VIEWPOINTS
Saturday, July 8, 2017
East Oregonian
Page 5A
The hard, satisfying life of writers
I
magine this: You have just earned a
degree in computer engineering. You’re
good at it, and you have spent a summer
as an intern earning more money than you
could have imagined in your hard-scrabble
rural childhood.
But you decide to take
a victory lap — a fifth
year of college — and
when on a whim you
enroll in a course on
writing poetry, you
discover that it’s what
you are doing in that
class that matters to you.
Matters deeply.
We heard this story
at last month’s First
Draft Writers’ Series.
Joe Wilkins’ third book
of poems had recently
won the 2017 Oregon
Book Award, and people
who have read it can’t
recommend his memoir
“The Mountain and the
Fathers: Growing Up
in the Big Dry” highly enough. Two more
novels are coming soon, and he’s just earned
a major teaching award at Linfield. That
writing course has worked out pretty well for
him.
I found myself smiling as I listened to
Joe’s story. No matter what we do for a
living — “Don’t quit your day job,” we tell
each other — all writers share that feeling.
This is what matters.
It’s why I drive to Portland every month
to meet with a poetry workshop group. We
call ourselves the Side Porch Poets — a
group of eight women who have been
gathering from various corners of the state
for more than a decade to share and respond
to each other’s words.
We are a diverse
group — some have
never published, some
are well-known, even
famous. What we have
in common, beyond
the deep friendship that
has grown out of these
meetings, is a passion for
language, for discovery,
for meaning. For working
hard to make something
that matters.
Granted, it’s rare that
the rest of us can help
our most famous member
with her poems, but when
we can, Ursula Le Guin
is the happiest person in
the room. Or maybe the
second happiest.
Meeting with these women feeds me,
keeps me breathing. I can’t believe how
lucky I am to have them. I get to meet with
writing friends in Pendleton sometimes, too.
If you see a huddle of folks around a table
poring over identical white pages at Great
Pacific or Sisters or Buckin Bean, that might
be us.
Writing isn’t the only form of human
creativity that matters. Artists alter our
perception of the world with music, dance,
It’s rare that the
rest of us can help
our most famous
member with her
poems, but when
we can Ursula
Le Guin is the
happiest person
in the room.
paint and canvas, wood and glass and fabric,
with their relationship to animals, to plants,
even machines. But words are the medium
we all share. You might even say words
make the world — for better or for worse.
And when language is debased by those in
power, bad things happen.
“Hard times are coming,” Ursula Le
Guin said as she accepted her lifetime
achievement award at the 2014 National
Book Awards ceremony, “when we’ll be
wanting the voices of writers who can see
alternatives to how we live now, can see
through our fear-stricken society and its
obsessive technologies to other ways of
being, and even imagine real grounds for
hope. We’ll need writers who can remember
freedom—poets, visionaries— realists of a
larger reality.”
I’m grateful that in our town we can
gather every month to hear recognized
Northwest writers who work at “getting the
words right.” It’s important. But it’s fun, too.
At 7 p.m. on July 20 at Pendleton Center
for the Arts, First Draft will be hosting
a native son. Joel Wayne (PHS, Class of
2001) will read from his work and answer
questions about his writing life — which
began, he says, when his sixth grade teacher
Mrs. Bell sent him to the Oregon Writing
Festival.
Students stayed in a hotel in downtown
Portland for a night —“a big deal for a
lower- middle class kid from a tiny town in
Eastern Oregon.” Writing is really hard, the
featured speaker told them. If they had other
interests, they should do those things instead.
A few years later, when he was asked to
Land losses and lessons on the Great Plains
G
abe Brown’s 5,200-acre
how farming can be less damaging
farm and ranch in central
and more sustainable. For example,
North Dakota practically
Gabe Brown changed the way he
straddles the 100th meridian,
managed his land after suffering
the line that historically divided
four years —1995 to 1998 — of
Eastern lands that were farmed
hail and drought. Nearly broke
from the drier Western lands that
and lacking access to capital to
were grazed by livestock.
buy seeds and chemicals, Brown
That geographic boundary, of
re-examined his approach to
Peter
course, has always been somewhat
Carrels farming. Finding that his soils had
blurry. But in recent years, row-crop
dramatically deteriorated through
Comment
agriculture on an industrial scale
conventional farming practices, he
has pushed the dry line westward.
started avoiding tillage and now
Modern sod-busting has gobbled up vast
relies on cover crops, perennial grasses and
expanses of native grasslands, markedly
a diversity of income streams.
enlarging the nation’s corn and soybean acres.
