Equal Wedding

The story of the historic marriages of Karen Franks and Dana Fickeisen, followed by that of Karen Chiricello and Mary Langley,  on Sunday, December 9, 2012--the first legal same-gender marriages in Jefferson County, WA on the first day such marriages were possible in Washington State after voters approved Measure 74 in the November election, confirming the state legislature’s passage of a law legalizing gay marriage in its last session.

Equal Wedding
(9.5 minutes)

Flu Vaccine Anyone?

This story started when my friend Julie Horner posted this simple query on her Facebook wall: “…to flu shot or not to flu shot?  That is the question.”

Julie’s quandary quickly uncovered an astonishing assortment of opinions, facts, and fables, and revealed surprising passions on both sides of the question of whether one should or shouldn’t get an annual vaccination against influenza.  Within an hour she had accumulated about 30 responses, a number that nearly doubled by the end of the day.

Here's the KPTZ Compass Segment her inquiry inspired:

Flu Vaccine Anyone?
14 minutes

It's the Cheese...

In recent years the local economy, like the national economy, has been sluggish at best, and many local businesses have been having a hard go of it.  But for at least one local start-up, business is booming:

Growing Cheese Co.
(13 minutes)

Defending Against the Defense Lobbyists

Defending Against Defense Lobbyists

Diane Randall didn’t much mind the ceaseless drizzle that enveloped Port Townsend on the day she was in town last week, considering that if she’d been at home in Washington D.C. that Monday, she would have been near the center of what meteorologists had already dubbed the worst storm in history—Superstorm Sandy, which within a day would leave dozens dead and an estimated toll in property and infrastructure damage that mounted into the billions of dollars.

The storm had direct relevance to Randall’s visit here, because she had come to talk about national security, and how we can best use our public resources to achieve it.  Hurricane Sandy was exposing a huge hole in a defense plan that focuses on mostly theoretical threats of foreign aggression, but by-and-large fails to take into account the very real and immediate threats from Mother Nature as the result of climate change—a failure she finds to be disconcertingly absent from campaign discourse this electoral season on the part of either party.

Randall is the executive secretary of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, or FCNL, the D.C.-based Quaker lobbying organization perhaps best known for the “War is Not the Answer” bumper stickers and lawn signs that can be seen all around Jefferson County. 

She was in town seeking support for an FCNL campaign to trim at least $1 trillion over the next decade from projected military spending, declaring that the time has come for the Pentagon to take its fair part in reducing the deficit, and citing an urgent need to refocus public resources. 

To put that proposed cut into perspective: Draconian though it may sound, it would only reduce military spending to 2007 levels by the year 2023.

“If war is not the answer, the answer is: let’s peacefully prevent war before it happens,” she told the full-house audience who had come to hear her talk titled “How we can Protect the Federal Budget from Defense Lobbyists” at the Community Center that night.  Pointing out that diplomacy is far less expensive than war, Randall criticized a budget that dedicates 39 cents of every tax dollar on the military, while spending only about two cents on what the FCNL terms the “peaceful prevention of deadly conflict.”

“Relative to what the military gets­—the Pentagon gets—to what’s spent on diplomacy and development, which really are the effective tools for peace, we’re way out of whack,” she observed.

Randall talked of the dangers to funding for vital social service programs presented by the so-called “fiscal cliff” that will be set in motion when last year’s Budget Control Act kicks in on January 2, especially in the face of an intensive campaign on the part of defense industry lobbyists to exempt defense contractors from their part of the automatic budget cuts.

“Now is the time for legislators to hear from you,” she told her audience.  “They’re certainly hearing from the defense lobbyists.”

Citing studies showing that legislators are far more responsive to personal visits or other communications from their own constituents than from any paid lobbyist, Randall pressed her audience to educate themselves on the issues by visiting the fcnl.org website and then to develop a respectful ongoing relationship with their representatives in Congress, and to regularly let them know what they think.

 “If everyone in this room would talk to their elected officials, that would be a lot of people,” she said. “I think you could count on the fingers of two hands the number of people who have gone in to talk with their representatives about reducing defense spending.” 

###

Defending Against the Defense Lobbyists

Wild Olympics Campaign

A few years ago, representatives from several local environmental groups got together to think about what might be done to permanently protect the remaining wild Olympic Peninsula watersheds and forests from further degradation.  The result of that brainstorming coupled with about three years of extensive outreach to and feedback from stakeholders, policy makers, and politicians is the Wild Olympics Campaign, a broad proposal to give permanent wilderness designation to 134,000 acres of Forest Service lands, designate 23 new watersheds as Wild and Scenic Rivers, and to make thousands of acres of privately- or state- held lands eligible to be purchased by the government for preservation if the sellers are willing and public funding is available. I went out with my recorder one day to talk with some of the stakeholders in the proposal--for and against:

Wild Olympics Stakeholders

(25 minutes)

KPTZ Compass

After about eighteen months of struggling to produce a regular weekday morning newscast with a very small volunteer staff, the decision was made to abandon the effort in favor of producing a weekly radio news magazine, which after a vigorous creative exchange came to be called KPTZ Compass.  Here are the first two editions:

KPTZ Compass 1
(25 minutes)

KPTZ Compass 2
(26 minutes)

Early KPTZ Newscast

KPTZ Community Radio is an all-volunteer operation, and I was there at the beginning—volunteering to do the morning news every Wednesday.  It was a crazy-ambitious idea: from the outset we tried to have a five-to-eight-minute original newscast every week day.  What this meant for me, as it turned out, was pretty much spending all day every Tuesday researching and writing the next morning's newscast.  At the beginning, we would read the newscast live on the air at 8 a.m., recording it, and then edit out all of our flubs for the 9 a.m. repeat.  This is one of my earliest newscasts, from June 22, 2011, with DJ Peter Guerrero introducing me, and then following with the Community Calendar, for those of you who want to know what we get up to in our little town:

KPTZ Newscast, June 22, 2011
(11 minutes)

Learning from Hope

This is the story of a killer whale named Hope, who was found washed up on the Dungeness Spit in 2002, and whose carcass was eventually found to have the highest toxic load ever measured in any marine mammal.  This piece was produced at the opening in October, 2012 of an exhibit at Port Townsend's Marine Science Center that features Hope's articulated skeleton, along with her cautionary tale.

Learning from Hope
(11 minutes)

Return of the River

In one of my first assignments for KPTZ, then a brand new community radio station, I went early in the morning on Wednesday, June 1, 2011 to witness the historic final shut-down of the hydro-electric plants on the Elwha and Glines Canyon Dams, the first step leading to the ultimate demolition of both dams in an unprecedented effort to save endangered runs of salmon.  About a dozen representatives of the media gathered at the top of the lower dam that morning, next to the enormous metal penstocks through which the river roared on its way down to the tall powerhouse far below. We were all handed hard hats to wear and then briefed by dam supervisor Kevin Yancy.  Here is an excerpt from that report, followed by interviews about a year later, once the Elwha Dam was gone and the Glines Canyon halfway demolished, with filmmakers John Gussman and Jessica Plumb, who are making a documentary about the dam removals titled Return of the River.

Return of the River

(28 minutes)