Just Pearly

Pollution from fossil fuel emissions might be killing a $73 million dollar industry.

It’s 8:00 am.  The small bay front town of Willapa Bay is still.  A lone bird in the distance flies across the classic Pacific Northwest landscape of green, lush mountains, dramatic storm clouds, and a skyline of pine trees.  A man with a ceramic coffee cup pulls up to the bay and backs his boat into the water sending out a circle of ripples.  With a push off the dock he climbs in and guides the boat.  He has the stance of a captain as he guides the boat and surveys his land.  He is Mark Wiegardt. owner of Whiskey Creek Oyster Hatchery and one of the largest suppliers of oyster seed, or larvae, on the West Coast.  At a raised bed of sand in the middle of the bay he gets out. Hundreds upon hundreds of oysters stick up out of the sand like crabgrass.  With two baskets in hand he sinks into the mud like sand and starts picking up oysters every few feet.  The sand covers his rubber rain boots, his gloved hands, and pants.  He continues, reaching down and bending back up for three hours without a break.  With four generations of oyster farmers behind him, he is used to this kind work.  In 2005 though, he experienced something that none of his ancestors had ever witnessed.  He couldn’t keep a single oyster larvae in his hatchery alive past 72 hours.  He wasn’t the only one.  Up and down the Pacific Northwest coast hatcheries have experienced this same unknown larvae death.  For five years it remained a mystery until researchers at OSU discovered the cause.  In short: pollution.

The cumulative impact of driving a car, turning on a light, plugging in a computer all require the burning of fossil fuels to produce energy. This act releases CO2 into the air. Fifty percent of that CO2 is then absorbed by the ocean. This is a natural process done by our earth to keep atmospheric CO2 levels in balance. Recently however, seawater circulation is bringing up CO2 from 30-50 years ago at levels higher than ever before. Our oceans are inching further higher and further away from their basic to neutral state due to excess CO2 from 50 years ago. Again, this effect is from actions that took place 50 years ago. Last year Earth’s population reached 7 billion. That is over a 50% increase from 50 years ago. We are burning fossil fuels at a rate higher than ever before, and at a level that obviously our ocean and Earth may not have the capacity to absorb.

“This is a real issue,” says assistant professor at OSU in ocean ecology and biogeochemistry George Waldbusser. “This is not a problem that is going to show up 100 years from now. We are dealing with it now.” The reality of this issue is more than obvious for Wiegardt. Whiskey Creek Hatchery just about went out of business back in 2008 due to exoskeletons dissolving before the larvae were mature enough to attach to the oyster shells. This problem impacted oyster farmers all up and down the West Coast. Oyster farms buy oyster seed from hatcheries, like Waldbusser’s, spread the seed over beds of oyster shell in the bay and wait two to five years for the oysters to attach and mature.

“The changes were so dramatic that we thought that there was a really strong possibility that we were going to go out of business,” says Wiegardt. “Once we stop growing seed for the farmers however, the oyster industry will be in pretty tough shape.” As the largest suppliers of oyster seed in the West Coast, the end of Whiskey Creek Hatchery would have had a ripple effect throughout the whole industry. The West coast oyster industry provides around 3,000 jobs and has a total annual economic impact of about $207 million. Those five years of stressful tests and calculations financially affected more than just Wiegardt and his family.

“We experience a production drop,” says Oregon Oyster Farm owner, Xin Liu. Liu buys 100% of his larvae from Wiegardt, meaning that when Wiegardt could not provide him with healthy oyster seed to plant in the bay, his revenue suffered as well. One of Liu’s workers, Miguel Correo remembers the experience.

“The larvae they sent us were bad,” says Correo. “Sometimes they would already be dead, and now has affected business some.” Seventeen years ago Miguel moved from a small indigenous Aztec community in Mexico to Oregon in search of a job. He found one with Liu and quickly moved up from sorting oysters to the head job of placing the oyster seed in the bay. Today on the small dock in Yaquina Bay, Oregon he sets out in a fishing boat. To the left of the steering wheel hangs a fish net with golf balls dredged up with the oysters. A small GPS tracking system shows a blinking arrow moving closer to a tangled of web of lines. “This is where I have the big ones,” he says as he points at the far edge of the labyrinth looking mass. Those oysters have been in the bay for five years now and are the size of a small football. The ones he is collecting today are a mere two years old and the size of a fist, or smaller. With a glance at his GPS he lowers a massive metallic net attached to a crane into the water. Beneath the depths of the surface, the net is scooping up hundreds of oysters to be brought into the farm and harvested. Miguel is one of those 3,000 workers whose job would be affected were the industry to fail.

