It's your worldchanging Monday.
Tonight is a little different for the Bright Light series of planning, architecture and sustainability talks. In some ways it is the polar opposite: disrupted planning, destroyed architecture, tenuous sustainability transformed to raw survival.
Cassandra Nelson presents photographs and stories from ten years of Mercy Corps projects, as member of the very first teams to arrive at large scale disasters. Not for the faint of heart. Her primary role in each case has been to be the field spokesperson for Mercy Corps, shaping the narrative to focus on human needs. She is also the lead Mercy Corps field photographer.
It is part of the Bright Lights series sponsored by the local architecture magazine Portland Monthly and the City Club, a thoughtful public interest group.
At Jimmy Mak's, 221 NW 10th. Doors 5:30PM, discussion 6. Free
Three blocks away, author Paul Greenberg speaks at Powell's. Greenberg is the author of Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. We eat little wild food. We've changed the land and changed the environment sufficiently to make it impossible. Our population density works against it too. The only exception is fish. Huge factory ships, up to 475 feet long, can capture as much as 100 tons of fish per hour, fillet and freeze it at sea. But even small boats are capable of destroying a fishery.
Author Greenberg traces the commercial history of the wild salmon, tuna, bass and cod; and their depletion. Salmon, for instance, are no longer viable in most of the North Atlantic, here, seriously depleted in the Sacramento River basin. Mediterranean tuna, which return to their birthplace to spawn, the same. He looks at fish farming, the inevitable future, though not entirely desirable, from the standpoint of the fish ground into fish meal to raise them. His conclusion is sustainable, industrial farming of species with a lighter impact on the seas, and allowing wild fish to again thrive. I'm a fish eater. This is food for thought. Greenberg speaks at Powell's Books www.powells.com 1005 W Burnside 7:30PM Free