Lots of new things going on with Portland's EcoTuesday.
June marked the resurrection of the event after a brief hiatus as former ambassadors Kevin Pile and Ann Stovel passed the torch to me, Gina Binole. We tried out a new venue, Wine Unwind (www.wineunwind.com) in the Pearl District, whic hprovided the perfect space for networking and eco-enlightenment. If you live or visit Portland and like wine, check them out!
Our speaker, Oregon Sen. Bruce Starr (www.brucestarr.org) spoke about sustainable transportation, and more importantly, ways to finance it. Yes, it would be great, he says, if we all drove electric cars or drove less in general, but then who woud pay the gas tax to fix our roads?
Bruce serves as vice-chair of the state senate's Business and Transportation Committee and is a member of the Join Ways and Means Subcommittee on Transportation and Economic Development. He is the chair of the National Conference of State Legislatures Surface Transportation Act Re-Authorization working group.
In this capacity, and on previous panels, he has been working for more than a decade to find ways to pay for our transportation system that recognizes the need, and the national security concern, to wean the United States off foreign oil and carbon-centered power. The entire means of procuring transit in the country, while not deliberately, almost always filters out anything that carries political and economic risk. So it's obvious Bruce has his work cut out for him still, but people are slowly realizing how important this shift in thought and process has become.
If it's possible for any good to come from the BP Oil spill, perhaps that be a greater awareness by the U.S. population on the tragic and devastating effects our reliance on oil and our cars can create. Now it's time to turn that awareness into action and get out of our cars and onto our bikes and mass transit.
