A video on Climate Change and Land: An IPCC Special Report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land
management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems

SPEAKER BIO: Michael W Mehaffy, Ph.D., is a researcher, educator, author, and consultant in urban development with international practice.  He is also the Executive Director of the Sustasis Foundation, an Oregon public benefit non-profit focused on research and publication in front-line urban issues. He has held teaching and/or research appointments in architecture, urban planning, and philosophy at eight graduate institutions in seven countries, and he is on the editorial boards of three international journals of urban design. Michael is also the former President of the Goose Hollow Foothills League, the venerable Portland neighborhood association. He has consulted for the City of Portland, Metro, and many other local governments, and he has taught architecture and urbanism at the University of Oregon's Portland graduate campus. He was the project manager for the master developer of Orenco Station, the pioneering transit-oriented development on Portland's Westside MAX line. 

Michael has been especially interested in Portland's lessons as an internationally celebrated urban laboratory with a number of notable successes, but also a number of cautionary mistakes and lessons learned. Michael now lives in the Columbia Gorge nearby two daughters and seven grandchildren, but still fondly considers Portland a second home.

This short video explains the Land Ethic, which is an environmental philosophy developed by Aldo Leopold.  It explains the philosophical foundations of the Land Ethic and how it differs from Deep Ecology.  Thanks for the GCSC Commodore production team for helping produce this video.  Aldo Leopold is the author of A Sand County Almanac.  He is author of the first textbook on wildlife management. 

In 2017, Sy Adler, Associate Dean of the School of Urban and Public Affairs at Portland State University, and Jim Irvine interviewed a series of key planners and advocates involved with Oregon's Statewide Planning Goal 10, which focuses on planning for and accommodating needed housing in the state. Don Mazziotti was the Community and Economic Development Director for the city of Beaverton from 2009 to 2013. He headed the Portland Development Commission from 2001 to 2005, served as Portland’s chief planner in the 1970s and acted as chief information officer for Oregon in the late 1990s.

He also worked as the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of transportation under former Oregon governor Neil Goldschmidt. This oral history interview is part of "People and the Land," a collaboration between the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development and Portland State University.

This digital access copy is made available by Portland State University Special Collections as streaming media for personal, educational, and non-commercial use only. It cannot be reproduced in any form, distributed or screened for commercial purposes.

May 25, 2017

Published on Feb 2, 2016

On January 28, the leaders of different indigenous nationalities directly affected by the contract between Ecuador and Andes Petroleum held a press conference in Quito to publicly announce their position that the government process of consultation has been illegal and illegitimate and that they reject the plans for oil exploration and exploitation in blocks 79 and 83 and reject plans for additional oil development in the South-Central region. Read more here on the Pachamama website, the publishers of this video on their YouTube channel.

This is the testimony of Manari Shigua of the Sapara people of the Ecuadorian Amazon.His testimony addresses the designation of the Sapara peoples culture a masterpiece of the Oral heritage of humanity by UNESCO which acknowledges that all resources in t heir territory (trees, mountains, oil +) are the world's heritage. The Ecuadorian government wants to exploit these resources and must understand they are required to consult the world as no resources can be exploited in their territory especially those the people oppose.

Deepa Senapathi talks about a study investigating the impact of over 80 years of land-cover change on insect pollinator communities in Britain and explains how results show expansion of single habitat types, such as arable land, may be detrimental for pollinators but diverse, mixed habitats including urban environments may benefit species diversity. Published on Apr 1, 2015

Portland, Oregon gets a lot of attention for our strategic and efficient land-use planning and we are known as one of the greenest and most livable cities in the world. We've invested in and revitalized places like the Pearl District and Alberta, and they are highly desirable places to live, shop and eat. Portland is a city that strives for equitable and healthy communities, but are those goals tangible enough to get the work done? What will it take to move forward with projects like the Memorial Coliseum and Centennial Mills, which have been hot topics of discussion for decades? Brian Libby will moderate this program, while John Russell addresses these development issues and provides us with his ideas to keep development moving forward in our city, while keeping Portland's values intact. Published on Jan 16, 2013 by City Club of Portland.

A heartfelt message from the Amazon rainforest communities in Ecuador to new Chevron CEO John Watson: "We don't want to continue dying of cancer." This video message appeals for Chevron to clean up its massive contamination of the Ecuadorian Amazon that has devastated the environment and continues to cause widespread cancer, birth defects, and other ailments. (published in  Jan 2010)

The Other Inconvenient Truth: How Agriculture is Changing the Face of Our Planet by Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment (IonE) at the University of the Minnesota and leader of  the IonE’s Global Landscapes Initiative. Foley’s work focuses on complex global environmental systems and their interactions with human societies.

We typically think of climate change as the biggest environmental issue we face today. But maybe it's not? In this presentation, Jonathan Foley shows how agriculture and land use are maybe a bigger culprit in the global environment, and could grow even larger as we look to feed over 9 billion people in the future.

Instructional, how it is done...After being made available on YouTube it was re-classified as "private" by the company.

We are leaving a link to it on EarthSayers in the event the company changes its mind and makes it available once again.

In order to maximize the production potential for a natural gas well, the shale formation must be hydraulically fractured. This video outlines and demonstrates the hydraulic fracturing process in Chesapeake Energy natural gas operations. For more information on fracking, visit www.hydraulicfracturing.com.

Here is a news/personal story about spills from a Chesapeak Energy drilling site and contamination of private and public natural resources.

Here is our January 1, 2013 article on Fracking in our blog, Sustainability Adovate.