rooted perennial grasses and nutrient-dense cover crops like winter pea, oats, sunflowers and a brassica mix—all plants that feed soil microbes as well as the cattle, eliminating the need for trucking in carbon-reliant feed like corn. The cattle are rotated on pasture and cycle the nutrients through their bodies, nourishing the soil with their manure, which in turn feeds the next cover crop. After they graze, that area is left fallow for as long as a year so it can regenerate. Crucially, the grasses and cover crops that the cattle munch on also pull carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the soil. 

Though Carman doesn’t have funding to test how deep a carbon sink her grazeland is, other ranches that practice regenerative grazing have. White Oak Pastures, a Bluffton, Georgia-based farm, recently had an outside firm conduct a “Life Cycle Assessment” of its rotationally grazed beef. The results show that the operation produces a net total of negative-3.5 kilograms of carbon emissions for every kilogram of beef produced. In other words, the cattle of White Oak Pastures have a net-negative impact on the environment—the very process by which they’re raised reduces climate change.

A partnership, rare and well done

Back in 2017, before the No. 6 Burger was on their menu, a few Burgerville executives visited Carman on her family’s ranch in Wallowa County, Oregon. The company wanted to put its money where its values were—fostering a more resilient regional supply chain. But the executives were wary, in part, because of the premium price that Carman Ranch beef commands. 

Cory Carman on her ranch in Wallowa, Oregon. Credit: Steven Jackson / Flickr

Carman convinced them that supporting her ranch would help bring the operation to scale, allowing her to lower her prices —a virtuous cycle of its own. “I told them, ‘Listen, if you want us to scale up so we can become one of your suppliers eventually, you can’t just sit around!’” she recalls. The Burgerville execs agreed, and committed to making the ranch’s grass-fed beef about seven percent of the beef in all their burgers.

The partnership worked. Burgerville’s commitment to buying a steady weekly volume allowed Carman to scale up, doubling the ranch’s production from 20 head of cattle a week to 40. Today, the Carman Ranch beef Burgerville buys goes first to the No. 6 Burger, and if anything is leftover, they’ll use it in the grind for the regular burgers. (The chain uses Country Natural Beef, which is grass-fed and corn finished, for its other burgers.) And even though the coronavirus pandemic shuttered all Burgerville restaurants to dine-in customers (38 remain open for drive-through or delivery business), they’ve stuck by their weekly order from Carman Ranch. 

Despite its $8 price tag — several dollars more than Burgerville’s $5.39 Northwest Cheeseburger — the No. 6 has been a hit. “I thought there was going to be all this pushback on pricing, but there wasn’t,” says Michelle Battista, the chain’s senior vice president for brand and marketing. From September to April 5, Burgerville sold nearly 50,000 No. 6 Burgers, nearly 14 percent of the company’s quarter-pounder burger sales. 

Impossible in nature

The No. 6 Burger is a story of long-game sustainability, in which shared risk and commitment lead to scaled-up carbon-negative farming.

The Impossible Burger’s story is different. A Silicon Valley food-tech triumph, its genetically engineered soy-based “heme” compound (the part that makes it “bleed”) has won over even un-woke fast food chains like Burger King and White Castle. But as critics like Anna Lappé, author of Diet for a Hot Planet, have pointed out, the company’s reliance on genetically modified soy is problematic in ways that have nothing to do with animal rights. 

GM soy is genetically engineered so that it can be sprayed with Bayer-Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup. Not only has glyphosate use been linked to the decline in honeybee and monarch butterfly populations, it has been classified by the World Health Organization as a probable carcinogen. The company’s reliance on a monoculture crop — genetically modified soy — also perpetuates one of the worst aspects of the industrial food system. Growing one crop year in and year out degrades the soil and contributes to erosion — because there are no cover crops to keep the soil in place — and also requires chemical fertilizers and other fossil fuels to harvest and transport. According to the World Food LCA Database, soybeans have a footprint of two kilograms of carbon for every kilogram of beans produced.  

Rachel Konrad, the chief communications officer at Impossible Foods, says that the company routinely scans for pesticides and herbicides and that there is no glyphosate in the Impossible Burger (though she did not deny that glyphosate is used on GM soy crops). She also disputed that relying on soy would perpetuate a monocultural food system, saying, “Animal agriculture is the No. 1 reason we’ve developed dangerous, biodiversity-killing monocultures… For what it’s worth, if you want to avoid soy for some reason, then you must eliminate animal products from your diet since livestock consumes the vast majority of all soy.” This is entirely true of the cheap feedlot beef raised in America, which is what most fast-food chains depend on. However, it is not true of ranches, like Carman’s, that practice regenerative agriculture, since their cattle is grazed on only pasture; they never eat soy or corn.  

There is also the question of whether heme, made from fermenting a genetically engineered yeast, is safe to eat. Konrad cites conclusions from the U.S. FDA and third-party food safety scientists “that the heme in the Impossible Burger is totally safe to eat.” But organizations like the Center for Food Safety and Moms Across America argue that we don’t really know, since this is the first time humans have ever consumed this unique lab-made form of heme. 