Back at Whiskey Creek Hatchery though, on this overcast morning the oysters are abundant and the events of 2008 seem to be just a distant nightmare. With the knowledge of the changing chemistry of the ocean, Oregon State researchers and Wiegardt came up with a plan. With the purchase of expensive monitoring equipment and liters of sodium carbonate, an antacid to neutralize the seawater they take in from the ocean to grow the oysters, the larvae stopped dying and the industry is now on its way to recovery. However, not all shelled organisms can be grown in a lab.

“It’s obviously not addressing the bigger issue of CO2 emissions,” says Waldbusser. “It’s just putting a Band-Aid on it. It’s helping the oyster industry stay afloat, and so it’s a mitigation strategy at the moment to help them continue to produce oyster seed.” Oysters however are a keystone species, meaning that the ocean ecosystem is dependent on their presence and role in the environment as a filter feeder. Without oysters, the whole ocean ecosystem would change just as drastically as the oyster industry would without Whiskey Creek Hatchery. Oysters are the “canary in the coal mine” that signal a problem, and deaths of oyster larvae should be understood as a warning.

“The worry is what is going on in the natural environment,” says Wiegardt.  “There has to be an impact out there. There’s no way around it.” Wiegardt is not waiting around to find out just how high oceanic CO2 levels can get. Once or twice a year, Wiegardt goes to DC to speak in Congress and to representatives about the issues that he, the oyster industry, and humanity are facing. But with every visit he is taken away from his farm and the work four generations before him have done.

“Going to DC is not my idea of an ideal trip,” says Wiegardt “You have to wear a suit which I have a problem with. By the end of the day I’m looking pretty ragged.” After three hours of collecting oysters in the bay, it’s time to bag them and leave them halfway submerged by the shore. Waldbusser steps out of the boat looking tired, but satisfied with todays work.  It’s good to have the hatchery back on it’s feet again, but the reality of a larger, global issue still looms.  He walks up the gravel driveway past the hatchery to his house and stops on the way to get a container of fresh oysters from the garage fridge. Today’s lunch is a special treat. Fried oysters.

 

 

 

List of Sources

Mark Wiegardt

Whiskey Creek Oyster Hatchery

(503) 815-8323

George Waldbusser

OSU professor of ocean ecology and biogeochemistry

410 610-1726

Xin Liu

Oregon Oyster Farm owner

(541) 265-5078

Miguel Correo Ruiz

Head Oregon Oyster Farm worker for 17 years

(541) 265-5078

Grossman, Elizabeth. “Northwest Oyster Die-offs Show Ocean Acidification Has Arrived.” Yale Environment 360. Yale Environment 360, 21 Nov. 2011.

Gilles, Nathan. “The Whiskey Creek Shellfish Acid Tests.” Oregon Sea Grant: Oregon State. Oregon Sea Grant, June 2013.

Wallace, Hannah. “Oregon Oyster Farms Rise.” Oregon Business. Oregon Business, 30 Sept. 2013.

1. Interviewing should be a guided conversation:

-For me, this sentence defines how my interviewing process should be because when an interview becomes a conversation people relax and are more open to talking and opening up.  As someone in multimedia, adding a camera, a recorder, and sometimes lights can get in the way of making someone feel comfortable during an interview, but this term I’ve tried telling my subjects off the bat, “Ignore the camera and the recorder.  I just want to have a conversation with you” and in doing so my interviews have gone a lot deeper.

 

2. People have as many conflicts in their lives as you do:

-This was something interesting that I never thought about before and it has forced me to reflect on myself to figure out what questions would get me to talk and open up about the conflicts in my own life.  Once I realized this, I felt as though I was able to guide the conversation a bit better because now I know a little bit more about myself and my comfort level or opening up and don’t feels as bad asking my subjects to do so as well.

 

3. The deepest interviews hit at a person’s demeanor and can be identified with a Greek trait:

-To me being able to understand someone’s body language and their demeanor tells a lot about who they are and who they want to be.  So for me, identifying a person’s demeanor makes them unique, but categorizing them into a Greek trait is the aspect in a piece that unitees us all and allows us, the reader, to really engage with a story because we can relate.  I want to focus more on finding those relatable traits in people so that people from all over can relate to my stories.

 

4. We interview to help our subjects understand themselves:

-During my interview with the OSU professor I found myself asking myself why I thought it was my right to pry into this man’s life and find out what really drives him and what conflicts he experiences in his own life.  Why should he open up to me, a person he just met twice and would probably never see again, but whose words I could publish for the world to see.  I’m still trying to come to terms with a justification, but I kept on going back to one of our first readings that said that interviewing helps our subjects understand themselves.  With the OSU professor, it took a while, but finally he opened up about really wanting to start an apple orchard to make hard cider and I think our interview made him realize how much he actually wants it and how plausible it is.  So, maybe in some way that encouragement to pursue his dream can be my reasoning.

