 |
  |
 |
||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||||
|
Slant: Short opinion pieces and rumor-chasing notes News: OPTIONS TO OPEN FIRES For centuries the indigenous people of Guatemala have been poisoning their lungs, burning their bodies and incinerating massive amounts of scarce wood simply to survive.
The traditional method of cooking in the indigenous communities is over an open flame called a "three-stone fire." These fires are contained inside one-room shanties with no ventilation. Women spend about six hours a day cooking and breathing in smoke, and because the fires sit directly on the ground, their children often fall into the flames, scarring them for life. "It's not like they don't know they cook on the ground and that it's bad for them. But they're too poor to do anything about it," said Nancy Hughes, creator of a grant to replace the "three-stone fires" with healthier, more efficient stoves. Hughes has accompanied Eugene-based Cascade Medical Team in conjunction with Helps International (www.helpsintl.org),a non-profit, non-denominational, Christian-based relief organization, on three trips to Guatemala to aid in essential care for the indigenous people who would otherwise be an economic impossibility for them. The team treats all types of medical needs, but began noticing a reoccurring pattern of burn injuries and respiratory ailments caused by the open fires. "I began to realize that nearly 90 percent of the pediatric patients our team sees are burn patients or patients with lung and skin disease," Hughes said. On one of her trips to Guatemala, a young burn victim stood up to tell of her run-in with a "three-stone fire" and to thank the team for its help. At that moment Hughes decided that she must do something about this issue. Her goal from that point on has been to prevent these health problems instead of treating them once they have already occurred. The stoves that will replace the "three-stone fires" are made from cinder blocks and sit about three feet above ground, eliminating the possibility of falling in the fire. They are easy for the community members to put together and come with a chimney to direct the smoke out of the living space. The new stoves are extremely efficient, using 70 percent less firewood, which is helpful to the families who must buy the wood and also helps to conserve the local forests. This year, Helps International received an Ashden Award, a "Green Oscar," for its innovative efforts to provide a sophisticated fuel-efficient stove to the homes of Guatemala's rural poor. One Guatemalan women who has already received a new stove raved about it and said she now has time to pursue hobbies like basket weaving. To facilitate her vision, Hughes established a grant in memory of her husband, Duffy Hughes, a physician in Eugene for more than 25 years. The goal of this grant is to raise $25,000 per year for the next four years to replace the "three-stone fires" in the homes of 8,000 indigenous Guatemalan families. The grant is sponsored by Southtowne Rotary, and each donation gets multiplied eight fold. A $100 donation gets doubled by the District 5110 Rotary Club, which gets doubled by Rotary International. That money, once in Guatemala, gets matched by Shell Oil. So, a $100 donation grows to $800 which would provide eight families with new stoves. To help Hughes with her quest, you can send your contributions to: The Duffy Hughes Memorial Stove Grant, c/o Eugene Southtowne Rotary Foundation, PO Box 5158, Eugene 97405 — E. Anderson Cael
THE REAL HISTORY The Pilgrims certainly weren't the first people to invent giving thanks in the fall. Harvest festivals have been celebrated ever since there have been harvests. However, the settlers in the New World had plenty to be thankful for. If the local Wampanoag Indians hadn't shown the newcomers (or is that interlopers?) how to hunt game, dig for plants and tubers and catch fish, the settlement would have starved (in fact, over half the settlement did perish during their first winter). In any case, they celebrated their good fortune with a big feast of Thanksgiving, which would have occurred sometime between Sept. 21 and Nov. 9. It lasted three days and they actually did invite the local Indians who had saved their skins. The big party was a one-off, though, and it wasn't until 1789 that George Washington proclaimed Nov. 26 as the "official" holiday. Even then, the date was contentious, and many of the original colonies were opposed to the