#oregon humanities

[megbits]

Candlesticks

I have a short piece in the "reader post" section of the newest issue of the Oregon Humanities magazine. Copied below, or find the whole issue at: http://oregonhumanities.org/rll/magazine/underground-winter-2023/

OH does themed issues, and this is more or less what came out immediately upon reading their prompt for this season's "underground" theme.

Candlesticks

We left them buried in the basement of the old house. Me, I would've taken them along, but D. made his disapproval of my grimy street rubbish very clear. It was one thing to have them sitting on top of the landlord’s pile of old paint cans and another to pack them away in boxes with our coats and linens.

Candlesticks are what you call those white plastic tubes that are screwed into the street to mark a perimeter, such as a separated bike lane. They are not particularly durable, as evidenced by the ease with which drivers routinely busted through them in our neighborhood. Sometimes the wreckage felt intentional, like motorists were playing a game of knocking down bowling pins.

Collecting them happened by impulse. Walking one day, I noticed two of them blocking a lane they had helped buffer just earlier that morning. Once in my hands, setting them back down felt like littering, while trashing them felt like complicity in destroying city property. So they came home with me.

But once I’d taken those, I began to see more, and once I saw them, I couldn’t leave them alone. As the collection grew, I began scheming. Maybe we could stealthily build a lane on a street in need of one. Maybe I would amass so many we could do a kind of art project: a pile of bollards like a pile of bones, representing all the injuries they failed to prevent. But before my little infrastructure graveyard could grow that large, we moved. Our landlord was of the more negligent variety; my guess is that they still live there in the basement.

I had almost wound up in a graveyard myself once, despite all the white paint on the crosswalk and a helmet on my head and the red light telling the driver to wait their turn. What my candlestick collection did, first, was to remind me that I was not alone, by sheer evidence of all the other “near misses” out there. But then, as someone who had often advocated for more bike lanes in cities, it began to do something else. The candlestick pile asked a question: Is this really what we want to build? Bowling pins for SUVs?

Presented like this, the answer seems like an obvious “no.” Who wants to scrap for a tiny piece of public space in which to exist, only to be threatened with death each day nonetheless? No one. But likewise no one, yet, seems to have quite the right answer for changing the public culture of how we live and move together on our streets—how we make room for everyone.

Still the need and desire for new and better answers is there, buried in that old basement.

[reality-detective]

Oregon: Did You Know❓🤔

[thegildedbee]

🏞️ !!! happy breaking news !!! after more than 100 years, fall-run Chinook salmon have returned to the Klamath River Basin: one month after the last dam obstacle was removed!!! 🏞️ Mark Hereford, ODFW’s Klamath Fisheries Reintroduction Project Leader, was part of the survey team that identified the fall-run Chinook. His team was ecstatic when they saw the first salmon.

“We saw a large fish the day before rise to surface in the Klamath River, but we only saw a dorsal fin,” said Hereford. “I thought, was that a salmon or maybe it was a very large rainbow trout?” Once the team returned on Oct. 16 and 17, they were able to confirm that salmon were in the tributary.

It marks the return of migrating fish to the area following the removal of four Klamath River dams. The salmon likely traveled 230 miles from the Pacific Ocean.

[eretzyisrael]

Source

[varilien]

since when did the stars stop shining so brightly?

Palestine: Funds | Action | eSims | Info Sudan Resources | Congo Resource | Lebanese Red Cross

[unconsiousppldontwanttea]

[rebeccathenaturalist]

You know the whole Tumblr trope that "humans will pack-bond with anything"? There's a lot of truth to that. As a species we are capable of incredible amounts of empathy, both toward other humans and toward other species as well. We even care for abiotic things like Roombas, cars, and little robots traversing the quiet slopes of Mars.

So it doesn't surprise me at all that the owners of the land where this centuries-old oak tree--Heritage Tree #19--live are giving it a celebration of life. The tree must be cut down according to Portland city officials due to an extensive fungal infection that has weakened its base and made it more likely to fall down in a storm.

Just once, I want to see us be able to look at a positive without immediately leaping to the negatives. Yes, I can think of a thousand different ways in which our species has fallen short in the realm of empathy, to include the history of the state of Oregon itself and all the devastation that this tree has seen in its ~300 years. But we also need to be able to balance that out with reminders that we are not entirely destructive and without feeling.

Sometimes we need to just focus on the positives for a bit, give our brains a break from the constant bad news, so that we can replenish our resilience. I know from hard experience that when all you look at is the bad stuff, it takes a lot more out of you and wears you down. There's a lot of room between being hyper-focused on what's wrong and needs fixing, and blithely ignoring everything bad in lieu of "only good vibes". You aren't engaging in toxic positivity if you allow yourself to just appreciate something kind in this world without compulsively pointing out all the wrong circumstances surrounding it.

