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East Oregonian
MUSIC: ‘Precious Lord’ one of King’s faves
Continued from 1A
voice of the first singer of the
night, Gina Johnson, set the
tone.
Ain’t gonna let nobody
Turn me ‘round
Turn me ‘round
Ain’t gonna let nobody
Turn me round
I’m gonna keep on walkin’
Keep on talkin’
Marchin’ into freedom
land
The crowd clapped along
and whooped as the voices
and guitar chords faded.
Later, they stood, joined
hands and sang “We Have
Overcome.”
Johnson
belted
out
“Precious Lord,” one of
King’s favorite songs, one
often heard at his rallies.
Besides Johnson, other
lead performers included Dan
Haug and Steve Hines.
Earlier in the day, others
honored MLK with elbow
grease and benevolence
during a Day of Service event
at the Pendleton Center for
the Arts. About 50 volunteers
spent two hours scrubbing up
the place. The group included
the Blue Mountain Commu-
nity College softball team.
In the kitchen, Kathy Beck
and Carly Varela organized
cupboards and cleaned
the refrigerator. The pair
professed a deep affection
for both the arts center and
volunteerism. They urged
Staff photo by E.J. Harris
Dan Haug of Pendleton performs Bob Marley’s
“Redemption Song” on Monday at the Great Pacific
Wine & Coffee Co. in Pendleton.
others to jump in.
“Be the change you want
to see,” Beck said as she
sorted storage container lids.
“Find something you love
and engage.”
Executive director Roberta
Lavadour
said
helpers
polished floors, banished
cobwebs, washed windows,
spackled and dusted, among
other chores. As they trickled
out the door, Lavadour called
out, “Nicely done.”
Later that night, the group
at the Great Pacific honored
King in a different way — by
getting lost in civil rights
music of the 1960s.
Organizer Sarah Wood-
bury took the mic between
songs and noted that positive
change has come over the
decades, though it hasn’t
always been linear. She
harked back to the late ‘60s at
the time of King’s and Robert
Kennedy’s assassinations and
the start of the Vietnam War.
“In that moment, a lot of
people, my parents among
them, felt as if all of the good
work that had been done …
because of the work of King
and others like him would
be lost, and they didn’t feel
like there was a lot of hope
for change or for justice,”
Woodbury said.
However, King always
advised taking the long view.
“We must accept finite
disappointment but never
lose infinite hope,” Wood-
bury quoted King. “The arc
of the moral universe is long,
but it bends toward justice.”
———
Contact Kathy Aney at
kaney@eastoregonian.com
or call 541-966-0810.
LOVE: King preached persistence, humanity
Continued from 1A
It was the writings and
speeches of people like
Martin Luther King Jr. that
helped him extinguish that
hate, he said. The words
stopped feeling distant, like
“reading a fortune cookie,”
and became a roadmap.
Chaney learned about the
power of love and nonvi-
olence from King, but he
said sometimes people have
a tendency to water down
King’s legacy to the point
where they forget that he still
spoke up for truth and still
took action for justice.
“The thing that he was
after was serving others
and giving his life for that,”
Chaney said. “A lot of us are
afraid just to lose a friend for
speaking out.”
King taught that “human
progress is neither auto-
matic nor inevitable,” and
Chaney said everyone must
continue to fight for progress.
“You persist with your
message, you persist with your
course, but you don’t let it lose
your humanity,” he said.
Before Chaney’s address,
almost 100 people — black,
white, Latino, Polynesian —
bundled up and braved the
cold and snow for a short
peace walk around downtown
Hermiston singing “We Shall
Overcome” and pausing at
city hall for a short speech by
Mayor David Drotzmann.
While waiting for Chaney
to arrive from another event
in the Tri-Cities, attendees
watched a cultural perfor-
mance from the Children
of Polynesia dance group
and shared their feelings
on Martin Luther King, Jr.
during an open mic session.
Cassandra Frost said as
a half-black, half-Indian
woman who was raised by a
white woman, she has expe-
rienced racism but has also
experienced the harmony
and support across races that
King dreamed of.
“Keep encouraging each
other, keep loving each
other,” she said.
