Think Out Loud

The Portland Fermentation Festival – also known as “Stinkfest” – is a celebration of all things fermented, from kimchi and kombucha to pickles and miso. Started in 2009, the festival returned last year after taking a three-year hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic. Once attendees pay admission, all of the featured fermented products are free to sample, trade and take home. We’ll talk with the three “Stinkfest Queens” who organize the festival — Liz Crain is an author who’s written several books about fermentation and the Portland food scene. Heidi Nestler is the CEO of Wanpaku Foods and a nutrition instructor at Quest Center for Integrative Health. Claudia Lucero is a cheesemaking book author and the CEO of Urban Cheesecraft. They join us in the studio to share more about the fascination with fermentation and what attendees can expect from this year’s festival. The 2024 Fermentation Festival will take place from 6 to 9 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 10, at the Ecotrust building in downtown Portland.

As buildings like the Keller Auditorium and iconic Portland sights such as the Burnside Bridge are approaching a remodel, could a fresh new look save Portland’s downtown? As argued in The New York Times, cities across the country and world are finding hope in new architecture. Tim Eddy is the founding principal architect and president of Henneberry Eddy. He joins us to share his thoughts on the role architecture plays in downtown revitalization.

Salem’s downtown has seen some local businesses shut their doors in recent years, but the Salem Reporter found that the economy is still strong there. Currently the vacancy rate for store fronts stands at 3.8%, and about half of the available spaces have new tenants within 6 months. Abbey McDonald is the homelessness and housing reporter for the publication. She joins us to share more.

Native Hawaiian and former Oregonian Lehuauakea has created 10 kapa paintings and digital art posters that will be on display this weekend at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton. Kapa is a textile made from the bark of certain trees after going through a process involving soaking and beating to create the fabric. Lehuauakea’s work for this exhibit focuses on belonging, especially at a time where there are more native Hawaiins living on the U.S. mainland than in Hawai’i. Lehuauakea joins us to share more about their art and the upcoming exhibit.

Names like Lonnie Mayne, Buddy Rose and Dutch Savage may not be familiar to some today, but for fans of Portland’s professional wrestling scene of the 1960s to early '90s, these were some of the headliners that sold out the old Portland Sports Arena. As first reported in Slam Wrestling, two Portlanders have been working to preserve the history of the Pacific Northwest wrestling scene and making sure these names and more aren’t forgotten. Rich Patterson is one of these historians and a video wrestling archivist. Kerby Strom is a fellow historian of the scene as well as a collector of memorabilia. He also recently had recovered footage played at the Hollywood theater earlier this week. Strom and Patterson join us to share more on the history of the city’s wrestling scene and what they’ve found while collecting.

After years of steep increases, overdose death rates appear to be dropping nationwide. Data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show a 10% decrease in the number of deaths from drug overdoses across the country from April 2023 to April 2024. That number varies significantly by state — while many Eastern states saw double-digit decreases, Oregon saw a 22% increase over that 12-month period. Still, some local health officials say they’re cautiously optimistic. Teresa Everson is the deputy health officer for Multnomah County. She joins us to talk about what overdose death numbers look like in the county and what they could tell us about the ongoing drug crisis.

The fourth annual Week Without Driving challenge kicked off on Monday. The event was created in 2021 by Disability Rights Washington to highlight the barriers nondrivers face, including those who have disabilities, with using public transit or sidewalks and bike lanes to get around. This year the challenge has expanded to all 50 states with the help of dozens of local and state organizations. And while it’s open to anyone, the organizers hope to recruit elected officials whose policies often shape public transit investments and planning decisions in local communities.   Joining us to share more is Abby Griffith, a Portland-based disability rights advocate and co-founder of Empower Movement Washington who is helping organize the event. The Columbian recently profiled her efforts to raise awareness of the mobility barriers she and others with disabilities face. Also joining us are two lawmakers: Khanh Pham, the Oregon State Representative for House District 46, which covers outer Southeast Portland. She is also running unopposed for Oregon Senate District 23; and Claudia Balducci, a King County Councilmember in Washington state. She is participating in the challenge for the fourth time.

Last month, the Oregon Water Resources Commission voted to change the state’s groundwater rules. The new rules would require new water users to prove the water is available before the state will issue permits for wells. Ivan Gall was appointed to head the Water Resources Department last spring. He joins us to talk about the new rules and other challenges facing water resources in Oregon.

The Oregon Public Utility Commission has approved rate hike upon rate hike in recent years, and consumers are feeling the pinch. Currently, the list of requests for rate hikes includes those from Idaho Power, which serves about 20,000 customers in Oregon; Portland General Electric, which last had a rate case in 2023; and Northwest Natural and Pacific Power, which both last had a request before the PUC in 2022-2023. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler wrote the agency a formal letter of opposition to the latest Portland General Electric rate. It says that vulnerable residents are not in a position to handle further rate increases, and the impact on the city’s power costs would be unsustainable. We talk to the Oregon PUC Acting Executive Director Nolan Moser to find out how these decisions are made and how the impact on customers is considered.

On March 20, 1998, police in Salem, Oregon, discovered the body of 28-year-old Harriet Thompson inside her apartment. Within a week, they arrested Jesse Johnson for murder. Johnson drifted west after a troubled childhood in Arkansas and a stint in prison there. In Salem, he was known around town as a homeless drug user. A random encounter with Thompson the week before she was killed changed Johnson’s life forever.Today we’ll listen to the first episode of OPB’s new podcast “Hush.”

Washington’s Yakama Nation received both a grant and a $100 million federal loan to build a large solar project. Held up by a series of bureaucratic hurdles, the funding could expire before the government lets the tribal nation access the money. OPB Investigative Editor Tony Schick joins us to explain how bureaucracy is getting in the way of progress.

