One citizen's opinion of the 4-11-14 Meeting between 2 Port officials and 11 citizens:
I am immune to "spin" and "charm" offensives from elected officials. The only thing that matters to me is what these officials actually do. That being said, there are a few positive things that came from this meeting.
1. That the meeting occurred at all is a positive. This kind of meeting had never happened before.
2. The meeting was cordial, and citizens were very frank in expressing their concerns.
3. Citizens strongly reminded the Port officials that the Port does have the power necessary to stop Global's operations at Port Westward until Global complies with necessary DEQ permits.
4. There was considerable conversation trying to define exactly what defines a "unit" train: they are single commodity (although sometimes they carry mixed commodities) and are between 90 and 110+ cars long.
5. Awareness of, and the risk to, the natural environment was discussed
Needs improvement:
1. The Port participants didn't provide answers to questions concerning Global's liability insurance.
2. They didn't respond positively to the suggestion that video cameras be used to monitor tanker trains to enhance safety and accurately count the numbers and types of tankers passing through the county.
3. Citizens didn't ask about our perception that the Port uses the Freedom of Information Act to obstruct citizen access to public records, imposing conditions that are too restrictive
This event is Free and open to the public! Snacks and beverages will be provided!
Hello Friends,
Clatskanie Forward is proud to host an event with author Jim Lichatowich on his recent book Salmon People and Place: A Biologist’s Search for Salmon Recovery
This beautifully written account of his experience as an acclaimed fisheries biologist, Jim Lichatowich exposes the sad truth that the fractured governmental agency's efforts to save the salmon have actually contributed to their drastic decline.
Lichatowich brings us hope by suggesting humans realize the acute and inseparable connection between salmon and the notion of place. As we engage in his exploration of salmon recovery based on past mistakes, perhaps we humans can rediscover our own sense of place in the intricate web of life.
Please Join us for conversation and light snacks in the Cedar Room at the Clatskanie River Inn 600 E Columbia River Hwy Clatskanie May 7th, 2014 at 7:00 pm
Light snacks will be served.
I will attach a flier in case you want to print them, e-mail them or pass them out and spread the word!
Just a reminder that Riverkeeper attorney Miles Johnson and Jasmine Zimmer-Stucky will be at El Tapatio tomorrow to discuss the latest news from Port Westward and the public comment periods. Miles is a wealth of knowledge about the Global crude oil terminal.
Here are the details, feel free to forward and see you tomorrow! Presentation and Q&A on Proposed Air Pollution Permit for Port Westward Crude Oil Terminal
Join Riverkeeper to learn more about the proposed air pollution permit at Port Westward’s crude oil terminal and prepare for the April 3 public hearing.
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) will hold a public hearing on the air pollution permit for the Port Westward crude oil terminal. This is the only hearing for the public to weigh-in on DEQ’s authority to protect public health and the Columbia River Estuary from oil-by-rail terminals. For more on the permit, click here.
Presentation and Q&A about Proposed Air Pollution Permit at Port Westward
WHEN: Monday, March 31 (6:30-7:30PM) – Please arrive early to order dinner. WHERE: El Tapatio Restaurant (117 West A Street, Rainer, OR)
Can’t attend the hearing? DEQ is currently holding a public comment period on the air pollution permit through 5:00PM on Friday, April 11. Submit your comment today.
Where: 8325 N. Central (St. John's) Hosted by Marilyn Zornado and Alan Garren
What: Enjoy an afternoon and evening of live music, kids activities, gumbo & square dancing. Help raise funds to support Crag Law Center and Columbia Riverkeeper's work to stop dirty coal export from setting up shop on the Columbia River!
Food & Beverages: Homemade gumbo, vegetarian red beans & rice and soft drinks will be provided. Each guest gets 1 complimentary drink ticket good for a beer or a glass of wine. Additional beer and wine will be available for sale.
You are encouraged to bring: a salad or side to share and/or a cake for the cake walk!
