Environmental justice tour of Portland, Feb. 3, 2018

Looking southwest from Willamette Boulevard just east of the University of Portland. Mocks Bottom is in the foreground, Swan Island beyond that, and the West Hills of Portland in the background. Feb. 3, 2018.

 

Luna and I had a fun time yesterday participating in Youth for a Livable Planet’s Environmental Justice Tour of Portland. At four locations on the east side of the city, we learned something about key environmental, social, and demographic changes in the city over the past 15,000+ years. We started at the Moda Center with a grounding in deep geologic history and the history of the Chinookan and Kalapyan peoples. Hopping-on the MAX Yellow Line, we alighted to the Albina Neighborhood, where we got an overview of the history of peoples of color in Oregon broadly and Portland particularly. Vanport was our third stop on the tour, where a representative of Portland Harbor Community Coalition spoke in depth about the creation (1943) and catastrophic dissolution (1948) of Vanport. The fourth station was at the University of Portland, where we had lunch and learned more about the Portland Harbor Community Coalition’s mission “elevating the most-impacted groups (Native Americans, African-Americans/Black, immigrants, and houseless) in the billion dollar federal cleanup of the eleven mile Willamette River ‘Superfund’ site, Portland Harbor.”

This was the second of three such tours the group has planned during the current academic year. This was my first time participating. I did so to have a fun, educational time with Luna and to meet the organizers. I also wanted to get a feel for the structure and content of the tour so I might prepare materials and contribute to the next one, planned for April.