But the biggest impact of these products may be how quickly they have shifted focus away from more sustainable methods of farming and toward tech-based solutions instead. Before fake meat made a splash, at least one fast-food chain had just begun committing to more sustainably raised beef. In 2015, Carl’s Jr. introduced an antibiotic-free burger sourced from free range, grass-fed cattle. It’s no longer on the menu — now the chain sells the Beyond Burger instead. 

While some regional chains like Elevation and Bareburger have continued to source grass-fed beef from smaller family-run farms, most are still sourcing their beef from confined animal feeding lots, which are devastating for the environment, horrific for the animals and not great for human health. (Cows evolved to eat grass, not corn, which tends to make them sick). This, at least, is something that Impossible CEO Brown and proponents of regenerative agriculture agree on: our addiction to cheap feedlot beef is harming the planet. 

Burgerville’s business has been crucial to Carman Ranch’s growth. But more important than revenue, the chain has given Cory Carman — and the other farmers behind the No. 6 burger — a chance to share her mission with the wider world. “We want to get the message out: Why should you pay a premium for grass-fed beef? Why is our species dependent on the health of the soil?” She, like other practitioners of regenerative agriculture, is concerned that lab-based meat perpetuates monocultures. “The integration of animals, in some way, is critical to all ecological systems,” she says.  

The benefits of regenerative agriculture are complex, but once customers are educated, says Battista, they’re on board. “As a marketplace, we got people to grass fed,” she says. “We got people to see the difference between grass-fed and conventional feedlot beef. And people are like, ‘Yeah, I get it!’ And they connect the dots back to their own health and wellness.” 

 

The Oregon County that Stopped Big Water

I wrote this story on March 2nd for Reasons to be Cheerful, David Byrne's new publication. 

As Washington State moves to ban companies from selling its spring water, the story of Hood River County shows how even a small place can stop the extraction of its most precious resource.

Two weeks ago, Washington State took a major step toward shutting off the tap for companies that want to haul away its spring water and sell it around the world. The state senate passed a bill that would prohibit companies like Crystal Geyser and Nestlé from extracting, bottling and selling water from spring-fed sources. If enacted, it would be the first state law in the nation to declare that “any use of water for the commercial production of bottled water is deemed to be detrimental to the public welfare and the public interest.” 

Governor Jay Inslee hasn’t taken a position on the bill, but observers say he will likely support it, setting a precedent for other states like Maine and Michigan that have pushed back against water bottling operations in recent years.

Washington’s law would be the toughest restriction on water bottling operations in the U.S. so far — but it wouldn’t be the first. Across the Columbia River from the state’s southern border, Hood River County, Oregon, won an improbable victory against a Nestlé bottling operation in 2016, setting the stage for efforts like the one in Washington today. Hood River County’s fight against Nestlé took a decade, but in the end it stopped the company from opening up a facility in the small town of Cascade Locks and banned commercial water bottling in the county entirely. The lessons of that fight offer a roadmap for similar efforts elsewhere.  

An extractive industry

Despite the snowy mountain peaks and sparkling waterfalls that adorn their labels, nearly two-thirds of all bottled water sold in the U.S. come from municipal tap water. Not only is this water no safer or purer than water from the faucet (tap water is actually tested more frequently) it is 2,000 times more expensive. In addition, the bottled water industry creates millions of single-use plastic bottles that will never be recycled. In 2016, four billion pounds of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic was used for bottled water production. 

But it’s bottled water from spring-fed sources that can have biggest ecological impacts. “Bottling spring water can be disastrous to the water table because the company sucks a large amount from a small source,” says Julia DeGraw, who was the senior Northwest organizer at Food & Water Watch during the decade when Nestlé was trying to open a bottling facility in Cascade Locks.

DeGraw says that communities in Mecosta County, Michigan have seen their wells run dry, their springs stop flowing and their fish die off because of Nestlé’s aggressive water pumping operations. A spokesperson from Nestlé Waters North America does not directly deny this, but points to data from Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy showing that the state’s nearly 40 bottled water companies account for less than .01 percent of water used in the state.  

A fish ladder at Cascade Locks on the Columbia River. Credit: J. Stephen Conn / Flickr

Hood River County’s fight against Nestlé began back in 2008, when the multinational company approached Cascade Locks with plans to open a $50 million bottling plant that would have extracted more than 100 million gallons of water a year from Oxbow Springs, which feeds a salmon hatchery.  

DeGraw remembers those early days clearly. “We were the lead organization… really early on when we were trying to build a coalition,” she says. That coalition ended up being big, a fact that was key to the effort’s success. It included not just environmental groups like Food & Water Watch and the local Sierra Club chapter, but also public sector unions, Native American tribes, activist nuns, pro-bono lawyers, ultra runners, a hunger striker and ordinary people turned activists. 

