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.