Daily digest: No farm workers for cherries + do wildfire risk maps work? + Juneuary poetry
Farm workers not showing up for harvest
As the Trump administration doubles down in its efforts at mass deportations of undocumented workers (US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently implied undocumented workers will quickly be replaced with Medicaid recipients and robots) OPB reports that Oregon cherry farmers are in crisis as the usual flow of immigrant workers has dried up. Thanks to ICE crackdowns and delays in the completely legal H-2A worker program that allows Mexican citizens to travel north, much of the cherry harvest may rot on the vine. Washington is facing similar pressures, NPR reports. In related news, the Washington attorney general is going after an apple and hops farm in Yakima that is accused of laying off local workers (many of them women) and replacing them with H-2A workers.
How a Eugene crisis response program collapsed
The Nation has a great, in-depth feature on how Eugene's nationally-acclaimed alternative to police response for people in crisis, CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets), which had existed since 1989, fell apart and was drastically scaled back this year. It's a story of relying to heavily on low-paid nonprofit workers to do essential work assisting vulnerable populations.
“CAHOOTS was more than a program; it was a movement to redefine what public safety is,” Portland City Councilor Candace Avalos said. “The confluence of the pandemic and the racial justice uprisings allowed people to stretch their imaginations beyond police.”
Do wildfire risk maps work?
OPB reports on efforts in Washington's Klickitat county to create maps of wildfire risk in order to help homeowners and property owner better prepare for and mitigate potential damage from increasing forest fires. This, in the wake of Oregon recently repealing its statewide wildfire risk mapping program, which was criticized for being inaccurate, used by insurance companies to hike rates, and lacking in local detail. Meanwhile a 200-acre human-caused wildfire near Lake Cushman in the eastern Olympics shut down the Staircase area of Olympic National park, where I was just backpacking this past weekend – oy!
Jetty and other Cascadia projects move forward
Washington State Standard reports that a $172 million, six-year project to rebuild a massive jetty at the mouth of the Columbia River has been completed. Meanwhile, negotiations are ongoing between Washington and Oregon to replace the aging bridge over the Columbia at Hood River. In other news, Washington state will contract with a Florida company to build three hybrid electric ferries that will serve routes on the Salish Sea.
Poetry by Elena Johnson
Over at ARC Poetry, you can read "Dream of a Summerless Summer" by Vancouver-based poet Elena Johnson, an ode to the rainy "Juneuary" we sometimes experience here in Cascadia when summer warmth fails to appear:
My boots are
buckets, contain their own puddles,
my toes now fully amphibian. – Elena Johnson
--Andrew Engelson
