Author: Camilla Mortensen

Want To Weigh In On County Spending?

News

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 →

Human Rights Scholar Hugo Slim At UO

News

“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 →

Pesticides That Hurt Women

Persistent environmental chemicals affect the health of the current generation

News

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 →

More Details Emerge In Liane Richardson Story

News

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 →

Defazio Forest Plan Goes To Video ‘Ad’

News

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 →

Climate is the Disaster

Dangers range from earthquakes to rising seas in Oregon

News

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 →

Kitty And Skunk Issues At EWEB

News

The West Eugene Wetlands area is one of the many places around town where the wild abuts the urban, and managing domestic animals overlaps with native species. EWEB’s Roosevelt Operations Center (aka the ROC) was designed amid about 14 acres of restored wetlands, and wild creatures have moved back in, including raptors and skunks. But according to Becky Long, EWEB is not doing a good job with the feral cat population that has also moved into the ROC. Continue reading →