LET TERS
MORE REST STOPS
Regarding EW’s Aug. 6 Slant item on
homeless camps and the river:
“The city spends about $250,000 a
year cleaning up homeless camps … John
Brown has some ideas. Anybody else?”
Yes, we have lots of ideas. For starters,
spend that $250,000 on creating legal
homeless camps, such as the fi ve existing
“rest stops,” Opportunity Village, etc., so
that people don’t have to camp along the
river. Provide more port-o-potties and trash
bins near where people are camping. Open
up more city-owned land for rest stops and
villages. Refuse to let public opposition
stop siting them.
Right now it’s like pulling teeth to fi nd
a place where the Eugene City Council
will allow them. Put more city money
into supporting the legal camps so that the
nonprofi ts presently managing them don’t
have to work so hard at fundraising. Or
have city employees directly manage some
camps. Do a lot more to build affordable
housing for people who have little or no
money. End the camping ban, which
criminalizes homelessness.
None of this is hard to fi gure out. It
would help if Eugene Weekly would write
more about all of this instead of John
Brown’s lame idea.
See also the reactions to this Slant item
VIEWPOINT
on the Homeless In Eugene Facebook
page.
Lynn Porter
Homeless Action
Eugene
THE BLOB
I wish it was just a cheesy sci-fi movie,
but “The Blob” is real. A huge patch of
unusually warm Pacifi c water lurking off
the coast, from Mexico to Alaska, has
appeared. Like the movie blob, it sucks
the life out of everything in its path. The
Blob’s algal toxin, domoic acid, is moving
up the food chain. Razor clams, Dungeness
crab, sardines, salmon, seals, whales and
sea birds are dying.
The Blob is feeding off El Niño's warm
water. If El Niño persists, The Blob could
spread across the Pacifi c, causing a mass
kill of marine life. Some scientists are
alarmed that we are racing toward the sixth
great extinction of life on our planet.
“Extinction, as is no longer in
existence, having died out, leaving no
living representatives.” The movie blob
was never destroyed; it was subdued by the
cold Arctic ice. Our survival may lie in the
last line of The Blob movie, “Yeah, as long
as the Arctic stays cold.”
Michael T. Hinojosa
Drain
With the pressure that our homeless
community is receiving from the great
residents of our city, I would like to point
out that, without a doubt, a large number
of these folks are not living in this manner
by choice. There are many factors that
contribute to this problem in which many
are having great diffi culty fi nding housing
that is affordable and without having the
burdens of their past refl ect on their ability
to pass a screening, a criminal background
check as well as past references.
With so many of these willing and
able men and women out there living in
shelters, exiting drug and alcohol centers
and moving out of abusive or dangerous
living environments to fi nd safe, stable and
permanent housing, is it too much to ask
for our community to band together and
help fi nd a solution to this existing and
ongoing problem?
Let me point out that a lot of the services
these people seek out have not done much
on their part to help! Handing them a piece
of paper with a list of places to fi nd food,
clothing and free medical facilities does
not solve the problem of homelessness, yet
at times leads to discouragement.
As for people in active addiction,
they must seek out help that is so readily
available to them with no cost before they
can do any good for themselves. I would
also like to say that I myself was one of the
many who we see on the streets today and
found a way out of this and by no means
encourage homelessness in any way, but
I do have sympathy for the ones who are
struggling with this dilemma. With the
help of our community leaders and the
citizens of Lane County, we could all help
a large percentage of our houseless citizens
of Eugene by being less restrictive of them
fi nding a place called home.
Joey Hensley
Eugene
THEN CAME ISIS
Lest anyone forget Bush’s legacy:
Endless war! “Bring ’em on!”
Then came ISIS and their ilk.
Marilyn Marcus
Eugene
GOODBYE ROCK PILES
Regarding the letter from Doyle Srader
commenting on the beautiful rock-stacking
art — I too enjoyed the rock-stacking art
next to the University of Oregon bike
bridge. Recently, I was watching the
river-boarding activities. Four young,
college-aged men swam over to them and
systematically destroyed them all. They
seemed quite pleased with themselves.
BY TOM GIE SEN
The Die is Cast
WHERE’S THE PLANNING FOR MITIGATION AND
ADAPTATION?
