Think Out Loud

A celebration of cheese is shaping up in Central Point. The festival on Saturday and Sunday will showcase cheese created across Oregon. Katie Bray is the executive director of the Oregon Cheese Guild. She said the event allows cheese lovers to learn more about the artisan selections made in places like the Willamette Valley and Southern Oregon. She joins us with details.

In January, a polar bear attacked two people in Wales, Alaska. It was the first fatal attack in Alaska in 30 years, the Associated Press reports.

And researchers at the University of Washington have found that as the climate changes, conflicts between humans and wildlife have increased. From polar bears spending more time on land as warmer temperatures melt the ice they depend on, to drought forcing elephants into villages as they seek water, conflicts are happening around the world.

Leight West is a doctoral student at the University of Washington and a co-author of the study. She joins us with more details on the research.

Last May, Mayor Ted Wheeler issued an emergency declaration aimed at cleaning up the city. This includes dealing with trash, illegal dumping and graffiti. While the city council recently voted on sending out more graffiti cleaners, businesses are struggling with weekly tagging and advocates are looking for more equitable solutions. As a part of our series on Portland graffiti, Dakota Thompson, the deputy director of community safety for Portland, joins us to share graffiti trends in the city and plans to address it in the future.

The Bureau of Land Management recently approved a controversial forest management project in Southwest Oregon. The plan, called the “Late Mungers” project, includes roughly 7,500 acres of prescribed burning and tree thinning, as well as 830 acres of logging. It’s one of the first projects approved under the BLM’s Integrated Vegetation Management plan, which the agency says will allow it to increase the “scope, scale and pace” of its wildfire prevention efforts.

But as Jefferson Public Radio has reported, the plan has faced significant backlash from environmental groups in the region. They argue that the accelerated project timeline cuts out opportunities for public comment, and that the timber sales included in the project will actually increase fire risks and endanger wildlife.

For more details about the plan, we’re joined by BLM Medford District Manager Elizabeth Burghard and Luke Ruediger, conservation director for the Klamath Forest Alliance and executive director of the Applegate-Siskiyou Alliance.

The healthcare organization CareOregon has purchased a former Red Lion Hotel in Seaside, Oregon, with the goal of turning it into both workforce housing and permanent supportive housing for people with behavioral health needs. CareOregon's Columbia Pacific CCO will run the building and provide mental health and addiction treatment support. Two-thirds of the building will house healthcare workers. Mimi Haley, executive director of Columbia Pacific CCO, and Amy Baker, executive director of Clatsop Behavioral Health, join us with the details of the project.

Last year, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed the Washington State Climate Commitment Act into law. It requires businesses to buy permits for the greenhouse gases they produce. The first auction for permits was held last week, and the state announced that they sold out quickly, with an average price nearly double that of the most recent cap-and-trade auction held by California and Quebec. Kate Yoder, a staff writer for Grist, explains the Washington program to us.

Nearly half a million people in the U.S. get Lyme disease every year, and most of them face symptoms that last a few weeks after the tick bite that transmitted the disease. But for some patients, the symptoms can last much longer. The medical community has been slow to recognize this form of long-lasting Lyme disease, and to find treatments for it. Winslow Crane-Murdoch, the co-director of a new documentary about Lyme disease, joins us to talk about his film "The Quiet Epidemic," and the history and controversy surrounding the medical treatment of the disease.

For most of the last three years, Tracy Schlapp and Danny Wilson have been working with a group of writers incarcerated at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. Schlapp and Wilson’s writing program comes out of their nonprofit Bridgeworks Oregon, which is focused on art and music in prison.

Some of the writers in custody are serving long sentences, life sentences without the possibility of parole. Some have children -- and grandchildren -- they won’t likely ever see on the outside. More than 70,000 children in Oregon are impacted by incarceration.

The storytelling group is called Ground Beneath Us, and it uses prompts that come from school children’s questions - questions they may be too uncomfortable or afraid to ask an incarcerated family member directly.
Some of the men’s essays and poems are published in the new anthology called “Prisons Have a Long Memory.” Schlapp is the creative director of Bridgeworks Oregon. She edited the anthology with Wilson, and she joins us to tell us more about the program and the process.

Kyle Hedquist’s essays appear in the book, and he served on the editorial board. He now works as a lobbyist with the Oregon Justice Resource Center after being granted clemency by Governor Kate Brown last year. He also joins us to share about how he spent his time the 28 years he served, his writing and his commitment to creating community.

Methane is a greenhouse gas that is roughly 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere, making it a key target of global efforts to fight climate change. Dairy cows and beef cattle are a significant source of methane, which is released as a byproduct of food digestion in the stomach of cows and other hoofed animals. Kangaroos, like cows, also have microbes in their gut which aid in digesting plant material. But these microbes release acetic acid instead of methane. Scientists at Washington State University collected gut bacteria from zoo kangaroos, and then introduced cultures of the bacteria into a solution mimicking a cow’s stomach. The bacteria quickly flourished and replaced the community of methane-producing microbes. Birgitte Ahring is a professor in the Bioproducts, Sciences and Engineering Laboratory at Washington State University. She joins us to talk about the research, which is described in a paper recently published in the journal Biocatalysis and Agricultural Biotechnology, and how it could help the agriculture sector curb a potent greenhouse gas.

The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry aims to create a hub for science learning, arts and culture. The plan includes a waterfront education park, more than a thousand units of housing and public green space. The proposal recently received approval from the City of Portland Design Commission. We hear more about the proposal and next steps from Erin Graham, the CEO and president of OMSI.