Portland writer Tom Spanbauer is being remembered -- on social media, in articles and in countless conversations with those who knew and loved him, were taught by him or simply loved his books. He died of heart failure on Saturday, Sept. 21 at age 78, after living with Parkinson's for the last eight years, according to his husband, Michael Sage Ricci. Spanbauer was born in Idaho. He moved around the country in his 20s and 30s, but settled in Portland in 1991. Since that time he taught and influenced a whole generation of Portland writers through an approach he invented called “Dangerous Writing.” We broadcast this interview live in April 2014, after his latest novel, “I Loved You More,” was published. It's a love triangle among a gay man, a straight man and a straight woman who push toward and pull away from each other with tenderness and ferocity. The book is also a fearless exploration of mortality and loss. “I Loved You More” was to be his last published novel. We also talked to Spanbauer about what it was like to live through the AIDS epidemic as a gay man in the 1980s and be a longtime survivor of HIV -- and how that influenced him personally and professionally. In 2015, he received an Oregon Book Award for lifetime achievement.

Brue Bjornstad has loved rocks since he was a kid, growing up on the East Coast. But his real love and expertise is the Missoula Floods – cataclysmic events that scoured the Columbia Basin, and laid thick deposits of sediments in other areas, washing all the way down the Columbia Gorge and out to the Pacific. These floods also shaped the Hanford area. The lava flows and uplifted mountains also still drive how clean up proceeds at the Hanford nuclear reservation. Bjornstad gives us a geologic tour from an outlook on the White Bluffs overlooking the Columbia River and Hanford.

The Hanford nuclear reservation produced more than 400 billion gallons of contaminated waste over its decades of operation. Workers have been sickened over the years, and some have successfully sued the Department of Energy with help from watchdog groups, including Hanford Challenge. The nonprofit advocates for whistleblowers and workers on the site, and monitors the clean up process, which has been going on for decades. The State of Washington and federal agencies including the U.S. Department of Energy recently agreed to an update on their cleanup plan, and the public comment period on that agreement closed Sept. 1.Miya Burke, Program Manager for Hanford Challenge, joins us.

JJ Williams is the third-generation of his family in the wine business out of Red Mountain – one of the world’s premier viticultural areas outside of Richland, WA. But before the wine business, his family first put down roots in the Mid-Columbia region to work at Hanford. During the Manhattan Project, Williams’s great grandfather worked at the site, and then his grandfather worked on what’s called the Fast Flux Test Facility. It’s September now and crush is on – meaning that all the grapes are coming in to be pressed and fermented into wine. Williams recently got the distinction of being named in Wine Enthusiast’s 40 under 40. We sit down with him in our remote studio on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities.

We’ve talked a lot this week about life and work specifically at Hanford, but not all of the waste stayed there. In the rush to process plutonium at Hanford, plant operators expelled radioactive byproducts into the local atmosphere and waterways.  People who were affected by these radioactive toxins call themselves “Downwinders.” Northwest Public Broadcasting reporter Anna King, who has been reporting on Hanford for over 20 years, joins us to talk about the people who were affected by radiation from the Hanford site in previous decades.

The National Park Service runs three different sites related to the WW II Manhattan Project. The one on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeast Washington was the first full-scale nuclear reactor in the world. The B Reactor features hundreds of nozzles capping the metal process tubes on the reactor face and even a mint-green control room with all its 40s-era instrument panels. But it’s hearing about the human stories of struggle that make the history come alive. Sept. 26 marks 80 years since the B-reactor first went online. We get a tour from Terri Andre, a volunteer docent at the Manhattan Project National Historical Park at Hanford.

Seattle poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland and worked as a civil engineer at Hanford in the 1980s. She served as Washington State Poet Laureate from 2012-2014. In her first year as poet laureate, she published a collection called Plume, which deals directly with how her Hanford area upbringing influenced her.  The book explores the history of the site, the death of her best friend's father from a radiation illness, and her childhood in "Atomic City.” Flenniken sits down with us from the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities.

The 56 million gallons of radioactive waste created from decades of plutonium enrichment at Hanford are stored in 177 massive, underground tanks on 18 different ‘farms’ spread out over the 580 square miles of the nuclear reservation in Washington State. Most of the tanks are single-shelled, but 28 of them are double-shelled, which helps prevent waste from getting into the ground. Each tank holds between 55,000 and a million gallons of toxic waste.  The U.S. Department of Energy oversees the facility and is responsible for preventing the contamination of both the groundwater and the Columbia River. The DOE is also in the process of testing its multi-billion dollar vitrification plant, which is intended to bind-up the radioactive waste in glass logs to safely store it. We get a tour of the tank farm from Karthik Subramanian, who serves as Chief Operating Officer of Washington River Protection Solutions, the tank farm operations contractor. And we sit down with Brian Vance, the Department of Energy’s top manager in charge of Hanford to hear more about tank integrity, the status of the vitrification plant and the overall clean up progress.

The Hanford Reach National Monument,  established in 2000, is a crescent of land with the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia River flowing through it. It’s also a major incubator of salmon. The Department of Energy calls it “the largest natural animal and plant community in the arid and semi-arid shrub-steppe region of North America.”  The Reach has remained largely pristine, protected from agriculture and development, because it was a security buffer around the central Hanford site – one of the most contaminated spots on earth. But the Reach is still home to a wide variety of  plants and animals, including endangered plant species like the White Bluffs bladderpod and the endangered ferruginous hawk. We get a first hand tour from Mike Livingston, the Washington Fish & Wildlife regional director for south central WA.