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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (April 14, 2016)
• The NAACP of Lane County’s “Community Conversations: Building Unity in our Community” series of public meetings on race, privilege and equity continues from 5:30 to 8 pm Thursday, April 14, at the EWEB Community Room, North Building, 500 E. 4th Ave. The meeting begins with a light dinner at 5:30. Additional meetings in the series will be at the same time and place on the second Thursday of each month through May. Reservations are requested through naacplanecounty.org or the Facebook page. Call 682- 5619. • 10 am to 1 pm Friday, April 15, at the Eugene downtown Post Office, 520 Willamette, community members will be calling on the Federal government to redirect taxes spent on war to instead fight climate change and to fund education, job creation, health care and other vital services. Taxpayers will have the opportunity to decide where their tax dollars go by participating in a penny poll. The event features a noon rally with speakers and the music of the Raging Grannies and Labor singer Mark Ross. All are welcome. From 11 am to 10 pm the same day, Whirled Pies Pizzeria, 1123 Monroe, will donate a percent of sales to CALC. For more information about the day’s events, contact CALC at (541) 485-1755. • MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) is holding a fundraiser in order to purchase one kilogram of pharmaceutical grade MDMA to continue Phase 3 trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. A Eugene Psychedelic Dinner will be held April 17 as part of dinners happening all around the country this April to raise awareness and funds to progress the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs and continue to remove the stigma associated with these substances. For more info go to razoo.com/us/story/Global-Psychedelic-Dinner- Eugene. To go to the Eugene potluck dinner, contact Mike Francis at mikefrancisnow@gmail.com. • Princeton historian Hendrik Hartog speaks on justice and the complexities of gradual emancipation in early 19th-century America 7:30 pm April 21 in 175 Knight Law Center at the UO. Hartog’s O’Fallon lecture comes out of his current research on the long legal history of slavery in New Jersey. He is the author of Public Property and Private Power: the Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730-1870 (1983); Man and Wife in America: a History (2000); and Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age (2012). The lecture is free and open to the public and will be live streamed. For more information, or for disability accommodations (which must be made by April 14), visit ohc.uoregon.edu or call (541) 346-3934. • Springfield City Club will feature Ted Taylor who recently retired after almost 18 years leading the area’s alternative newspaper, Eugene Weekly. An avid fly fisherman, he will reflect on his years of leadership at the end of a long journalistic career and on how the community and media have changed. Noon Thursday, April 21, Willamalane Sports Center, Springfield. Free to members, $10 nonmembers; with lunch $11 members, $22 nonmembers. LANE COUNTY AREA SPRAY SCHEDULE Oregon Department of Transportation is spraying roadsides. Call 503-986-3010 to talk with a Vegetation Management Coordinator or call 1-888-996-8080 for recent herbicide application information. Highways I-5, 99, 101 and 126 East were recently sprayed. Seneca Jones Timber Company, 689-1011, is planning to hire JR Helicopters, 509-452-3300, to aerially spray 109 acres near Hawley Creek East of Lorane with 2,4-D, clopyralid, glyphosate, hexazinone, sulfometuron methyl, atrazine and/or Crosshair. See ODF notification 2016-781-04302, call Dan Menk or Brian Peterson at 935-2283 with questions. Giustina Land and Timber Company, 345-2301, plans to hire Northwest Reforestation Services, 554- 0489, to spray a total of 145.5 acres on two units East of Lorane with triclopyr, glyphosate and/or Forest Crop Oil. See ODF notification 2016-781-04342, call Brian Peterson at 541-935-2283 with questions. Compiled by Jan Wroncy and Gary Hale, Forestland Dwellers: 342- 8332, www.forestlanddwellers.org 8 A pril 14, 2016 • eugeneweekly.com BY CAMILLA MORTENSEN COMMUNITY MOURNS LOSS OF ACTIVIST LEIF BRECKE O n Sunday, April 10, dozens of people came to Kesey Square in downtown Eugene to memo- rialize a vibrant former member of the Eugene community with Cascadian flags, pine cones and other symbols of his years in activism, civic en- gagement, advocating for diversity and more. Leif Brecke, a graduate of the University of Oregon, had moved to Southern Oregon in 2015, but his presence is still felt strongly in Lane County. His April 6 passing was announced on Facebook by his partner, Kay Wilde, who wrote: “My partner, Leif Brecke, passed away ear- lier today. He was so incredibly well loved and is so very deeply missed.” She continues, “If you know someone suffering from depression, please reach out to them and let them know you’re there for them if they need it.” Wilde says of Brecke, who was co-parenting his daughter, “I loved exploring ideas with him. Talking about the changes we wanted to see in our communities and how to effect those chang- es in an equitable way. I’d brainstorm with him on how to push changes through on city commissions I sit on, or how to best approach a sticky civic issue like getting bike lanes put through downtown Medford.” Brecke had worked for the Resilient Communities Project and at the Cascadian Resilience Network and as a Grange Hall organizer. He had worked in forest defense, was involved with Occupy Eugene and worked with people with disabilities. Wilde says, “Most of his background and activism centered around community resilience. How can our communities be as strong and resilient as possible? How are we operating within our communities to make it ac- cessible and equitable for all its members?” He also pro- tested at the Nevada Test Sites, she says, and was tear- gassed at the WTO protests in Seattle of 1999. As secretary of the fraternal organization Bellview Grange in Ashland last year, he endorsed causes such as fighting the liquefied natural gas pipeline, and food and water security, Wilde says. She says of Brecke, “No matter how much he dis- agreed with someone, he’d still try to maintain that notion of humanity and connection,” adding, “he was a community builder first and foremost.” “I feel like he brought so many different communities to- gether,” says Brecke’s friend Silver Mogart, who attended the April 10 memorial. “It was amazing to see the different back- grounds of people at the event yesterday.” “He was into everything; he knew so much about so many different topics,” Mogart continues. Mogart, who is presi- dent of LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), worked with Brecke on a committee at CALC (Community Alliance of Lane County) fighting racism and LGBTQ bias and hate. “Leif was warm and kind and not just thoughtful,” he says. “He came from a place of love and warmth and trying to bring a change.” Mogart adds, “He had the most amazing laugh, a cross between a chortle, I’ve never heard anything like it.” Connor Salisbury went to high school with Brecke in Coos Bay and says that even then, Brecke “was always both a champion of defending those who were targeted for abuse of discrim- ination and the first person in the room to understand when a system or set of rules were rigged to cause harm.” Dana Jo Cook says Brecke was “a support advocate. He supported me when I first decided to break — K AY W I L D E out of the stay-at-home-mom role over five years ago.” Cook says, “He said my skills would be im- portant to the activist community and he was right.” Cook cautions that as an activist, “taking time for self care gets thrown out the window because the urgency of the work is so important. That’s the lesson we as an activist community need to remember: Reach out to each other, take a break. We all need each other if we are going to do anything about the issues that affect all of us.” Wilde says, “He was definitely a radical — but his radical- ism was also rooted in love, connection, understanding and growth. He was my best friend, and I know he held that role for many other people as well.” A GoFundMe account has been created to help give Wilde time to process her partner’s death and can be found at go- fundme.com/9yyrsr6c. On the page Wilde supplies the num- ber for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273- 8255. Leif Brecke ‘was a community builder first and foremost.’