Schedule of Events:
3:00 PM - Irish Music, Happy Hour and Kids' activities 4:00 PM - Ceilidh Dance (lessons provided) 5:00 PM - Let's eat! Gumbo is served. 5:30 PM - Short Presentation - Learn about what's happening with coal export proposals and Crag and Columbia Riverkeeper's work to stop these dirty projects. 6:00 PM - Family Square Dance and Cake Walk
All proceeds will support Crag & Columbia Riverkeeper's work to challenge coal export proposals. Thank to generous matching grants from the Energy Foundation, all donations made at this event will be doubled!
A very special thanks to Church of the Acoustic Redemption for hosting this event, Full Sail Brewing for sponsoring the beer, our volunteer musicians and gumbo chefs!
Dear Communities of Columbia and
Clatsop Counties,
I am writing this letter to you from
the year 2019. I know we all think that is impossible but in a
quantum universe...well, things happen. Suspend your disbelief for
the length of this essay because I have good news to report. The
results of your community efforts over the last 7 or 8 years have
been nothing short of miraculous! What began as an auspicious trend
of corporations shipping fossil fuels through your communities has
taken on a new and creative paradigm. The Bakken Crude is long
gone...unfortunately, as of this writing to another community
elsewhere. But take heart! Representatives of your community are
helping that community recover their local control as I speak. The
global climate change has increased as predicted. but many, many more
people across the globe are reversing the trend of corporate control.
The new hope is that the world-wide effort toward local sustainable
food sources will actually create a new feed back loop to absorb
carbon from the air. Your community has been no small part of that
trend. You should be proud!
In 2014 Clatskanie and Goble joined the
Rainier and Scappoose Communities in creating organic, locally grown
Farmers Markets. These markets flourished. Working with the cities in
between the existing market at the time, new markets were developed
in St. Helens, Deer Island, Columbia City and Westport by the year
2015. Clatsop County Between Knappa and Astoria joined the other
groups by 2016. This effort began what is now in 2019 called the
Fresh Food Corridor. At this writing The Fresh Food Corridor on
Highway 30 has proved to be one of the biggest tourist attractions in
Oregon. Folks leaving the Portland metropolitan area for weekend
travel to the coast in Astoria have been flocking through these
communities buying local grown and crafted products all along the
way.
The farming proved to be so much more
profitable to the communities and their local businesses than the
shipment of fossil fuels which proved to be so dangerous and
detrimental to communities that the choice was clear. Farming
prevailed. But the railroads themselves turned out to be a huge asset
after all! Currently, there are several passenger trains a day that
follow the farmers markets up through the Fresh Food Corridor
dropping tourists off for a few hours allowing them time to shop then
they just catch the next train to the next market along the way to
Astoria. Trains are also going the other way back to Portland so
tourists can catch a train to say, the St Helens Market, spend a few
hours then turn around and get home by dinner to cook their delicious
organic food purchased in the Fresh Food Corridor! The trains are an
important part of this corridor because it relieves car traffic on
Highway 30 and many of the folks in Portland who don't own cars use
mass transportation. This Fresh Food Corridor is so popular and
profitable that other communities all over the U.S. and Europe are
now copying it as model for attracting sustainable business and
tourism of their own.
From my vantage point here in the
future I say a resounding THANK YOU! Thank you for sticking together!
You created an amazing vision of what the future could be. A future
that our communities could be proud of and you made it happen. You
worked together and helped each other. There were disagreements but
you resolved them and made better choices. For your efforts and hard
work you now have a community independent of corporate control. Thank
you all for creating sustainable businesses based on healthy locally
grown food that doesn't depend on fossil fuels to grow or deliver it!
We are now less dependent on food being shipped in and, in fact,
other communities need you to help provide food for them. I am
humbled by the unity you showed over these years and I hope the
future “we” can continue to be as much of a community as the past
“we” became!
Here's to an amazing future...I'll see
you all here soon!
Come Join us for the monthly Clatskanie Forward meeting at 7:00 on Wednesday March 12 at 7:00 at the P.U.D. at 495 E Columbia River Hwy, Clatskanie. Topics will include how we can help with plans for the new CLATSKANIE FARM AND CRAFT MARKET, the Community Rights 2 day workshop in April, the newsletter and more! All are welcome. Snacks and beverages will be served!
