Think Out Loud

Oregon’s legislative session is set to begin on Tuesday. Lawmakers will consider a slew of bills on issues such as housing, infrastructure, mental health care and more. House Speaker Julie Fahey, D-Eugene, and House Minority Leader Christine Drazan, R-Canby, join us to share their parties’ priorities for the upcoming session.

Kaarin Knudson became the mayor of Oregon’s second largest city, Eugene, on Monday. She delivered her first state of the city address shortly after being sworn in. Knudson says increasing housing capacity and revitalizing the city’s downtown are among her top priorities. But first, she faces a budget shortfall and will need to work with the city council to find a way to fill it.  Last year, a proposed municipal fee to address the shortfall drew a lot of public opposition and the council decided not to vote on the issue. Knudson joins us to tell us more about her first official week on the job and her priorities for her term.

By the early 1900s, the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group founded by former Confederate soldiers after the Civil War, had all but faded from existence in the U.S. Then, in 1915, a second Klan was founded in Georgia, and soon spread across the country. By the mid-1920s, it had as many as eight million members across the U.S., including many chapters in the Pacific Northwest, and a strong base in the Midwest. Seattle writer Timothy Egan’s most recent book, “A Fever in the Heartland,” tells the story of the rise of the Klan in the 1920s and the leader who was brought down by one woman’s deathbed testimony. We talk to Egan in front of students at McDaniel’s High School.

Animals such as grizzly bears and Arctic ground squirrels have evolved the ability to hibernate as a way to survive winter months of extreme cold. During hibernation, their core body temperatures drop and their heart rates and metabolic activities slow to conserve energy. They also consume less oxygen during this inactivity.    But what if you could make non-hibernating species – including humans - hibernate? How could you control hibernation as a therapy to help people recover from strokes or heart attacks, or administer it to astronauts to help them endure a yearslong trip to Mars? Scientists at Oregon Health & Science University have embarked on a first step to exploring these questions by inducing a state of hibernation in rats, which don’t normally hibernate. Joining us to discuss this research is Domenico Tupone, a research assistant professor of neurology at OHSU.

People are choosing to spend less time than ever in the presence of other people, whether in social events, one-on-one meetups or eating out. The latest cover story in The Atlantic explores some of the psychological and social implications of that trend. And a recent study out of Oregon State University goes deep into how solitude is defined and experienced — and the range of benefits that different kinds of solitude seem to offer.  If you go out to eat alone, but are around other people, that’s one kind of solitude. Another would be going out alone on a nature trail where you don’t see another soul. Whether you have your phone on you or not would be another factor that would influence the kind of solitude you experience.  Morgan Quinn Ross is an assistant professor of liberal arts at OSU and recently published a paper about this spectrum. He joins us to tell us more.

On Jan. 6, Josephine County Commissioners voted to terminate the lease of the Grants Pass central library. Commissioners have since said they simply want to renegotiate the $1-a-year lease of the county-owned building. This comes after a legal battle last year over whether residents could opt out of the library’s special tax district. It also follows a period of 10 years in which the library system was run by a nonprofit and volunteers, rather than by the county. Josephine County Commissioner Chris Barnett and Jennifer Roberts, president of the Grants Pass Friends of the Library, join us to fill us in.

In Southern California, fire hydrants ran dry as flames ripped through the Los Angeles area. Some critics blamed the municipal system for not meeting the demands for water. But the systems that house fire hydrants were not designed to battle major wildfires. Kylie Mohr is a freelance journalist and correspondent for High Country News. She reported on this issue for the outlet and joins us with details.

Students from Southern Oregon University collected over a million photos and videos of animals attempting to cross Interstate 5 in Southern Oregon. The students were working with SOU professor Karen Mager to try to understand the best place to put a wildlife crossing to facilitate passage for wildlife in an area well-known for vehicle-animal collisions. The federal government recently announced over $33 million in funding to create an overpass within the Mariposa Preserve of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. It will be the only wildlife crossing over I-5 between Mexico and Canada. Karen Mager joins us to tell us about the project.

Disability Rights Oregon filed a motion last week, asking a federal judge to hold Oregon in contempt of court for failing to admit aid and assist cases within seven days. At the same time, a number of bills have been introduced in the Oregon Legislature surrounding mental health. Chris Bouneff is the executive director of the Oregon chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. He joins us to share improvements he hopes the state will make during the Legislative session.

At the beginning of the year, Portland’s new city council elected Elana Pirtle-Guiney as council president in a contentious vote that revealed some of the dividing lines of the new council. Pirtle-Guiney won by a 7-5 vote after nine rounds of voting. In the new role, Pirtle-Guiney will set council meeting agendas and refer council items to a vote that are proposed by the mayor or city auditor. Pirtle-Guiney joins us to talk about her new role and the challenges facing the new 12-member city council.