The September 2020 fires in Oregon and California destroyed many things, but they also created some. The creations include several organizations geared to help communities and individuals get back on their feet after the smoke cleared. One of those was the Community Rebuilding Fund, housed at the Oregon Community Foundation with support from severa…

We've gotten used to checking the air quality index (AQI) numbers when wildfire smoke hangs in the air. If the numbers get into the unhealthy range, we may limit our activities. But the limits may be different for children, whose developing lungs are potentially more susceptible to damage from smoky conditions. University of Oregon researchers expe…

The government response to the COVID pandemic included legislation keeping people on Medicaid as long as the health emergency lasted. Once it ended, millions of Americans would potentially lose their Medicaid coverage, and many have. But Oregon appears to lead the nation in keeping people on its version of Medicaid, the Oregon Health Plan. OHP is s…

Talent Maker City is oddly quiet of late, but there's a good reason. A space that usually hums with the activity of people making things is in transition, as TMC moves from its old quarters into a brand-new building in the heart of downtown Talent. The larger space will allow TMC to serve more people of all ages who want to work with their hands. G…

When people talk about vanishing forests in our part of the world, it's usually a reference to collections of trees on land. Not this time. There is another vanishing forest of great concern, under the surface of the Pacific Ocean. The kelp forests in the shallow waters have been vanishing in recent years, and recent research from the Oregon Kelp A…

Plumes of smoke are seen from miles away as a rangeland wildfire burns outside of the small town of Antelope in Wasco County, Oregon.(Emily Jane Davis, Oregon State University) We've heard many times in recent years how unpredictable wildfires have become, in addition to them getting just plain larger. Anything that can help fire managers figure ou…

There's no substitute for experience when you're doing something difficult. And you can't get experience overnight when doing something like starting a business from scratch. But what you CAN do is call upon the experience of people who've been down that road, and that's why there's SCORE, originally the Service Corps of Retired Executives. SCORE v…

Look at the maps of current fires in our part of the country, and all the red dots look like a major case of the measles. Hundreds of thousands of acres lit up in the latter part of July, after the heat wave baked the landscape in the first part of the month. As usual, many of the fires are burning on U.S. Forest Service land. We check in with Ed H…

We're taking risks if we get to the end of July in our region and we have not prepared a "go-kit" in case of evacuation. The dry landscape is actually on fire in many areas, bringing firefighters in and forcing nearby landowners out. Local and state governments have put in some work in recent years, identifying evacuation zones and distributing inf…

Not every part of our region is as flammable as the next. There is some variation, meaning wildfire risk is just higher in some places than in others. And when the state of Oregon said so with the release of a wildfire risk map in 2022, landowners in high risk areas complained, loudly. The state withdrew the map until just recently, offering in its…

There are many places on the map where people once lived and worked that faded into history. But Maxville, Oregon may be one of a kind. It was a timber town, and there were plenty of those, but Maxville was integrated: Black and white workers inhabited the town and worked in the mill. The Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center works to preserve, int…

We expect things to move on highways; that's what they're for. But not the highway itself, which has long been the problem at Last Chance Grade on U.S. 101 in Del Norte County. The highway is located in a landslide-prone area, and frequent work is required to keep the highway from sliding down the hill. Caltrans, the state department of transportat…

Any community of a reasonable size has a few people with some dollars to give, and some places that will gladly take them. Josephine County--and western Jackson County--have an entity that helps collect givers with receivers. The Four Way Community Foundation is closing in on its 50th birthday, having spent nearly half a century now helping givers …

[Tue 9 AM | Keeping journalism alive by staying truly local in coverage] Staying in business in the journalism field has grown tougher in recent years, with newspapers taking the loss of paid subscriptions and classified advertising especially hard. For some journalism entities, the key to survival has been to go hyper-local: focus heavily on the n…

The recent saga of the efforts to protect the forest around Pipe Fork Creek in Josephine County ended with a whimper, not a bang. But it may not be over. Fans of the forest, led by the Williams Community Forest Project, worked to protect the land currently owned by Josephine County. They even lined up a buyer in The Conservation Fund, which planned…

Maybe it's a rare writer who gets rich at the craft... but writers can find other kinds of rewards like inspiration and technical growth in their work by taking part in residencies and retreats for writers. The Lost in Place Nature Writing Intensive, held at Summer Lake Lodge in the Lake County (Oregon) backcountry is that kind of opportunity. It i…

(Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons) He's the Republican candidate for Vice President now, but last time we talked to JD Vance, he not only had his doubts about Donald Trump, he did not think Trump would win the election. That was in 2016, and many things have changed. The occasion for Vance's appearance on the JX was a conversation about his highly…

Sculpture by Hank Thomas Willis: "Raise Up"(Ron Cogswell / Wikimedia Commons) Activism and community organizing are generally about getting people to move: move to demonstrate on an issue, move to vote on an issue, move off dead-center in thinking. One way to move people is by inspiring them, through art. And there's a long history of the intertwin…

Suicides by young people in Oregon hit a peak in 2018, with 129 deaths. And while the overall numbers have dropped a bit in the years since, the rate of youth suicide remains high when compared with the rest of the country. And there's another note: youth suicides by white people are dropping, while deaths by people of other ethnicities are on the …

The Supreme Court had its say, and then the residents of Grants Pass weighed in. The SCOTUS ruling that rousting people from camping on public property is NOT cruel and unusual punishment gives the city--any city--more tools to clear encampments of homeless people from public property. And a council "listening session" after the ruling featured doz…