5. Question that is highly relevant to me.

What type of photojournalism do you want to do?

Ten weeks ago when I returned from Spain this seemed to be the only question I got.  I was struggling with a concrete answer to this question.  It basically included me laughing and saying I just want to tell stories.  I’ve always just been able to say I just want to photograph.  I’ve never liked not being able to answer people’s questions about my future, so for a while my lack of an answer really stressed me out, especially because most of my friends are seniors.  I think that now my answer can be best summarized by a media film company’s byline: “We are a production company that specializes in the production of short documentary films for online publication. Reel Peak Films helps magazines and newspapers produce films with journalistic integrity and cinematic quality ” I’m not really sure where I belong in the journalism industry because it is changing or if I’m good enough to make it.   I do know that I want to visually tell visual human interest driven stories for publications.  I’m not sure what type of reporting, I know I like environmental reporting and pieces that get at the heart of who a person is, but I don’t know where that leaves me exactly in the journalism field.  At the end of the day though, my goal with journalism has always been to inform people and make them more aware so our world can be a more open place.

Pearly seashells line the base of the kitchen window.  Through the glass and past the acres of grassland, though Highway 99 stands Mary’s Peak, the highest point in Oregon’s Coast Range.  George Waldbusser, assistant professor at Oregon State University (OSU) in ocean ecology and biogeochemistry, may be over fifty miles from the ocean, but at heart he isn’t.

 

From a young age Waldbusser was exposed to the wonders of the ocean life and the creatures that dwell there.  His grandfather, a cement truck driver in New York City, would always take him fishing to escape the uneven noisy roads, honking cars, and high rise buildings.

 

“I remember being on a boat with him fishing for blue crab in the South Bay in Long Island,” says Waldbusser.  “He taught me this technique.  We’d tie a rope to a chicken leg and hold the leg near the bottom of the boat until we’d feel the crab start picking at it and then we’d slowly raise the crab up and have the net ready to scoop the crab up.”  This was just the beginning of a lifestyles defined by curiosity and creativity thinking.  As years went on, he continued to go to the beach in Maine with his mother and brother racing out a low tide to discover what the blue waters kept hidden.  For him, that golden hour of opportunity when the tide had just retreated and the sand was still moist and bubuling with life was like a treasure chest.

“As a kid, when I looked across that vast barren seascape of water I would recognize and know that there was a lot of stuff on the bottom.  I wanted to know what those things were doing and what they were,” says Waldbusser.  As an adult that curiosity and love for the water did not fade.  Harshly cold winters on Long Island with freezing temperatures and hulking waves that crashed down pummeling anything that lay beneath it were no diterent for Waldbusser.  With a heavy wetsuit and a face slathered in Crisco to prevent frostbite, Waldbusser braved nature.  It however, wasn’t a man versus nature challenge type of relationship.  The crashing waves and the sound of his board slicing through the water was a connection to the sea, a way to be a part of it at it’s most challenging time.

“It was the kind of thing where you really had to want to do it.  It wasn’t just a nice day to paddle out into the water.  It’s one of those things where when you do it, you get that sort of connection and feeling with the ocean so that it helps you in a way,” says Waldbusser.  “You recognize your place in the world and appreciate that we all are just small in the grand scale of things.”

 

That symbiotic relationship with the ocean that Waldbusser shared through surfing and sailing and boating is almost all but a memory now.  To the right of the kitchen window hangs a painting of a hand painted sailboat.  A gift from his mother from his old sailing days.  For the first time in his life though, he is landlocked. His house does not border a body of water, but five acres of land in Central Oregon.  His work at OSU is confined to research labs in classrooms. He has replaced his sailboat with a tractor, jellyfish for chickens, and his campervan top carrier has been covered into a chicken coop.  The window no longer support glass weathered by grains of sand blown up by the wind.  Now they support rusting wire to keep the chickens from escaping.

 

After a life in New York suburbia though, this new change of pace is welcome.

“I can go out and it’s quiet at night,” says Waldbusser.  “You can just hear the great horned owls going.  There’s something about it that’s refreshing.  It’s very hard to gain that when you live in a very congested environment.”

 

In 2009, he and his wife moved across the country from Maryland to Oregon.  Their lives changed and with that came an adaptation to a more agricultural lifestyle.  They sits at their kitchen table sipping homemade hard apple cider he poured from a large metal container outside.  With eight apple trees, a garden, and chickens on their property the scenery and day to day tasks have shifted.