Oil
Trains, Salmon, and Dead Heads: Management Without Stewardship
A
few years ago, fisheries and forestry managers pursued an aggressive
campaign to clear logs and debris from Northwest streams and rivers.
The goal was to “improve” the efficiency of the migratory
wild salmon “highway.” It viewed the declining salmon
numbers as a “factory process” problem. Tinker with the
steps in the “production line,” raise enormous numbers of fish in
fish factories (hatcheries), dump them in streams and rivers and
Presto!, problem solved.
Of
course, the folly of cleaning streams of logs and debris destroyed
the very environment the salmon needed to survive and flourish. Local
author and career salmon biologist Jim Lichatowich, in his
beautifully written book, Salmon, Place and People, calls this
misguided activity “Management without Stewardship”.
What
is missing, he argues persuasively, is the lack of understanding of,
or willful ignoring of, what the salmon actually need to thrive. This
mindset ignores the salmon’s habitat, its interactions within its
complex biological web, and the larger environmental and cultural
impacts if it becomes extinct. In a certain sense, it ignores
the salmon’s “community,” and fails to exercise stewardship
over it.
In
Columbia County active stewardship would display an understanding and
appreciation of our complex community. It would give equal
weight to maintaining our community safety, curtailing pollution of
all kinds, protecting livability, and sustaining the natural world
where the community lives. Yes, it also means job creation and
growth, but not just any industry, any job, at any cost.
In
the past I’ve seen very little evidence that the Columbia County
and Port of St. Helens (POSH) commissioners have exercised this
broader responsibility of community stewardship beyond their narrow
management goals. Particularly at POSH meetings, more
than one citizen has come away feeling that their stewardship
questions and concerns have been met with an attitude of dismissive
condescension, bordering on arrogance, from some commissioners and
their hired staff.
1,429.
That number represents the number of children and young people at
Scappoose High School, Middle School and Grant Watts elementary
school. This doesn’t even count the hundreds of adults who
work in or visit these 3 schools every day. Two of these schools are
very close together and none sits more than a block from the railroad
tracks.
On
November 13th, 2013, the Port of St. Helens (POSH) commissioners
voted unanimously to allow increasing the number of long oil trains
in our county to 38 per month by 2015. The approval was given
despite widely known and easily discovered information about the
explosive nature of Bakken crude oil, and the DOT111 oil tankers that
carry it. Those tanker cars are susceptible to puncture,
rupture, and have easily damaged valves. Either the
commissioners were not aware of these dangers before their decision,
or they knew and proceeded anyway. Both show a frightening lack
of stewardship for our community in the pursuit of their narrowly
focused management goals.
To
give credit where it’s due, the County commissioners decided to
exclude coal from their approval for the zone change at Port
Westward. I would be more inclined to see it as an act of true
community stewardship, if the same stroke of the pen did not doom
over 800 acres of valuable farmland to ultimate destruction. At
the recent POSH public meeting with Portland & Western railroad
representatives, some commissioners pressed hard for information
about P&W insurance coverage for injury, property damage, and
environmental destruction should an accident occur in our community.
I hope they keep it up, as these are the questions responsible
stewards of the community must insist be answered.
Finally,
I cannot seem to get the image of the public display of rotting
cattle heads out of my brain. To me, a POSH commissioner allowing
this display on her property reveals either an inability or
unwillingness to practice stewardship in her own neighborhood. It
displays her failure to take her share of responsibility for the
harmony, esthetics, environment and safety on her own street.
Addressing citizens’ stewardship concerns about the trains,
she has publicly stated that citizens who don’t like it should just
move. Can any voter seriously expect her to wield her power for the
stewardship of the entire community?
We
the people of Columbia County must not allow our complex community to
be damaged by management without stewardship, as happened to the
Pacific wild salmon. We have a right and responsibility to
insist that our elected officials display action, evidence and
transparency in their stewardship of this community that we love, and
not just present reassuring platitudes and press releases.
