Opinion
Hurricane Katrina: remembering and acting on climate and racial justice
Today marks ten years since Hurricane Katrina. Its devastation highlights painful histories and issues of racial injustice and inequity in this country, including policies, planning and investment that are not entirely unique to New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina shined a bright light on segregation, disparities in physical and economic mobility, as well as inequitable emergency response…
Frederick Douglass’ journey to the Emerald Isle
Frederick Douglass is a colossal presence on America’s 19th-century stage. An impressive black man, his electrifying oratory excoriated the injustice of slavery polluting this nation’s avowed aspirations to democracy. A master’s wife taught Douglass the rudiments of reading before the master put an abrupt end to the lessons — for power comes with discerning the…
Bicycle Transportation Alliance: Car free, not carefree, in the suburbs
The school district reporting the most homeless students in Oregon isn’t Portland Public, Reynolds or Gresham-Barlow. It’s Beaverton. Washington County is known as the economic engine of the state, with large companies, large subdivisions and large cars. Those days might be behind us now though, as the economy stagnates while businesses and individuals shift toward…
Director’s Desk: Worlds collide amid Portland’s housing crisis
People experiencing homelessness having sex in a doorway in downtown Portland. A camp full of bicycle parts. A group of people getting high or shooting up in public. Another group with an abundance of trash overflowing from their shopping cart or the car they sleep in. Feces in the park. These are the images being…
Street Roots editorial: Portland needs safe drug injection site
This past year, there were 122 heroin-related deaths in Oregon, with 80 in Portland’s tri-county area. According to county officials, heroin use in our city has increased steadily over the past few years. Heroin-related deaths have gone from double digits in the 1980s and early 1990s to more than 100 annually during the past…
News
In volcano territory, should you fear ‘the big one’?
Working with the U.S. Geological Survey might be the best work on the planet, says Andy Lockhart, a geophysicist who specializes in volcano monitoring, instrumentation and crisis response. The work is useful and exciting, he says, and there’s a lot of travel and interesting people. That travel has involved 13 countries, where Lockhart has worked…
Japanese citizens group aims to end threat of nuclear power plants
More than four years after the Fukushima disaster, no nuclear power plants have operated in Japan. At least that was the case until August 2015, when the Sendai nuclear plant in southern Japan became the first to begin operation since the 2011 Fukushima meltdowns, despite anti-nuclear protests. An additional 23 units in 14 nuclear power…
Disadvantaged high-achievers may be harming their health, expert says
The stresses of poverty are well known among scientists and public policy experts. The effects of erratic sleep while homeless, the constant worry low-income people feel about whether their paychecks will pay the bills, fear of harassment or discrimination while living on the street, and other experiences of living in poverty are recognized for leading…
Safe-injection sites: Seeking a solution to public IV drug use
On the concrete floor of a public restroom, inside a parking garage in Portland’s Old Town, a heroin addict took his last breaths. He was overdosing while his “street brother” pounded aggressively on the locked door that stood between them. “I don’t know if it was stronger or if he did more than usual,” says…
