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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (March 24, 2022)
letters STOP THE REAL ESTATE FREE FOR ALL The Eugene City Council is now in the process of considering substantial changes to the planning codes in R-1 single family housing throughout Eu- gene. According to state law HB 2001, all R-1 housing is now R-2 to promote more efficient land use in suburban areas. Eugene’s job now is to define the codes guiding this new statewide standard. Eugene's planning division has opted for extreme deregulation, in essence creating a free for all, a gift to develop- ers and rent-seeking businesses that will tear down single family homes to build more profitable fourplexes with no off street parking requirement. Your block may host 42-foot-tall two- story buildings with all the construction involved, resident vehicles parked on streets. It’s dismaying in the extreme. This will only exacerbate the loss of low- income housing. Contact your ward rep today and ask why this is occurring. All the hand waving over middle housing disguises the city’s true intentions here. And somehow you have not received a single postcard about this. There is a better way, called the Mid- dle Housing Standard. This proposal protects the quality of housing in resi- dential neighborhoods by creating real- istic standards that adhere to HB 2001. Low-income housing will not be solved by throwing raw meat to real estate devel- opers. It will be solved by a city commit- ment to providing assistance to those in need. The planning division’s proposal is marketing fluff based on feel-good sunny assertions underlying a blatant revision of established building norms. Todd Reed Eugene IT’S TIME FOR THE RICH TO HELP OUT I applaud the letter (EW 3/17) calling attention to struggling families lacking income for basic needs. The Child Tax Credit lifted more than 30 percent of U.S. kids from poverty in 2021. But Congress allowed the 2021 CTC extra provisions to expire in December, so now in January 2022, 3.7 million children fell into poverty — a 41 percent increase. In 2020, more than 50 of the largest U.S. companies paid no federal taxes at all (Forbes.com, April 2, 2021). In the 1950s, corporations accounted for about 40 percent of federal income. To- day it's just about 7 percent. We can afford to give our kids the ba- sic resources to thrive. We must change the tax code to make the rich and large corporations pay their fair share. Thank god much-needed tax reform looms large on President Joe Biden's agenda. Note: If you qualified for Child Tax Credit monthly payments last year, go to ChildTaxCredit.gov to learn how to claim the rest of your credit. Donna Schindler Munro Bremerton, Washington NW NATURAL LIES ABOUT POLLUTION A recent study from The Gas Index shows at least 5.5 percent of the natu- ral gas supplied by NW Natural to the city of Portland leaks into the atmo- sphere, which means it causes twice as much global warming as an equivalent amount of coal. Northwest Natural does not want you to know this. While much of this leakage occurs “up- stream,” or before the gas gets to Port- land, about 1 percent leaks from the dis- tribution system owned by NW Natural. NW Natural is a member of the American Gas Association, which says that distribu- tion systems owned by local natural gas utilities leak only 0.08 percent, while local leakage in Portland appears to be more than ten times that amount. NW Natural claims to have “one of the tightest, lowest emitting systems in the nation.” The fossil fuel industry lies. Scientists warn of record growth of atmospheric methane, while NW Natu- ral distracts from the ongoing damage to our community by speculating on the hypothetical use of renewable methane and hydrogen, which is unrealistic for many reasons and will leak just as much. NW Natural refused to negotiate in good faith with Eugene City lead- ers. They treat our community with contempt. Green sustainable energy is poised to take over the marketplace. Building electrification and decarbon- ization, as planned by the Eugene City Council, is the surest and least costly way to slash local greenhouse gas emissions. Chuck Areford Eugene Local Vocal and FROM A TO Z BY JOHN ZERZAN The Meta… what? WELCOME TO VIRTUAL EVERYTHING F acebook has been renamed Meta and is poised to roll out the metaverse. Simply put, this is where digital and virtual come together, aiming at the exclusion of all else. “Technoverse” would have been a more truthful term, but a bit too brutal sounding. The metaverse universe would be a technological reality with nothing outside of it. We would basically only exist on computer screens, having shed the confines of actual, physical life worlds, as fantastic as that sounds. The metaverse is us — at base a perfection and extension of virtual reality; the very name pretty much says it all. Virtual reality, VR, peddles a “sense” of reality, with its goal of “producing a high-grade feeling of presence.” (Not presence, but simulated presence.) E U G E N E W E E K LY . C O M Oliver Grau, German art historian and media theorist, wrote that statement in 2003, a reminder that the components of the metaverse have been in the works for a while. Think of cybersex or haptic technology, a techno substitute for the sense of touch. Or “untact,” a South Korean government policy that seeks to remove layers of human interaction in the service of economic expansion. The metaverse will combine all such synthetic “advances” in a qualitative Great Leap Forward into estrangement from one another and our Mother Earth. There will be no more distinction between real and virtual. The term IRL (in real life) will fall from the lexicon as obsolete. “Meta” was a stand-out Super Bowl commercial. It featured an outmoded and discarded robotic dog, given renewal in the metaverse. The ad is presented in a nostal- gic vein, promoting the metaverse as, in effect, a return to the good old days. Deleting, of course, the fact that Facebook has played an important role in bringing on the ruin it now promises to rescue us from. Marketed as imagination unleashed and experience without limits, the metaverse represents the opposite of those dimensions –– the techno-evacuation of direct expe- rience. We've already come a ways down this road, but I predict that the metaverse will not be realized. Not yet, anyway. I have some faith that we will resist this further surren- der to simulation. Zerzan is a local anarchist writer whose books include Elements of Refusal and Future Primitive. You can listen live to his "AnarchyRadio” at 7 pm Tuesdays on KWVA 88.1 FM or via audio streaming. M A R C H 2 4 , 2 0 2 2 3