idea of celebrating the deliverance of a dinky little hamlet with a national holiday. It was through the efforts of a woman in the 1800s that we can thank for our present Thanksgiving. Sarah Josepha Hale, a writer ("Mary Had a Little Lamb") and editor of Boston Ladies' Magazine, devoted 40 years of her life to getting recognition for a day of thanks. the indomitable Ms Hale finally persuaded Abraham Lincoln to set the fourth Thursday of November as the real and true Thanksgiving day. So how come it isn't always held on that day? Yet another president, Franklin Roosevelt, moved the day back one week in order to provide businesses with another seven days of Christmas shoppers. The day isn't thankful for turkeys, of course. Almost 30 million turkeys are raised each year for their part in the ultimate Thanksgiving sacrifice, except for one lucky turkey that is ceremoniously sent to the White House, where it is given an official presidential pardon, and is sent off to live out its days in peace on a farm. It has yet to be seen if any inspection teams have ever been sent to a turkey retirement farm to check on the treatment of the fowl residents. — Laird Goodman WHY KIDS PEE IN BUSHES The city of Eugene has a policy "to avoid placement of restrooms in neighborhood parks due to the illegal activities they seem to attract," according to a memo to the City Council this past summer. "While everyone would agree that having a restroom close by when you need one is a desirable convenience, unfortunately several less positive circumstances often seem to accompany restrooms in parks," parks manager Johnny Medlin wrote the council. "Restrooms by necessity require providing users an environment with a degree of privacy. Unfortunately, we find this provision of privacy or seclusion is also a major factor that facilitates illegal park uses such as drug use and sales, prostitution and camping." To minimize problematic privacy in restrooms, Medlin writes that the city is "minimizing the use of internal doors" especially lockable ones, in restrooms. Besides the crime concerns, there's also the problem of cost, according to the memo. The city spends more on a multiple stall restroom than most people would spend on a nice house— $150,000 to build, plus $30,000 a year to maintain. — Alan Pittman
PIELC RETURNS TO UO IN MARCH
Dates have been set for the 23rd annual Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (PIELC), an event that draws about 4,000 attorneys, activists, students and concerned citizens to Eugene from more than 50 countries. The conference will be held at the UO School of Law March 3-6. The event is organized by volunteers from Land Air Water, a student environmental law society. Every year LAW plans for about 125 panels, workshops and multi-media presentations addressing a broad spectrum of issues with environmental implications. Keynoters in recent years have included Ralph Nader, Vandana Shiva, Paul Hawken, Julia Butterfly Hill, David Brower and Terry Tempest Williams. No word yet on this year's likely keynoters. Information about the conference is regularly updated at www.pielc.org
QUOTABLES Jonathan Turley, professor of constitutional law at George Washington University, is quoted by the Institute for Public Accuracy (www.accuracy.org)saying Nov. 15: "Electors are certified on Dec. 7. They actually vote on Dec. 13. But those votes are not opened by Congress until Jan. 6. So there is still time to challenge the results in Ohio — as well as other close states such as New Mexico, Iowa and Nevada. … I was surprised on the morning after the election. I was legal analyst with CBS News for the election and we did not go off the air until 6 am. At that time, due to the reports and my conversation with Kerry attorneys, I expected a challenge. "Kerry's statement the day after the election that there were not enough provisional ballots to have any chance to alter the result of the election may have been true, but it was a bit misleading since provisional ballots are only part of the story. There were also absentee ballots, there were reports of substantial pockets of election problems, and allegations of over-voting and machine malfunction. In addition, over 70 percent of Ohio's votes were done with punch cards. We know that when you do a challenge to those, they tend to turn over. So there is room to challenge Ohio and other states. This is not to say that a recount is likely to change the result of the election, but it is not an impossibility."