“Having a farm is a lot of hard work,” says wife Miranda Waldbusser.  “But it’s rewarding to see that it pays off when you’ve produced your own food.”

George Waldbusser takes a sip of his cider and looks out the window at the acres of land in front of his house.  He is plotting a new challenge, buying the open land in front of his house and converting his farm into a hard cider business.  For a while it was just a dream, but a few weeks ago his friend bought a farm and planted 150 apple trees pushing Waldbusser to question why he can’t do the same.

“If I can scramble up some money to buy some bigger equipment to start making some bigger batches of cider maybe I’ll be able to retire a little earlier than I thought.” he says with his eyes still fixed on the land.  “That would be a dream.”  It would be a change, an adaption in life.   Something new to spur his curiosity once more.

 

Kathryn Boyd-Batstone
J483-03/4/2014

3rd Q&A – The Other: George Waldbusser
Oysters are a keystone species, meaning that if they are removed from an ecosystem, the ecosystem will drastically change. All other organisms in that ecosystem are dependent keystone species. In the past seven years, the oyster industry has noticed a decline in oyster larvae reproduction. For many years the cause remained a mystery, but in 2008 when water samples from Whiskey Creek Hatchery in Netarts Bay were sent to Oregon State University, it was discovered that the pH, a numerical measure of how acidic or basic a solution is, was lower, or more acidic, than the normal pH of 7, or neutral. Oysters are just an indicator of this larger issue of ocean acidification. Professor George Waldbusser is a scientists at Oregon State University studying the effects of ocean acidification on shellfish and researching methods for a solution.

So can you explain for me why our ocean’s chemistry is changing? Why is it more acidic now?
The increase in fossil fuel combustion, loss of forests, and cement production all contribute to the increasing amounts of fossil fuel in the air. Because of that, there is an imbalance of carbon dioxide in the ocean and the atmosphere. The ocean is actually very efficient in taking up carbon dioxide, but in doing so, it gives us the benefit of keeping CO2 levels in the atmosphere lower. The trade off of that is that it lowers the pH of the ocean because that carbon dioxide is a weak acid that reacts with water and changes the chemistry of the water. If we lower the pH and we also lower something called the saturation state which is very important. It is a measure of how corrosive the water is for shells.

 

What is the effect of that corrosiveness?
The big problem for the larvae is that during its period of initial shell formation following fertilization, in the first 48 hours of life, they need to make a whole lot of shell really quickly. That number, that saturation index or saturation state, tells you something about how easy it is to make shell, and so even if it’s not corrosive, the closer that number gets to corrosive the harder it is for the organisms to make shell.

Is that still an issue now?
Well in the hatcheries they’ve dealt with this by, essentially using an anti-acid. They are using sodium carbonate to buffer the water coming in to increases the saturation state and lower the CO2 to raises the pH.

Do you think that the steps taken by hatcheries to make the water more basic is just putting a bandaid on it rather than addressing the actual issue?
You’re right, it’s obviously not addressing the bigger issue of CO2 emissions. It’s helping the oyster industry stay afloat, and so it is a mitigation strategy at the moment to help them continue to produce oyster seed. It’s actually not dealing with actual CO2 emissions, but this is a real issue. This is not a problem that is going to show up 100 years from now. We are dealing with it now. It seemed very far away when we first started working on it. We were talking about these scenarios that were hundreds of years from now, but in fact we are seeing the issues already.

So now we have 7 billion people on this earth. There is more fossil fuel emissions than ever. Do think that in 50 years from now the situation will just be ten times this?
Well I don’t know. It depends on political will. It depends on how much politicians want to do and what they are willing to stick their neck out for. Washington State, Oregon, British Columbia have all joined together to form a panel to address this issue along the entire west coast with the formation of the Blue Ribbon Panel. Governor Gregoire, the former governor of Washington who established the Blue Ribbon Panel, was in DC talking about this issue with other governors and congress people there and the story is that she got this response kind of like, well what’s Washington going to be able to do about this problem, and her response was lead. The idea is that someone has to step up and start doing something. I think there is some groundswell and some inertia that’s building on this topic. There are oyster growers and shellfish growers all over the world who are starting to see issues at different times of the year. Now there’s this concern that there could be a more pressing problem globally that could be bigger than just here in the Pacific Northwest.

