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Camilla Mortensen is the longtime local editor of Eugene Weekly, the area’s alternative newspaper. The paper, which has been in print since 1982 (originally as What’s Happening) continues to print more than 27,000 copies a week in addition to its popular email newsletters and website. Camilla has a masters degree in folklore and mythology from UCLA and a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Oregon. She has been a reporter and editor at EW since 2007 and teaches journalism at the UO in the mornings before heading to the Weekly’s office. She also teaches newswriting at Lane Community College and advises The Torch student newspaper.
The Hanford Site, also known as the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, or most often, simply Hanford, is home to the nation’s largest nuclear waste dump. The 586-square-mile site on a plateau near the Columbia River is also the location of the Pacific Northwest’s only commercial nuclear reactor. Hanford was started in 1943 as a result of the Manhattan Project and America’s attempts to develop the atomic bomb. Continue reading
On Nov. 24 massive loads of tar sands equipment — some as long as a football field — will hit the roads of rural Eastern Oregon, traveling from Umatilla through the small towns of Prairie City and John Day to Homedale, Idaho. Activists, Native Americans, rural dwellers and more have been fighting the so-called megaload shipments for three years now in Idaho and Montana, and now the fight has come to Oregon. Continue reading
Over the past couple years there have been cuts in Lane County’s budget to the animal shelter, cuts in funding for Womenspace and cuts to other groups that provide aid to women, children and others in need, while at the same time the Lane County administrator who was making more than $150,000 a year was seeking to have her salary raised. If these county financial issues have raised your ire, now is the time to do something about it and weigh in. Continue reading
“When you are working with people, you make relationships; when they are on TV they are faceless,” says Oxford humanitarian ethics scholar Hugo Slim. When he was working with Save the Children doing relief work during the famine in the Horn of Africa in the 1980s, he says he never broke down while surrounded by thin and dying people. But when he returned to England and watched the famous Band Aid music video with a slow motion image of a skinny child from a refugee camp in Korem, Ethiopia where he had once worked, “Then I cried, watching it.” Continue reading
Endometriosis affects 10 percent of reproductive-age women and can seriously affect a woman’s quality of life and cause infertility, according to University of Washington professor of epidemiology Victoria Holt. A new study of women in the Northwest shows that endometriosis is linked to organochlorine pesticides. While these pesticides are for the most part no longer used in the U.S. — with the exception of some doctor-prescribed lice treatments — their effects linger in the environment and wind up in the bodies of women. Continue reading
You’re an aboveboard activist, passionate about the environment and willing to speak up and get heard. Then one day the FBI comes knocking on your door. What do you do? Continue reading
The emails read like something from the New York Post or The National Enquirer, not like messages that would be copied to the Eugene City Council, the mayor and the city manager. Former county administrator Liane Richardson’s ex-husband Mark Richardson fired off a volley of angry exchanges with his ex into the public record late in the evening of Oct. 23 and kicked off an investigation by the Eugene Police Department (EPD) and more questions about Liane Richardson’s tenure at Lane County. Continue reading
A recent open mic night at Luckey's shows rappers rockin' the mic in a whole new way. "Eye of the Tiger" edit comes to us by way of Andre "DJ Foodstamp" Sirois's YouTube channel. Continue reading
The battle over Oregon’s federal O&C forestlands isn’t just taking place in the backrooms and hallways of Washington, D.C., it’s playing out on the internet, in emails and on video. A new video about the O&C lands out of Rep. Peter DeFazio’s office has made it through the House Franking Commission, which has to approve “unsolicited mailings of 500 or more pieces of the same matter” before taxpayer money is used to send it. Continue reading
Nothing says death and destruction like climate change. Actually, for most of us the effects of climate change seem like something that will happen in the distant future, a tragedy for our grandchildren but not us. If we are going to think about planetary annihilation and devastation, we focus on Sharknado-like scenarios of wild hurricanes and tsunamis. And here in Oregon we tend to not to think about catastrophic natural disasters at all — it seems like earthquakes, tsunamis and deadly floods happen to other people, in other places. Continue reading