Sometimes self-care looks like fighting, but sometimes self-care looks like setting down one's weapons for a while and appreciating what's to be saved. That some of us would be willing to acknowledge the impending loss of a non-human living being in such a bittersweet way is a reminder to me that, as Tolkien, wrote through Samwise Gamgee, "There's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for."

(By the way--those of you in the Portland area who'd like to attend the public celebration of life for this tree? It's at 1815 N Humboldt St, Portland, OR 97217 from 12pm - 5pm today, Oct. 6.)

[kingscythe]

bill would hate being human but one thing I think he’d like is stomach acid. You can’t tell me he wouldn’t find producing HCL at least a little bit cool

[stateofgraciee]

everytime i come across the 'dying of dysentery' card in card against humanity, i think about trail to oregon

[banchiedoingart]

and what if i said that humanizing bill cipher is the cowards way out. what if i said we should monsterize him. what then

[megbits]

One of the things that I love about where I live is the widespread culture of intentional place-making paired with creative sense-making about place: the many artists and writers shaping how we relate to where we are, past, present, and future. 

Just to provide a small sampling, here in Portland one finds groups like City Repairbuilding neighborhood visual identity through street murals, or hyperlocal publications like Buckman Journal. Around the state are any number of projects such as Pine Meadow Ranch, deliberately connecting art, agriculture, and ecology. And of course you have OPB, prolifically producing not just news but podcasts and videosthat keep an eye on history, culture, and natural science all at once, along with their regular coverage of all our other artists and place-makers.

And you can throw into that mix Oregon Humanities, a group dedicated not just to cultural programming around the state but to fostering dialogue and discussion as well. They also produce a seasonal magazine, focused on a theme; the theme for Winter 2023 is “Underground,” with writers exploring “things hidden or buried, for better or worse: subcultures and political currents and stories and plants and pollutants.”

There's some great pieces in the issue, see my recommendations on which to check out in this week's Unsettling post over on Substack: https://unsettling.substack.com/p/underground-in-oregon

[rolesolo]

Ur house in rural Oregon full of toys and ur pet possum

[dizziesims]

First couple vacay together!

[klanced]

i feel like keith could absolutely terrify normal/rational people (hunk, lance) by coming up with the weirdest most complicated way to fix the most simple problem. shiro is very used to it so he isn’t scared anymore

i think keith and pidge are two sides of the same raccoon-macgyver-packrat coin, but whereas pidge is a #WomenInSTEM👩‍🔬, keith is an unhinged liberal arts major

[humanrightsupdates]

US/Oregon: Wildfires Threaten Pregnancies

Socially Excluded Communities Especially at Risk

(Washington, DC) – Air pollution from wildfires is on the rise, but experiences from Oregon indicate that public health officials are not doing enough to provide education and resources to pregnant people, Human Rights Watch, an international human rights advocacy organization, and Nurturely, an organization that promotes equity in perinatal wellness, said today. Officials are not listening to the needs and experiences of pregnant people most at risk of exposure and enabling trusted community health workers to provide localized, actionable advice.

The 78-page report, “Reproductive Rights in the US Wildfire Crisis: Insights from Health Workers in Oregon State,” finds that the US government needs to do more to address the growing threat wildfires pose to maternal and newborn health, particularly in marginalized communities. The organizations documented the impacts of recent wildfires on maternal and newborn health in the state of Oregon, drawing on the experiences of community health workers and maternal health providers, among others.

“Pregnancy health and wellbeing is at risk in the US, with deep and painful unjust inequities between communities,” said Aver Yakubu, program director at Nurturely. “We’re living in the climate crisis now and it’s crucial for state and federal governments to address the effects of environmental harms on pregnancy that intersect with systemic racism factors, such as economic inequities that dictate whether someone can temporarily leave a smokey area or not, quality housing, and safe work environments.”

Wildfires, including increasingly common megafires, hazardous smoke, and extreme heat, have been on the rise in part because of drier, hotter conditions due to climate change. The recent trend of increasingly damaging fires in closer proximity to inhabited areas is predicted to continue: Oregon state health officials said in July that, in Oregon, levels of harmful “particulate matter, or PM2.5, from wildfire smoke are expected to double or triple by the end of the century.” PM2.5 is associated with worse maternal and newborn health in many studies.

[sealbee101]

I feel like the yyh community dosen't talk about sensui enough. Sensui is probably one of the best antagonist ive ever seen and it sucks no one talks about him hardly.

Sensui was a man of a justice system that was unblinded with obvious one sided ideals (demons = bad, human = good) it wasn't until that one night that completely made black and white turn to gray, his morality shattered, everything turning into a murky puddle.

Humanity doomed itself that night, turning the man who fought for it, to turning against it.

But it also made Sensui reflect, made him question himself, made him want to open his eyes and balance the scale as to why demons were so bad which led to Sensui down to opening the barrier between the worlds, if he could understand the same thing he'd use to hunt down maybe it'd put his mind at ease. himself at ease, maybe he'd finally understand.