When many of his neighbors plowed
Critics watched this happen but weren’t
pastures to plant corn, Brown did the
able to quantify the ecological alteration.
opposite, reducing row crops from 2,000
Now, an analysis issued by the World
acres to 800 acres and re-vegetating 1,200
Wildlife Fund, Plowprint Report, confirms
acres back into prairie. His operation also
just how extensively the American Great
emphasized grazing and grasses instead of
Plains has been transformed. The Great
growing annual grains.
Plains region, the short and mixed-grass
“It’s not easy to admit that I farmed the
portion of the North American prairie,
wrong way for many years,” Brown said.
includes lands from the Canadian border
“But we’ve completely weaned ourselves
east of the Rocky Mountains, between Great from government programs, stopped using
Falls, Montana, and Fargo, North Dakota,
synthetic fertilizers, minimized herbicide
and stretching south to Texas — some 800
use, and in the process enriched and even
million acres in total.
built our soils.”
Destruction of the Eastern portion of the
Keeping roots in the ground became his
continent’s prairie region — the tallgrass
mantra, and that meant growing cover crops
part — was caused by conversion to corn
and indigenous grasses. He began measuring
and soybean fields and is nearly complete.
moisture retention and monitored microbes
Less than 1 percent of the original tallgrass
in the dirt. Soon he had a name for his soil
prairie ecosystem survives. The Plowprint
stewardship: Re-generative agriculture.
study reveals that since 2009, more than 53
On land still planted to row crops, Brown
million acres of prairie on the Great Plains
saw his yields rise, outpacing his county’s
has been plowed and converted to corn,
averages by 20 percent. He began selling
soybeans and wheat. That figure — an area
grass-finished livestock and nutrient-dense
that equals the size of Kansas — represents
eggs, honey and other produce directly to
about 13 percent of the estimated 419
consumers. He grazed cattle, sheep and hogs
million acres of Great Plains grasslands that
on dozens of carefully rotated pastures. The
had survived in its native condition.
operation included 1,000 pastured laying
Fortunately, stewardship models show
hens.
“We can feed the world better food by
maintaining healthy soils,” declared Brown.
“The destruction of perennial grasses
to grow subsidized crops like corn and
soybeans is a travesty.”
The World Wildlife Fund would likely
agree, noting that grassland songbirds have
experienced the sharpest population declines
of all North American birds. In addition,
plowing on the Great Plains has released
billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere, and the loss of prairie
habitat now threatens North American
bumblebee species.
Gabe Brown and his profitable,
regenerative farming methods have helped
propel a new movement of soil stewards
and prairie advocates. In recent years his
popularity as a speaker and presenter has
him regularly touring the region, the nation
and other countries.
In 1998, the same year Gabe Brown
began to transform his farming techniques,
a dozen South Dakota farmers and ranchers
concerned about prairie destruction formed
the South Dakota Grasslands Coalition.
Brown helped the coalition get underway,
and since then it has flourished, with a
current membership of around 500. These
days, some people call him the “guru” of
smarter agriculture.
Brown is a modest guy, but he’s glad to
say that regenerative techniques are catching
on. “We’re seeing a snowballing effect,” he
said. That’s good news for anyone who cares
about the Great Plains, because Brown and
other farmer-ranchers in the region hold the
key to its protection: About 90 percent of the
Great Plains is privately owned.
■
Pete Carrels is a contributor to Writers
on the Range, the opinion service of High
Country News. He writes in Sioux Falls,
South Dakota.