So what to do see the future of the oyster industry and ocean being?
We need to address what we are doing to the ocean. It’s not just CO2 emissions, it’s other types of pollution, it’s nutrient runoff into coastal oceans, it’s overfishing. All these things contribute to the degradation to our oceans which we rely upon for our food. For the oyster industry at least, it seems that the buffering approach for the hatcheries has worked to a large degree for Whiskey Creek Hatchery in Netarts Bay. But, as you’ve alluded to, we can’t produce every organism in a hatchery that has a shell. We ultimately need to address some of these issues and one of the ways to do that is working on habitat restoration. We have an Oregon Sea Grant Project that just got founded to look at the role of seagrass mitigating CO2 for oyster and shellfish production. We are going to try to measure the experience of organisms who actually live in those seagrass beds and whether that may help them. Providing and restoring our coastal ecosystems should help provide some resilience and some buffering to these important services, but ultimately it still comes back to the fact that all these things are kind of stop cap and short term responses. We need to deal with the bigger carbon issue. That’s far beyond what I can do personally. A lot of my effort has been what we can do on a regional and local level and what we can do to help the shellfish industry just to keep them afloat.

At about 5’4 and a coffee cup in hand Deb Merskin is a force to be reckoned with.  She is changing the way we do journalism.  Merskin’s work focuses on the representation in journalism of marginalized groups including minorities, women, and most recently, animals.

“I became very well versed in -isms that are solely based on who is set up as the norm,” says Merskin.  One of these -isms is “speciesism”, a term Merskin created to describe when either animals are described as less, or something or someone is described in a derogatory fashion in relation to animals.  I found it interesting how she analyzed a speech by former president George Bush and found a hidden agenda in his use of language.  He described “those of Arab descent” as “burrowing down”, a diction that conjures an image of moles or rats.  In other words, his choice of comparing Arabs to animals in a negative light dehumanized firstly all Arabs but also animals, making animals seem lesser.

“It’s all because of fear.  A fear of either losing power and having to relate on a human level with someone.  I’m interested in why.  What are we afraid of giving up?” says Merskin.

Merskin herself use a diction related to animals to describe human behavior, but in a positive light.  When describing whether the terminology to counteract speciesism should be called animal rights or welfare, Merskin said, “People’s hackles go up when they hear animal rights.” Hackles refers to the hairs along the back of an animal that stick up when they are angry or alarmed.  I found that comparison of a human behavior in terms of an animal behavior interesting because not only does the descriptive language paint an image strong than saying “people get alarmed when they hear animal rights”, but it also places animals and humans on the same level.  In a quick google search for the definition of hackles; however, google dictionary says, “erectile hairs along the back of a dog or other animal that rise when it is angry or alarmed”.  The key word here being “it”.  Merskin’s work is looking to change that language.  She believes that animals should not be referred to as “it”, but as he, she, or they.  This humanizes the animals and changes the perspective of reporting.  According to Marskin, journalistic ethics support taking the direction of stories to include the animals as well.

“We have a responsibility to give voice to the voiceless,” says Merskin.  “Maybe it’s just children and babies, and if that’s the responsibility of journalist, then why stop with our species?  It’s ethical to figure out what the animals point of view may be and bring that view into the story.”

This is an interesting and important idea and I know I will be more conscious when reporting in the future.

 

 

2nd Q&A – The Personal Connection: Mark Wiegardt

Mark Wiegardt is the owner of Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery in Netarts Bay, Oregon.  Wiegardt is the supplier of over 90% of oyster seed in Oregon.  In 2005 the oyster larvae started to die by the billions and by 2008 Wiegardt almost went out of business.  He sent multiple larvae tests and water samples to Oregon State University with no conclusive results until the water’s acidity was tested.  The water was so corrosive that it was strong enough to kill the oyster larvae.  He now has to continually monitoring the pH level of the hatchery water brought in from the ocean on a 24 hour basis and add chemicals to make it more basic.  Although for now the oyster industry is back on it’s feet, it is temporary if the ocean’s pH level is an indication of a larger issue.

 

How are oysters being affected by ocean acidification?

What we’re seeing in the hatchery is that the seawater chemistry has changed and it’s affected the larvae in many ways.  It’s killed larvae, it’s stunted their growth, it dries out their exoskeleton of the larvae as well.  It just makes growing shellfish larvae very difficult when this is your business.

 

So your business has been greatly affected by ocean acidification?

Our business has definitely been altered by the change in water chemistry.  We do not grow shellfish larvae the way we used to.  We have to continually monitor and buffer the water on a 24 hour basis.

 

Did you grow up in the oyster business?

My history is that I’m a fourth generation oyster farmer.  Originally out of Willapa Bay. My family history has been shellfish.  My great grandfather started in the late 1800s.  That’s basically my family background.

 

Do you think you’d be the same person without having grown up with oysters in your life?

It’s definitely had a big impact on my life.  I typically like being around the bay or the ocean and I can’t imagine living where there’s not water.

 

Is there a possibility that in your lifetime the oyster industry will stop to exist?