CORRECTIONS/CLARIFICATIONS The website that was listed at the bottom of our story last week on "Election Wrongs" has been replaced. A better website for citizen involvement is www.truthinvoting.organd the e-mail address is info@truthinvoting.org
Think all that recycling you sort out of your trash and roll out to the street in a giant bin gets recycled? It might, or it might not. More than 850 tons of plastic and metal put out by Portland households in August got trashed. A sorting company, Smurfit-Stone Container, allegedly threw all that recycling out, The Oregonian reported this past week. The big diversion of recyclables to the landfill raises questions about Eugene and the state's increasing move to a system of commingled recycling and its reliance on a largely unregulated sorting industry. "It's definitely a black eye and I think there's definitely some explaining that needs to be done," says Alex Cuyler, the city of Eugene's recycling analyst and chairman of the Association of Oregon Recyclers. The news about Smurfit could worsen public mistrust of the city's new commingled recycling system, he said. "Already people are asking is this stuff really being recycled." Eugene haulers truck local commingled recycling to SP Newsprint near Portland. Cuyler says he has visited the facility and it looks good. There's a state law against trashing recycling. But neither city nor state officials regularly inspect, regulate or audit sorting facilities to independently verify how much of the recyclables that the facilities receive actually get recycled rather than dumped. "It's one of these issues DEQ is looking at," Cuyler says of tighter regulations. But he adds, "they are kind of understaffed, underfunded." It's unclear what, if any, economic incentive the recycling sorters have to go to the expense of actually sorting all the recyclables rather than creaming off the most valuable or convenient materials and trashing the rest. Many of the sorters, including Smurfit and SP Newsprint, are arms of paper mills that likely value the paper in commingled recycling more than the plastic and metal. "They will say outright our bread and butter is in paper fibers," Cuyler says. Even when the sorters aren't cheating like Smurfit, a lot of recycling ends up in the trash. Two years ago, Metro, the Portland regional government, studied recycling sorters in its area. The study found that 45 percent of the material the sorters were throwing out as garbage was actually recyclable. One sorter's trash was 70 percent recyclable. That sorter, part of a paper mill, was throwing away anything in a brown paper bag because the mill didn't want that kind of brown fiber. Some sorters fail to separate some plastic, glass and metal recyclables and instead bail them up with paper and send them off to paper mills. The mills screen out the contaminants in the pulping process and then throw out the once recyclable material. Cuyler says he visited one Longview, Wash., mill that reported going from five tons of garbage a year to 35 tons after it started taking fiber from commingled recycling sorters. Some of the mixed-in plastic ends up as pollution. Environmentalists in Georgia have threatened a SP Newsprint mill there with a lawsuit for spewing plastic bits from commingled fiber out into a river. In all, Metro estimates that about 14 percent of the plastic and metal containers sent to sorting facilities don't end up recycled. In addition, plastic and metal is often shipped overseas by state processors where it's difficult to verify what actually happens to the material. Mills have complained that glass contamination is particularly troublesome. The shards are difficult to screen out without also wasting lots of fiber. Glass can also cause rips in paper during printing, angering mill customers and wasting more reams of paper. But Cuyler says any problems with commingling are outweighed by its benefits. Eugene residents recycle 30 percent more because commingling is easier, and haulers save money with simplified collection. "There are still some bugs that need to be worked out," Cuyler says, but, "it's still showing to be a net gain in the total amount of stuff being recycled." Passing an expanded Oregon Bottle Bill could address some of the problems by keeping many plastic containers out of the mix, Cuyler says. Metro reported that only one percent of all the recycling sent to sorters was trashed. But that figure was apparently based on unverified information supplied by the sorting companies themselves. In Smurfit's case, DEQ says they were throwing out much more recycling. The lack of sorter regulation could shake public confidence in recycling, a source of environmental pride for Oregonians where recycling rates are almost twice the national average. BRING Recycling's Operations Manager Damien Czech says he's always been skeptical of the big curbside commingling bins. Sorting recycling is difficult and "you get kind of suspicious when big quantities get mixed together," Czech says. "I got a feeling that a lot of it was being thrown away."
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