Also critical was the fact that although the effort was grassroots, it was also well-resourced. Food & Water Watch put money behind the campaign, hiring DeGraw to be the local organizer and helping to pay for the county ballot measure. And in 2012 the Crag Law Center donated its services, filing two protests challenging the Oregon Water Resources Department’s (OWRD) approval of Nestlé’s water exchange permit. 

The broad reach and resources of the coalition, which named itself Keep Nestlé Out of the Gorge (KNOG), allowed it to confront the company’s U.S. water division, which has a pattern, the organizers say. They claim it seeks out economically distressed towns like Cascade Locks, which was once a boom town when the timber industry was thriving. In 2010, the town had a median income of just $42,917 and an unemployment rate of 15.5 percent, according to data from the U.S. Census. 

“When the mill closed down, it really had a profound effect on the economy,” says Aurora del Val, a retired English teacher who got involved in the campaign to keep Nestlé out. “Cascade Locks is a town that has the profile that I think a lot of these water companies are looking for. And they’re saying all the right things. The Nestlé guy would shake hands with all the business people and gave money to the food bank. He made all these promises. There is a real standard way that they operate in a small town.” Nestlé’s spokesperson confirmed that the company makes significant economic contributions in areas where they operate. “We support many community organizations, locally and nationally, through donations of water, food, supplies, and money,” he wrote via email. 

In Cascade Locks, Nestlé promised jobs and economic prosperity while playing down potential environmental consequences, and local officials took it at face value, del Val says. 

“It’s kind of like the tobacco industry saying ‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t give you cancer!’” she continues. “The water plant might’ve provided a few jobs locally, but in terms of — for the larger economy — it would’ve put the water supply at risk.”

Resistance coalesces

Concerned about the negative repercussions — depleting groundwater that farmers and residents depend upon, siphoning off the cold creek water that’s essential for fish habitat — del Val started to talk to her neighbors, many of whom were also concerned. In the spring of 2015, she helped found a group called the Local Water Alliance, eventually becoming the group’s campaign director. Even though she calls herself a “reluctant activist,” del Val went door-to-door and talked to Democrats, Independents and Republicans alike. 

In Cascade Locks, she and others were able to persuade long-time residents and independents Kathy and Bob Tittle, who own the Chevron station in town, as well as Joseph Shelley and Lynn Pruitt — a Libertarian and Republican, respectively — who felt so strongly about the campaign that they allowed their photos on the Local Water Alliance’s materials. In Odell, in the heart of orchard country, Butch Gehrig, a registered Republican, endorsed the Alliance’s campaign, too. “Water matters, and it doesn’t matter which political affiliation you are,” she says. 

The Bridge of the Gods spanning the Columbia River between Cascade Locks, Oregon and Washington State. Credit: C. Hanchey / Flickr

The Yakama Nation opposed the bottling plant at around the same time. Chairman JoDe Goudy spoke on the steps of the Oregon Capitol saying that the Yakama Nation would sue the state of Oregon if Nestlé was authorized to bottle water from Oxbow Springs. The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and Umatilla and Nez Perce tribes also sent Governor Kate Brown letters opposing the bottling facility and critiquing the process. 

“Our natural resources are important and we can’t be extracting them,” says Carina Miller, who was a member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs’ tribal council at the time. Miller says that tribal treaty rights were disregarded when the Nestlé deal was set into motion, and was troubled that this wasn’t what motivated Governor Kate Brown’s late-in-the-game decision to oppose the deal. On the other hand, Miller says, the fact that area environmentalists and conservative white farmers alike recognized that tribal people needed to be at the table was huge. “To go and have shared values — just that there was an acknowledgement that tribes should be included. That was a win.” 

Even though Nestlé spent $105,000 to oppose the Hood River County Water Protection Measure — more than double what backers of the measure raised — it passed in May 2016 by nearly 70 percent. “It was democracy in action,” del Val says. “The power of the vote was pretty inspiring. Even though this is a real dark time, people do really make a difference.” 

Even so, perhaps because Governor Brown hadn’t taken action, Nestlé, Cascade Locks and the ODFW continued to pursue a water rights swap, in violation of the voter-approved measure. (At question was whether a county government has the authority to tell a city government what it can and can’t do with its resources.) After a new round of emails and phone calls from local residents and a damning story from a local news affiliate, Brown finally told ODFW to halt its water exchange in October of 2017, putting the kibosh on the Nestlé facility for good. 

Today, business is booming in Cascade Locks, according to del Val. A Basque cidery called Son of Man recently opened, sharing space with two natural winemakers. Thunder Island Brewing just broke ground on a 10,000-square-foot facility on the main street. And Renewal Workshop, a startup that takes discarded apparel that would normally go into the landfill and transforms it into new products or upcycled material, opened in 2016. “Those are the kinds of companies that are opening here,” says del Val. “They’re green and sustainable… and they’re hiring!” 

Now Hood River County is passing on the lessons it learned from its epic battle. DeGraw and del Val have recently shared tactics and strategies with resident-turned-activists in Randle, Washington, who have been fighting a similar effort by Crystal Geyser. “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” says del Val. “Not everyone involved is a career activist. We’re just ordinary people who care.”