I would say yes, there is a possibility, I hope that’s not the case, that’s what we’re trying to avoid.  Once we stop growing seed for the farmers, the oyster industry will be in pretty tough shape.

 

Has your family experienced any tough times because of the oyster industry?

Yeah, the hatchery has experienced many tough times.  We just about went out of business back in ‘08.  It’s really not that long ago, but the changes were so dramatic we thought that there was a really strong possibility that we were going to go out of business.

 

How was that?

We just simply couldn’t grow shellfish larvae.  It’s like anything.  If you can’t sell and produce something, there goes your cashflow and there goes the business.

 

Did you have a backup?

Well the backup was…we thought about going out of business, well it was very likely that we were going to go out of business, but shellfish farmers as a general rule are very stubborn in that we don’t give up easily.  I think it’s that push that we have that maybe got us through this problem.

 

Was that something that your father taught you?

Shellfish farming in general is very tough.  There are always problems.  There’s never smooth sailing.  I mean once in a while you’ll get a great day and it’s very rewarding, but you expect it to be a struggle.  I think we are a bit addicted to the struggle.

 

What about the struggle is addicting?

I don’t know.  I think, farmers in general, we all like to complain a little more than we should, but we just don’t like to give up easily. When it’s been a generational business though you don’t give up that easily.  You think about the tradition that you’re trying to uphold and it just gets you up over the rough spots.

 

Have you gotten your children involved in the oysters?

The hatchery business is very confining.  Most kids don’t like to be confined.

 

How did it work with you and your father?

I worked with my father for many years.  He was a taskmaster like many of our fathers are that work hard.  He taught me a lot about the business.

 

Did your father have to push you to get into the business at all?

He always knew I wanted to go back into the business.  The one thing that he said was get your education, get it out of the way, then make your decision.

 

And that worked for you?

It’s hard to go to college to specifically grow oysters or even work in a hatchery.  It’s more or less a hands on experience that you’re getting out of it so I was in economics and business at the University of Washington.

 

How do you work with Lou at Oregon Oyster Farm?

We have a oyster farm out here in Netarts Bay.  I farm them, he sells them.

 

Does that relieve some of the pressure?

I think when you go out on the bay and you see the end product it reinforces why you do what you do in the hatchery.  The hatchery can be very nerve racking.  It’s a rather precise business. It’s confining, it’s long hours.  There’s something about going out in the bay that reduces your stress.

 

Can you describe how you feel heading out in the boat in the morning?

It’s invigorating.  That’s what it is.  It’s kind of nice to get out to the bay.  It feels like when you get out on the boat you’re escaping from something.  What I don’t know you kind of check out when you are out there.  You’re kind of checking out form a lot of people, a lot of problems.  You just kind of bend over look for good oysters and you know it’s very simple.  It’s just putting in the time.

 

What do you think the future of oysters will be?

The demand for oysters has never been greater.  As long as we are able to grow oysters, cultivate them, and keep our waters clean then yeah there’s a future.  The big worry for me is our ability to grow seed or larvae.  If we can’t do that, well then we are in big trouble.  So I guess there’s a fair amount of pressure to continue doing that.  The science doesn’t look good, but I’m optimistic that we will figure it out.  My generation is basically telling people there’s a problem, but the real problem is going to be for the generation ahead of me.

 

Is that hard to deal with at all?

I think any time you know something that will have a huge impact you need to communicate that.  It’s not responsible to just hide from the facts.  We need to address the problem.  To me it’s not acceptable to just assume that everything is going to go away and that everything is going to be fine.

 

Are oysters an indication for the rest of marine life.  If so, what will happen to them?

The worry is that what is going on in the natural environment.  Since we are actually able to see it in the hatchery there has to be an impact.  There’s no way that it can’t be.  I think you’re just blind or ignorant if you say that there’s not an effect on the marine environment.

 

The first thing I noticed about Officer Joe Kidd were his eyes.  One a blue gray and the other a golden hazel.  He looked us all directly in the eyes, alternating between those directly in front of him.  Although there were twelve of us in the room, he did not seem the least bit intimidated.  His eyes didn’t flit back and forth unsure of where to stare.  They found a person to focus in on and looked confidently into their eyes.  His eyes were not weathered with a weariness from having seen too many lives destroyed by drugs, or guns, or money, but clear and wake.

He told us a story about a man who died.  The man was a regular.  He was continually  involved in drug use, and one day his fun landed him into trouble and a fight lead to his death.  It was up to him, the officer, to tell the family.  Seeing the body dead, broken, and covered in blood was not the hardest part.  No, he had become immune to that by now.  The hardest part was telling the man’s family.  A family of three brothers and a mother.  He told each of the brothers separately and each one cried. He struggled to keep his composure.  Despite the lack of emotion he had for the dead man, he felt for the family.

