Mark: in the area of environmental concern, I have never seen any Portland newspaper concerns about smoke from forest fires. All over the US, right now, the public lands fire managers are letting fires burn to remove vegetation to the tune of hundreds of thousands of acres. How is that smoke "better" than field burning. Same objectives in burning. One is on private lands regulated by the State, and the other on public lands, regulated by National Wildland fire policy makers, who are from the Administration and NGOs.

If you accept the observations of the Western Institute for the Study of the Environment, in a big fire year, Oregon will produce more green house gases from wildland fire than from all other human inputs, including Boardman, autos, cows, etc.

So the party that runs our country, that has control of the administrative branch, and both branches of Congress, and has the same political control in Oregon, encourages wildland fires to burn, but wants to eliminate beneficial fire as a management tool for farmers.

I read FreeP (Detroit Free Press) on the net. The defunct Packard plant of millions of square feet of building and tunnels and roads, is filled with "stuff." Recyclables, garbage, whatever, and is constantly on fire, and the Detroit fire dept. is forbidden from entering it at night to fight fire. Mostly they just let them burn out. Can you imagine the air contributions from that deal?

Huge hypocrisy in liberal, Democrat treatment of who burns what and when. Not equality of treatment. And no equal treatment under the law. Oregon is 65% public lands. All are considered available for "beneficial fire" through them, not unlike the almost annual WFU (wildland fire use) fires from the Three Sisters and Mt. Washington and Mr. Jefferson Wilderness areas that have a propensity to end up on private land, and land put aside for heritage forests. Meanwhile, field burning is painted as a scourge on the countryside.

So which is it? Private burn bad and public burn good? We must expect to drive a Smart car to allow for WFU burning on public lands? We should destroy our economy by not fighting or suppressing wildland fire and punish private greenhouse gas emissions? It is a HUGE deal HUGE.

If you want to see the scope of ongoing fires, follow Inciweb (Google it) the national fire reporting site. They have narrations of public speak for ongoing fires, and the management of them. It would appear that air quality is NOT a national concern when managing public lands.

 

The piece on Jim Lynch and his new novel in the ROP pages (not the Powell's insert) lists his reading at Powell's but not the Thursday night, June 25, reading at Broadway Books. That reading should have been listed, too. The neighborhood independents deserve all the attention they can get. Powell's is not the only book store in Portland. As far as that goes, the listings are for the writer and the reader, too, and both deserve having the small stores' readings mentioned. Thank you.

 

Thanks for pointing this out. Lynch's reading at Broadway is, however, listed on our web site, under word events

 

Have you thought of a cover story on day labor during a recession? It's hard to think of an area other than soup kitchens that is closer to depressionb era realities. Take Labor Ready for instance. They just closed their decades-old Tigard location in order to consolidate with their Beaverton branch. If you thought it was hard to get an honest day's work before (when real estate, construction, and landscaping jobs were on the decline) try it when the employees of two offices have to compete against eachother every day!

The official office hours begin at 5:30am, yet if you arrive any later than 5am you can count on 15-20 other individuals being there to take the 5-15 new jobs available.

10 years ago Labor Ready was one of the few ways someone without an address could make a days (minimum) wage. Today there are half of the offices, half of the jobs, and 210% of the competition as former construction workers and other laid off individuals stoop to manual labor to survive. Please write about this. I'll email this to another WW email address as well to be sure it gets through.

-A worker

 

Any chance the OES Board story sill droning on since spring, might be an unannounced Twitter contest?  If so I wish you had put it out there so my tweet deck had a chance to win.  Too late now.  My gangs in summer camp.  Sounds like some Mellissa Lion or Kiala tweet party down on that story.  Then Kiala gets her old man Dane in and his contacts, and the Merc fires up Radik, and all of a sudden they're the ones winning the all Tweet tees. Bummer.