I
for one will not be moving as suggested. Along with ever
increasing numbers of community voters, I will stay and fight for
meaningful stewardship of this home that I love. We all invite
our elected officials to join us.
Join us Sunday, March 2nd at 6:30 PM for a question and answer session with Community Rights Movement leader Paul Cienfuegos! We will be meeting at the Cedar room at the Clatskanie River Inn. All are welcome. The Community Rights Movement is a non-ideological movement that helps communities find legal strategies to regain control of their natural resources from corporate entities. — with Paul Cienfuegos.
Thank you for your interest. Please spread the word to others you may feel might be interested in donating their talents, time or efforts to the cause.
We are creators of positive Planet Earth content for the internet and other forms of media. We create short videos to be streamed on Facebook/twitter, Print Ads to be inserted in public media, public live theatrical performances. Any form of communication with other humans in the form of video, music, animation, poetry...Bring your ideas! Together we can make this happen!
Everyone is welcome. We are also interested in recruiting folks who have been working in the ad industry. The corporate entities that are now destroying the planet for profit have exploited the talents of creative individuals for the sake of profit. They have convinced us that we were fortunate to be able to do what we love creating things to make their products look good and to convince the public to “buy in” to the so called “American Dream”. Dream A Green Planet will give us opportunities to use our skills and talent to do the opposite. We want to teach the public that the resources on planet Earth are for honoring.
Dream a Green Planet does not use money. No money ever changes hands for anything between anyone or any other entities. All resources are donated or done without.
There is only one payoff and it is that everyone gets to use their amazing talents to create a new world paradigm! The answers to global issues are already here. If we all coalesce around a new positive world view we can make change happen. Corporations have been using their money to convince us through media and advertising that we need to live the way we are today...miserable prisoners of a broken system doomed to drive our entire planet into extinction in a very short time. We need to use those same techniques of public media and engagement to redefine culture on our planet. The corporate paradigm has squeezed itself into every corner of our lives. We are allowing this to happen because we don't understand that it doesn't have to be that way. We can recreate a healthy world. We can do this by creating content to help the public understand where to look for happiness...it's not in the next new car or the bigger house, it's right here under our feet.
Dream A Green Planet exists solely to create media content that promotes a healthy, balanced planetary ecosystem with human engagement as a part of the process of life on Earth. Our message is that the Earth does not exist for humans to exploit. Humans exist as one part of the ecosystem.
So much of our language and rhetoric is divisive. We “fight a cold or cancer” instead of create good health. We “fight” poverty. We “fight” for our rights. We do battle every day with our language. At Dream A Green Planet we would rather focus on “creating” a positive new vision than “fighting or battling” an old one.
Bring your ideas for content. We will assemble a first class volunteer creative team around it and make it happen!
Suggested subjects
Community Empowerment
Saving Natural Resources
Reconnecting humans with
their food
other creatures
water
each other
Completely green energies
Sustainability 0 carbon Emissions
Focus on Creative Solutions to Big Issues
And many, many more...
We are planning a general meeting for interested people on Earth day at Goody Cable's farm in Beaverton on Sunday April 20 2014 at 2:00pm.
Please attend and bring your ideas. If you would like to attend contact Tracy Prescott-MacGregor by email tracypmacg@gmail.com and put “Dream A Green Planet” in the subject line.
Community Rights Workshop with leader Paul Cienfuegos!
Wednesday, February 5 at 5:30pm Rainier, Oregon. 5:30-9:00 Pm,
Riverside Community Church, 3rd and C streets.
$5-$20 sliding scale. No one turned away.
Call Steven for details...541 954-3125 See you there!
Paul will share a mostly unknown history of how large corporations came to win so many constitutional rights, and how the Community Rights movement has been pushing back in order to protect the inherent right of local communities to govern themselves and define their own future free of corporate interference.
A large engine for a new power plant under construction near Clatskanie fell off a truck Tuesday morning and struck a fully loaded railroad crude oil tanker.