Alex Hobbs took the
opportunity to share part
of King’s “Letter from
Birmingham Jail,” in which
he addressed white religious
leaders in the South who had
called civil rights protests
“unwise and untimely.”
“I have almost reached the
regrettable conclusion that
the Negro’s great stumbling
block in his stride toward
freedom is not the White
Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku
Klux Klanner, but the white
moderate,” King wrote,
“who is more devoted to
‘order’ than to justice; who
prefers a negative peace
which is the absence of
tension to a positive peace
which is the presence of
justice; who constantly says:
‘I agree with you in the goal
you seek, but I cannot agree
with your methods of direct
action’; who paternalistically
believes he can set the
timetable for another man’s
freedom; who lives by a
mythical concept of time and
who constantly advises the
Negro to wait for a ‘more
convenient season.’”
Hobbs added her own
voice, saying that today there
UEC: Wind project between two counties
Continued from 1A
said Monday they have not
had the opportunity to review
the filing, and would not be
able to comment.
Both Lost Valley Ranch
and Wheatridge Wind are in
the permitting phase of their
respective projects. Both
would be built on land that
extends into Columbia Basin
and UEC service territories.
Columbia Basin claims it has
been working with UEC for
more than a year to resolve
the conflicts, but they have
not been able to reach an
agreement.
Construction of Lost Valley
Ranch is already underway,
despite not securing the state
permits needed to operate.
If approved, the 30,000-cow
dairy would recycle waste-
water to grow animal feed on
ranch property.
Seven of those crop circles
cross the southern boundary
of UEC’s service territory
into the northern boundary of
Columbia Basin’s territory,
yet Columbia Basin alleges
that UEC began providing
electrical service to approxi-
mately three of those circles
sometime after June 20, 2016.
The other four irrigation
circles would also be served by
UEC, according to Columbia
Basin’s complaint. At the
time, UEC general manager
Robert Echenrode reportedly
told Columbia Basin manager
Thomas Wolff that they would
not stop without a court order.
Meanwhile, Wheatridge
Wind Energy has received
a proposed order from the
Oregon Department of Energy
to build up to 292 wind
turbines between two main
project areas — Wheatridge
West, located about seven
miles northwest of Heppner,
and Wheatridge East, which
overlaps into Umatilla County
southwest of Echo.
Developers
of
the
500-megawatt wind farm,
however, did not specifically
address the location or oper-
ation of a transmission line
as part of their project appli-
cation. The company instead
plans for UEC to develop the
line separately.
On Jan. 6, Wheatridge
filed an application to the
Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission to direct UEC
to provide the transmission
service. Columbia Basin, in
turn, motioned with FERC to
intervene on the grounds UEC
would impinge on its service
territory.
The transmission line
would connect at one end to
a substation within Columbia
Basin’s territory.
“If UEC builds the
proposed transmission line,
Columbia Basin either will
be forced to use UEC’s trans-
mission line or to construct
duplicate facilities to distribute
retail power within Columbia
Basin’s exclusive service
territory to serve the project’s
station service load, and to
serve any future generation
projects or other retail loads in
the area,” the co-op writes in
its motion.
A contested case is
currently ongoing against
Wheatridge at the Energy
Facility Siting Council. The
status of Lost Valley Ranch is
also up in the air, as a coalition
of environmental groups are
urging the Oregon Depart-
ment of Agriculture and
Department of Environmental
Quality to deny the project’s
Confined Animal Feeding
Operation permits.
———
Contact George Plaven at
gplaven@eastoregonian.com
or 541-966-0825.
Last astronaut to walk on the moon dies at 82
HOUSTON (AP) —
Astronaut Gene Cernan traced
his only child’s initials in the
dust of the lunar surface. Then
he climbed into the lunar
module for the ride home,
becoming the last person to
walk on the moon.
It was a moment that
defined the Apollo 17
commander in both the public
eye and his own.
“Those steps up that ladder,
they were tough to make,”
Cernan recalled in a 2007 oral
history. “I didn’t want to go
up. I wanted to stay a while.”
