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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 3, 2017)
LET TERS THE FACE OF THE FAIR I wasn’t able to go the Oregon Country Fair this year, so on Saturday afternoon while making lunch I turned to KLCC to hear what was on the Mainstage. A guy was singing about leaving his girl behind. Hmmm. I tuned in again on Sunday and finally got to hear some female voices singing with the male lead. Checking the schedule for the Mainstage for the entire fair weekend, every act was predominantly male. I found two bands with female singers. Granted, there are many female performers on other stages at the fair, but the Mainstage is kind of the “face” of the fair. Two years ago at the midnight show on Saturday, the only female presenter spoke to protest the fact that there were no female performers on the schedule for the show. For the most part, she was ignored. Every year, starry-eyed young women show up at fair for the first time. The way young people grow up feeling like they are represented by the culture is to see representations of themselves, their race, gender, orientation, etc. in leaders — whether it be a teacher, a rock star or a president. There are hidden outcomes and VIEWPOINT accumulating costs to not hearing the stories of women in song in the limelight of the Oregon Country Fair. Fair community: Please feel free to dispute any of my observations. Suggestion for Mainstage 2018: MaMuse, two very gifted female musicians. Lia Gladstone McKenzie Bridge fitting concepts of our bodies. I am not specifically a feminist. I am a female, and I believe the changes we want to express will occur first from woman to woman. It’s our decision. Sue Gallego Eugene SAY BREASTS According to an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July, the planet is in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event. Strikingly, the scientists who wrote the article call this a “biological annihilation.” The destruction of the planet happens bit-by-bit. A new big-box store, a new housing development, a new farm. Day- by-day, the change seems slow. But over a decade, or a lifetime, the scale of the destruction is dramatic. Here in the Willamette Valley, we can see this in action. Due to agriculture and development, less than one tenth of one percent of the native oak savannah remains. Many local species have been driven to the brink, including the endangered Fender’s blue butterfly and the threatened Kincaid’s lupine. Both species are barely hanging Thank you Ingrid!! (EW 7/27, “Normalize the Breasts”) Finally a woman who can carry the beautiful weight on her chest and who has the courage to say “Breasts”! I too have breasts. Not boobs. So long I have hoped that someone would appear who could help turn the page on how women view themselves. We are natural and exquisite beings. Our bodies belong to each of us. There is nothing embarrassing or shameful about our sexuality or sensuality. It expresses certain dynamics about our natures and our personalities. We are as individual as stars. But we are sisters, related and expressed in our vast domain of Womanhood. Please, please if you still profess to having “boobs,” rethink your sense of who you really are. Camel toes included. Let’s be free of these ill- LOCAL GLOBAL MASS EXTINCTION on. One of their few havens is the Willow Creek preserve in southwest Eugene. The latest threat is a proposed housing development on Gimpl Hill Road (see “Sour Grapes,” EW 5/27), near where I live, that would destroy native habitat in favor of million-dollar trophy homes. There are many reasons this project is a mistake, including the lack of water in the neighborhood. Already, some wells run dry each summer. But the most important reason is that contributing to “biological annihilation” for the sake of “sophisticated, secure gated country living” is wrong. The Lane County Board of Commissioners should do what is right — not what is profitable or easy. They should deny permits for this project. Max Wilbert Eugene SELFISH PET OWNERS I very much love the animal companions who share our homes, but I believe that it would have been in the animals’ best interests if the institution of “pet keeping” — i.e., breeding animals to be kept and regarded as “pets” — never existed. The international pastime of domesticating animals has created an overpopulation BY ROBERT EMMONS Eulogy for an Eco-Advocate TOM GIESEN JUNE 25,1940 - MARCH 4, 2017 M any of the relatives, friends and colleagues gathered at Tom Giesen’s memorial on a sunny April afternoon at McKenzie River Eco-Lodge had been joggers, cyclists and hikers on the treks Tom led for decades. The adventures they described clearly tested their fortitude and often their patience but ulti- mately gained their admiration and respect for a man who pushed himself even harder than he did them. Lean as an alley cat, he never seemed to sit still long enough for fat to catch up with him — or complacency either. It wasn’t reporting to boot camp that brought me to Tom’s office on Willamette Street when I was living in Eugene in the 1980s. I was there to strategize our mu- tual opposition to a growth-driven City Council decision that would negatively impact Eugene’s environment. As we talked at his drafting table, I remember being puzzled by the seeming discrepancy between Tom’s work as a construction cost consultant and his environmental advocacy. Later I learned of his early membership on the Oregon Natural Resources Council board, now Oregon Wild, and his work for a year as its president; his coordination of Citizens For Public Resources, advocating stewardship on private forestland; his membership in the Association of American Foresters; and in the Isaak Walton League. Late in his life, well after he and I had worked together as environmental advocates, he went back to college to earn masters’ degrees in both forest ecology and creative writing and was an adjunct research associate in the University of Oregon’s Public Planning Policy and Management Department. Though we communicated infrequently, what brought us together, usually by email or phone, was our responses to each other’s guest editorials or letters in The Register-Guard or Eugene Weekly. In his writing Tom was as clear and instruc- tive, as forceful and uncompromising, as he must have been while leading his group forays up or down a mountain trail on bike or on foot. He was carefully factual as well as forthright. In a 2001 RG op-ed Tom responded to righteous recriminations against “eco- terrorists” by pointing out those who ought to be punished: economic terrorists who clear-cut steep slopes and create dangerous landslides, then spray aerial poi- 4 A ugust 3, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com sons over the remains. Despite obvious signs of global warming, he averred in a 2009 RG guest edito- rial, “Many people are adopting an attitude of ‘Waiting to see.’” He pointed out that instead of “a cautious approach to a gnarly dilemma with lots of unknowns… waiting is actually reckless… It’s like waiting until you’ve had an auto accident before you put your seat belt on.” He went on to explain the basic science of greenhouse gas accumulation in both the atmosphere and the ocean; how, as a consequence, the planet continues to heat up; and that, to stop the rise, “a rapid and immediate reduction in emissions is the only rational option.” To stop heating the planet, he asserted in a July 2016 RG opinion piece that we have to stop heating the economy with fossil fuels and deforestation. As one way to turn down the heat, he proposed a substantial tax on carbon emissions. He also insisted, in a 2010 RG editorial, that we stop using the term ‘sus- tainable’ without concrete meaning and substance. “Sustainability,” he lamented, “has gone viral in more than one sense: It is suddenly everywhere and it has infected all of us…. ‘Sustainability’ is an example of the empty rhetoric that now pervades our culture.” Whether on the trail, in the classroom, at home or in the papers, Tom was an educator — an unrelenting, passionate purveyor of ecological truths born of his own education, compassion and on-the–ground experience. He had an incisive mind honed by a keen sense of environmental justice and integrity. It was a mind still sharp enough to appreciate the irony when he told me last year that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Characteristic of his ruthless logic and responsibility, he also mentioned that when the time came, while he was still lucid enough to know that neither he nor time could brook further delays, he would kindly stop for death before death unkindly stopped for him. Many may miss his rides in the wind. Those of us who recall his editorial insights and integrity will miss his efforts to save the wind. Robert Emmons of Fall Creek is president of LandWatch Lane County, a group that seeks to protect and sustain Lane County’s soils, air and water quality. See landwatch.net.