“For me, the emotional part is more around the family aspect, rather than death.  It’s about how the family has been affected,” Officer Kidd said.  Behind that cool and collected stare lies the heart of a father with a family.  Although Officer Kidd did not speak to his family very much, for me this story was the most insightful part of the interview because it spoke to who he really is and what he actually values.  Perhaps this is really why he is a police officer, to keep families, including his own, safe.  Although I found his stance on gun control surprising, I found that his example for his reasoning also exemplified this commitment to family.  If a person walks into a school with a gun and starts shooting but no one has a gun to defend themselves there will be a large lag time before the police can get there. “Do you know how many students could be killed in that amount of time?” he said. His focus was not on the adults in this scenario, but the students, the youth.  Again, his value for family played a role in his reaction.

I think it would be interesting to learn more about this side of Officer Kidd because there were only slight allusions to something deeper, but mostly on the surface.

 

 1st Q&A – The Authority: Carmen Gonzales

Carmen Gonzales is the Director of Collective Bargaining at Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste or PCUN.  Her role is to document cases of wage theft and contact the employer to require him or her to fulfill the contract and obtain the stolen wages.  If the wages are too large or the employer poses any difficulties, she passes the case on to associated lawyers at the Oregon Law Center.

How is wage theft occurring in Oregon?

The end of the month comes and the contractor doesn’t pay them for all the work they’ve done so they say, “Look next month they will pay me.” We’ve had clients who have worked six months without getting paid.  They’ll just give them $150 or $50.  What are they going to do with $50? The workers have this mentality of “Oh my money is there.”  They keep track of what they should be earning. Then contractors will loan their license to another person and that person robs his or her workers.  The two end up winning.  So when we talk with the owner of the license he says,  “I don’t know who you are talking about.”  He just washes his hands and says, “Talk to the person on the license. I do not know.”  It’s that easy .

 

Why aren’t the workers reporting this?

Now there is so much fear in the community to not collect wages because of fear of deportation and so it continues.  Or they are injured on the job and the contractor will says “Don’t say anything about how you hurt yourself. Say you fell or your hurt yourself at home. I don’t want problems with anyone. And if you talk I will look into you and your family.”  Recently I received a young , a very young boy, looking for help because he was fired from his job and his contractor didn’t pay him. I thought he had just hurt at work, but he told me he has been injured from work for a year and a half.  He went to the hospital, but the contractor declined to pay the payments because he didn’t have insurance.  This young man is now hurt and can no longer live like he used to, but he still has to pay the bills, but the contractor no longer answers the phone.

 

Is it hard to see cases like that day after day?

Yes. For example when we are denouncing subcontractors with the state. Logically we can’t get their information off of their license because they are working under another name. That is the hardest for us.  They disconnect their phone and change their number and address. It’s a shame because it’s lost money that will never be recuperated.  As much as we would like to help the victims we can’t if the contractor no longer exists.  They are very difficult to locate. Those cases just get left in the dark. We will fight a lot for the victims, but sometimes we can’t do anything.  We worked on one case for three years investigating, searching, looking everywhere to see if the contractor existed until sometimes the victim sees the contractor himself and then sometimes we can help and sometimes no.  It’s very difficult to see that everyday.

Three years is a long time.  Does that wear you down?

Sometimes I feel like I don’t have the energy to negotiate with the contractors and ask for the wages. Sometimes they insult me . I just simply say don’t insult me, I’m just doing my job. It’s just my client has lost his rent, his home. We’ve had people who have lost their home because they have not been paid and the contractor  just tells them they will get paid the next month. Don’t worry about your money, it will be there.  They just  believe them and then they lose their income. There’s a case where a man’s wife had recently had a baby and he had no money to buy diapers, to buy milk or to buy food for his family. These cases are very sad .

 

What is the emotional effect on the workers?

That’s when it gets sad because then they have problems with their families.   They ask them, “Look at how much you are working but they don’t give you money!  There’s no milk for the baby or for the nephews.  What’s going on?” Sometimes there are conflicts between family friends too.  This is when people get the most depressed.  We’ve had people who have lost their partners because for those who live here, they are seeing their husbands go off to work and pack them a lunch of beans and tortillas, but they are seeing that they aren’t receiving any pay.  But what happens to those whose wives are in Mexico? The wife says, “What are you doing?  Why aren’t you sending money? It’s already been two months.”  If the poor victim receives some money he has to use it to eat, but then what is he going to send to Mexico?  We’ve had people lose their wife or husband.  That is very sad because it’s from just one individual who doesn’t respect basic human rights or think about the the traumatic emotional harm he is inflicting on the victim. That is the reality that many people live.