His family said his
devotion to lunar exploration
never waned, even in the
final year of his life. Cernan
died Monday at age 82 at a
Houston hospital following
ongoing heath issues, family
spokeswoman Melissa Wren
told The Associated Press.
“Even at the age of 82,
Gene was passionate about
sharing his desire to see the
continued human exploration
of space and encouraged our
nation’s leaders and young
people to not let him remain
the last man to walk on the
Moon,” his family wrote in a
statement released by NASA.
On Dec. 14, 1972, Cernan
became the last of only a dozen
men to walk on the moon.
Cernan called it “perhaps the
brightest moment of my life.
... It’s like you would want to
freeze that moment and take
it home with you. But you
can’t.”
are many civil rights issues,
from mass incarceration to
immigration, that must be
addressed by people of all
races.
John Carbage, president
of the Black International
Awareness Club that has
sponsored the event for
the last 17 years, said that
in recognition of its more
diverse mission, the club
will be changing its name in
February to the Hermiston
Cultural Awareness Club.
The group meets the second
Saturday of every month
at Starbucks at 2 p.m. and
everyone is welcome.
———
Contact Jade McDowell
at jmcdowell@eastorego-
nian.com or 541-564-4536.
Tuesday, January 17, 2017
Rule easing public
lands transfer
concerns hunters
By KEITH RIDLER
Associated Press
BOISE, Idaho — A
change in U.S. House rules
making it easier to transfer
millions of acres of federal
public lands to states is
worrying hunters and other
outdoor enthusiasts across
the West who fear losing
access.
Lawmakers
earlier
this month passed a rule
eliminating a significant
budget hurdle and written
so broadly that it includes
national parks.
President-elect Donald
Trump’s pick for Interior
secretary, Montana Rep.
Ryan Zinke, voted for the
rule change as did many
other Republicans. The
Senate would have to weigh
in on public land transfers
as well.
“Anybody who uses
them for any kind of
outdoor activity — snow-
mobiling, mountain biking,
hunters, all that — they’re
very alarmed by all this,”
said Boise State Univer-
sity professor and public
lands policy expert John
Freemuth. “The loss of
access that this could lead
to.”
The rule passed by the
House defines federal land
that could be given to states
as “any land owned by the
United States, including
the surface estate, the
subsurface estate, or any
improvements thereon.”
About a million square
miles of public land is
managed by the federal
government, mostly in 12
Western states, according to
the Congressional Research
Service.
Some
state
lawmakers in recent years
have made failed efforts to
wrest control of those lands,
mainly to reduce obstacles
to accessing resources such
as timber, natural gas and
oil, Freemuth noted.
U.S. lawmakers have the
authority to transfer those
lands to states. Outdoor
recreationists fear states
would then sell the land to
private entities that would
end public access.
Zinke, whose confir-
mation hearing to become
Interior
secretary
is
Tuesday, has a track record
of opposing public land
transfers. Last summer, he
resigned as a delegate to
the Republican National
Convention, which favors
such transfers.
“The
congressman
has never voted to sell or
transfer federal lands and
he maintains his position
against the sale or transfer
of federal lands,” Heather
Swift, a Zinke spokes-
woman, said in an email.
Whit Fosburgh, CEO
of the Theodore Roosevelt
Conservation Partnership,
which works to guarantee
places to hunt and fish,
said he’s inclined to excuse
Zinke on his House vote
favoring transfers because
of his record being “very
solid on these public lands
issues.”
Still, Fosburgh was irked
that the House approved a
rule that he said essentially
allows federal public land
to be given away as if it had
no value.
Rep. Mike Simpson,
R-Idaho, also voted for the
rule easing transfers. But
Simpson was also the driver
of a 2015 bill that created
three wilderness areas in
Idaho after he got ranchers,
recreationists and environ-
mental groups to back the
plan after a 15-year effort.
The possibility that Pres-
ident Barack Obama would
designate a much larger
area as a national monu-
ment is widely believed to
have led to the bill passed
by the House and Senate.
“There is no disputing
Congressman Simpson is a
supporter of public lands,”
Nikki Wallace, a spokes-
woman for Simpson, said
in an email.
Freemuth noted that
even with a rule change,
land transfers would face
significant challenges.
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