Rep. Parrish wrong to pursue overturn of healthcare provider tax
The (Medford) Mail Tribune
R
ep. Julie Parrish had a good idea in
April, when she proposed shifting
state employees’ health care into
coordinated care organizations, potentially
saving the state up to $1 billion. Now, she’s
pushing a bad idea: filing a referendum to
overturn a tax on hospitals and insurance
plans that will maintain Medicaid coverage
for 350,000 Oregonians and help balance
the state budget.
The provider tax, approved by majority
Democrats with only four Republican votes,
would increase the existing tax on hospitals
and add a tax on some insurance premiums,
raising $670 million. The tax was supported
by the hospital industry, and it will leverage
$1.9 billion in federal funding that the state
otherwise would not get.
Parrish, along with other Republican
lawmakers, objects to the provider tax,
arguing that the costs will be passed on to
customers, although the hospitals stand to
get their increased tax payments back in
the form of payments for treating Oregon
Health Plan patients.
The wisdom of a Band-Aid tax plan to
keep the Medicaid program afloat can be
debated, and it would have been preferable
to see lawmakers enact serious cost-con-
tainment measures and restructure the
corporate tax structure to balance the budget
as they initially intended. Parrish’s proposed
changes to state employee health coverage
could have played a prominent role in that
effort, and it’s unfortunate that the majority
Democrats paid it scant attention.
But launching a petition drive to overturn
the provider tax, potentially throwing the
health coverage of hundreds of thousands
of Oregonians into limbo for a year, is
irresponsible. If Parrish gathered enough
signatures to qualify the referendum for
the ballot, the provider tax would be put on
hold until the November 2018 election.
Yes, Oregon law provides for citizen
initiative and referendum powers, allowing
the voters to overturn legislation they
disagree with and to enact measures the
Legislature can’t or won’t pass.
But Parrish’s campaign isn’t a
spontaneous uprising of popular will; it’s
retaliation by a lawmaker and a political
action committee for legislation that didn’t
go her way.
Oregon at least can try to provide some
stability for as long as possible. Retaliatory
measures such as Parrish’s referendum are
not helpful.
B ette H usted
FROM HERE TO ANYWHERE
address the Scholastic Writing Awards, he
would give different advice to the younger
versions of himself he knew were out there
in the audience.
“You’re doing just fine, kiddo,” he told
them. “Now keep at it.”
■
Bette Husted is a writer and a student of
T’ai Chi and the natural world. She lives in
Pendleton.
Quick takes
Rainbow Family compared to
disaster area, occupation
I suppose the Rainbow Gathering is
akin to a refugee camp. Interesting parallel;
thank you for sharing.
— Grant Cooper
The Bundys were trying to take posses-
sion of the refuge. The Rainbow folks are
camping on public land for a little while.
And you know, law enforcement actually
has been arresting and citing folks at the
Rainbow thing.
— Brenden Nemo
These people don’t care about the
environment. They’re violating federal
laws and are walking free. Anyone else
would be in jail or prison.
— Levi Raber
Some Eastern Oregon
nursing homes in danger
Political choice: Cut funding and force
people to accept a lower level of care.
People are dying because of state policy and
the ACA when it comes to senior care.
— Loren Lovejoy
Nursing homes don’t have enough staff
or nurse assistants to care for the clients. It
is like that in every single nursing home in
western and Eastern Oregon. That’s why we
are keeping our parents at home as long as
possible.
— Armstrong Dan-jeannette
Hermiston Foods to close
Hermiston Foods will be missed.
It provided many jobs in our area and
employed many kids looking for summer
work over the years.
— Debbie Trumbull Pedro
I worked there as a teen, sad to see it go.
— Bryan Bow
Pendleton, Hermiston
consider food truck rules
Hermiston was limited to three trucks
because of racism. Taco trucks have better
food than any fast food chain.
— Kyle Brangham
$500 a year is an outrageous annual
expense for a new business to simply exist
on private land.
— Steven Pelles
One of the great lessons of the Twitter age is
that much can be summed up in just a few words.
Here are some of this week’s takes. Tweet yours
@Tim_Trainor or email editor@eastoregonian.
com, and keep them to 140 characters.