Carmen Gonzales

Director of Collective Bargaining Work at PCUN

carmeng@pcun.org

503-984-6815

300 Young St, Woodburn, OR 97071

The light turns red and a line of cars come to a stop. Tan Ford. Black Ford. Red Ford. Blue Toyota Corolla. Black Ford. Tan Ford. Gray Ford. A young woman with blond hair sits inside the Toyota looking straight ahead trying to ignore the angry looks of the passes by and the man in the Ford car next to her.  “What are you doing driving that Japanese car! You are the reason I don’t have a job!  You are destroying Detroit,” a man yells at her window.  Deep breath in, exhale. The light finally changes. It is 1978 and the young woman is my mother.  It is her first day in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  She is only 23 years old.  All her belongings are neatly packed into that Blue Toyota, the only Toyota on this block, and maybe it seemed like the whole state.  Just weeks before her one year long volunteer job with AmeriCorps VISTA helping families in poverty in Levittown, NY had come to a close.  She had spent the last day driving from New York to here in her trust car, Seemore.  Just another trip to add to the list of places “See more of the country” had taken her.  It was now time for a new adventure. An adventure with a plan. Step one establish residency by finding a job in social work.  Step two apply to grad school with said job in social work. And step three make a world of change.

Find a place to live.  Without a plan for a living situation or a job my mother had packed her bags and driven nine hours to a new state with a whole lot of determination.

“What am I thinking?” my mother mumbled to herself.  Down the street was a guest house. She had experienced poverty with her work in Levittown, but never lived it herself. The mindset of the other inhabitants were a harsh reflection of the economic times.  Their daily concerns were not what to make for dinner, but where the next nights stay was going to come from. My mother did not share their desperation because she knew if things did not work out here she could always go home.  She did however share a determination to survive. She would not be returning to Houston, TX where her parents and two brothers had moved three years ago.  No, she would be proving her independence and living life on her own.

After two nights at the guest house, it was time for a change.  The Y, where she swam every day, offered inexpensive housing.  That would work for the time being.  By day three my mother found a job as a waitress at a expensive hotel.  The shifts started early, but it was there that she made her first friend.  The friend was short and her dirty brown hair fell to her shoulders in uneven layers.  Her face was kind and her actions reflected it.  She was about three years younger than my mother.  It didn’t take long for her to figure out my mother’s living situation was not ideal.  With a generosity only a special few have, she invited my mother to come live with her and her mother until my mom could afford an apartment to move into.

My mother had never been in a trailer park before, let alone a trailer home.  With such a show of kind thoughtfulness and the prospect of a friend to talk to on the way to work in this new city, my mother said yes.  She spent one week living with the brown haired girl and her mother.  It was just enough time to get on her feet, save some money, and find an apartment.  After that week they stayed in contact some, but my mother’s life moved on and now only the memory remained. The first year in Michigan was one of the most challenging times for my mother, but the graciousness that this family still remains with her today over thirty years later.

 

WAGE THEFT

Oregon law requires farm workers to be paid minimum wage, however to get around this law, some farmer owners pay a “piece rate”, or a set fee per volume of harvest. Those not covered by employment insurance, hired for a set fee, custom, or contract work are not represented in the Oregon Employment Covered wages. Furthermore, many of Oregon’s farm workers are immigrants.  According to Alice Larson, a Washington-based researcher specializing in farm worker populations, in 2013 there were about 87,000 farm workers in Oregon’s agriculture, nursery and food processing industries, of which 31 percent were migrant.

Because employers of migrant workers do not need to file paperwork with the government, many farmworker immigrants become subject to wage theft, the exploitation of labor so that workers receiving less than the minimum wage, don’t get overtime, tips, have to work “off the clock,” and/or fail to receive their pay at all and so can not afford adequate housing or health care.  While some workers seek redress with the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, many are not aware or able to obtain help.

I hope to talk to a family that has experience wage theft and can show me their account of how it has affected their lives, specifically with housing.  Many migrant farmworkers live on farmworker camps that may or may not have adequate drainage, bathrooms, laundry facilities, and hot water may not be available in adequate supply, contributing to poor housing conditions.

Virginia Garcia’s mobile clinics provided 715 migrant workers with medical care and 69 with dental care at a cost of $2 per person, per visit. Their van visits nine migrant camps and two nurseries in Washington County, plus two nurseries in Yamhill County. I am currently talking to their outreach communication about interviewing a family living at one of the farmworker camps.  I hope to shed light on their form of life as a farmworker living supporting a family minimum wage, as well as someone who has experienced wage theft.  I will get this contact from the Director of the Oregon Law Center Woodburn Migrant Farmworker Camp.