L
ate in the 19th century, we discovered and began to burn crude oil rather
casually, as if an epoch-marking discovery of an incredible energy source was
a routine event.
It wasn’t.
Crude oil is an enormous one-time bounty of highly concentrated energy
that developed millions of years ago in the depths of the planet, from a soup of anoxic water,
alga, sediment, heat and pressure. We have squandered about half of that gift in just 156 years.
Oil is the most valuable and versatile of the fossil fuels (crude oil, natural gas, bitumen
and coal), and I will focus on it. Oil is the powerful change agent that enabled the physical
transformation of our planet over about 150 years. However, our choices for oil’s use were
focused on trivialities — expressions of wealth and power. We failed to plan the use of our
bonanza, and that planning is still absent, especially in regard to the global warming that
burning oil produces.
The purpose of burning oil and natural gas is the production of incredible amounts of
energy, harnessed primarily for transportation. We don’t understand how incredibly useful
and novel oil is, and we consume it casually, greedily and foolishly.
Today, the U.S. alone uses about 19 million barrels of oil each day — close to 25 percent
of global production. We have now produced and burned perhaps half or more of what
petroleum geologists believe is the ultimate available resource.
We cannot escape the consequences of burning all that fossil fuel — and producing all that
CO2. Burning oil results in heating the planet plus myriad other negative effects — acidifi ed
oceans, melting global ice, substantial sea level rise, widespread extinctions, changed climates
and much more. We have made profoundly ignorant and selfi sh choices by burning half or
more of the world’s available petroleum without any coordinated attempt at mitigation or the
production of replacement amounts of renewable energy.
We are passive in the face of our fossil fuel bonanza. Our oil use history was largely driven
by markets. It was all about business: converting petroleum into mobility, machine tools,
wealth, toys, comfort and convenience.
4
NOT BY CHOICE
A UGUST 20, 2015 • EUGENEWEEKLY.COM
As folks began to think about the possibility that oil was fi nite (and that inescapable
fact eluded many) a major PR/disinformation campaign was launched by the oil industry
to discredit climate science and scientists — an intense campaign promoting ignorance that
continues today.
American “exceptionalism” is a broad and variable claim that we are different from and better
than other nations. This self-proclaimed advantage, part of the extreme individualism characteristic
of American politics, allows us to imagine we are exceptional. We somehow imagine we deserve
to burn all that oil, without a thought for others or the future. We haven’t set aside any oil for our
children, grandchildren, etc., and there appear to be no comparable energy substitutes.
Our progeny will have to take care of themselves.
Now, the die is cast. We did not mitigate and thus we face temperature rises of 4 degrees
Celsius and more, along with massive changes in climate, vegetation and species. There are
reasons for radical pessimism:
• We don’t discuss the problem of warming — talking about it is verboten.
• The global community has done no successful broad scale planning for mitigation —
or for adaptation — and we are just waiting for things to “happen” to us. Our rudders are
disconnected and swinging wildly.
• We are at or beyond peak oil, when half or more of oil has been burned and the rate
of production inexorably slows. Any work on energy transformations must be done soon,
because only oil can power a transformation to renewables — there are no electric bulldozers.
• Dr. James Hansen and his coauthors produced a plan in 2013 to quickly reduce emissions
6 percent per year. It is a realistic approach to a diffi cult problem that will require sacrifi ces,
while doing nothing leads toward total collapse as oil becomes scarce. Unfortunately,
Hansen’s plan appears to be a non-starter: There is no broad movement to quit using oil.
Collapse looms.
• More than 16 million new vehicles were sold in the U.S. last year (and likewise in recent
years). We become eunuchs in the absence of automobiles.
• Eighty-two percent of U.S. total energy (2013) is fossil fuels. Reducing that to zero and
developing renewables seems impossible. There simply isn’t enough will, time or money.
• These are global problems. CO2 is global in scope and requires global abatement.
• Today most economies are fragile and incapable of creating global change.
It is time we engaged in public debates on these issues on the practicalities, and not
symbolically as part of fruitless culture wars. The time to worship those idols is over. In fact,
our civilization’s time may have passed. ■
Tom Giesen is a retired University of Oregon professor of planning who remains an observer of energy issues,
among others.