The Jefferson Exchange

Rural Oregonians who need specialized health treatments can't always get to Portland.  So Portland, in a sense, is coming to them. 

An ongoing relationship between Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) and Sky Lakes Medical Center in Klamath Falls will create the Sky Lakes Collaborative Health Center. 

Construction started recently, with completion planned for next year. 

Juniper must be good for something besides flavoring gin. 

The woody plant grows easily in Oregon's high desert; a little too easily.  Juniper has been encroaching on high desert ecosystems, and land managers want to cut it back a bit. 

So there's an effort to find uses for juniper that go beyond using berries for gin and the rest for firewood. 

Rancher Duncan Livingston has been taking part in juniper management experiments. 

Affordable housing is still out of the grasp of many low-wage workers.  The National Low Income Housing Coalition just put out its annual report, which shows that workers earning minimum wage and working full time can afford housing in just a few counties in the entire country. 

We explore the numbers, the issues, and the solutions raised with Diane Yentel, the CEO of NLIHC. 

We get local input from the Rogue Action Center in the person of Michelle Glass. 

ACCESS, Inc, also contributes, in the person of James Raison. 

It's been a long odyssey for the Jordan Cove LNG (liquefied natural gas) project proposed for the Oregon Coast near North Bend. 

The plan, resurrected after an earlier federal denial, requires a pipeline crossing the region from North Bend to the Klamath Falls area. 

State agencies make up a piece of the regulatory puzzle, and a comment period is now open on whether the state should issue a water quality permit.

The Army Corps of Engineers is also accepting comments.

Rogue Climate is one of several groups opposing the permit and the project. 

"Feel years younger now!"  We hear claims like that frequently, especially with 10,000 Americans reaching retirement age every day. 

Can you believe any of them?  Maybe, says microbiologist Carolina Livi. 

She has been working for a biotech company and teaching at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, exploring some of the products offered to slow the aging process.  Her work focuses on fasting and the drug rapamycin. 

Not everybody likes to go to the doctor's office.  With good reason: often, when we go, there's something wrong with us, and we're worried about that. 

Now consider this: it could be that the doctor dreads seeing YOU. 

Caroline Elton, a vocational psychologist, works with doctor, and many of them are having a hard time doing their work.  She gives plenty of examples in her book Also Human: The Inner Lives of Doctors. 

School is out, and parents are looking for things to do with the kids.  Oh, look, a puppet show!  But Puppeteers For Fears says "Cthulhu: The Musical!" is NOT child-appropriate. 

The Halloween-themed show based on an H.P. Lovecraft story begins a summer tour this week, including several days in Hollywood. 

Josh Gross, our Rogue Sounds co-host, is the driving creative force behind P4F and the musical. 

The rise of the wine industry in the region uncorked a whole range of businesses. 

We have vineyards, and wineries, and places that have nothing to do with the actual growing of grapes (but are still a key part of the wine business). 

We put Medford's Pallet Wine Company in that final category.  The plant takes the grapes brought in by growers and turns them into wine. 

All growers need to bring is the grapes and the money.  Linda Donovan started Pallet after years in the wine business. 

It was the late 1960s... and Malcolm Terence did what a lot of people did in that time: looked for a different way to live. 

He'd been a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and he was ready for a change.  Managing a rock band was fun, but also not the answer. 

So Malcolm found his way to the Black Bear Ranch, a commune nestled in the mountains by the Oregon-California state line.  That's where things got interesting, and Malcolm built himself a life. 

He tells the story in his first book, Beginner's Luck: Dispatches From the Klamath Mountains. 

A highlight of the entertainment season in Southern Oregon is the opening of the Elizabethan Theatre at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  It is the heart of the original festival, with plays presented under the summer sky taking stage since 1935. 

The opening is celebrated with an outdoor meal, but also with a church service.  Church?  Yes, 1559 style. 

Trinity Episcopal Church offers a service that attempts to recreate a Church of England service from the time of Elizabeth I. 

The vaccine resistance continues to grow.  And Oregon remains one of the most un-vaccinated places in the country. 

Josephine County leads the state in avoiding vaccines for children, and Jackson County is not far behind. 

This is obviously a concern to the people who run the immunization program in the Oregon Health Authority. 

Thank Heaven for zombie movies.  Now we're at least familiar with the concept of people eating brains. 

Jokes aside, cannabalism--eating your fellow creatures--is well-established across the animal kingdom, as we explored last year with zoologist Bill Schutt. 

He wrote the book Cannibalism: A Perfect Natural History.  And for some reason, we have a taste for hearing the discussion again. 

It's a long way from the Oregon Coast to Philadelphia, both in distance and in feeling.  Jeff Brady takes it all in stride. 

Brady is one of NPR's correspondents, based on the East Coast after many years living and working in the West.  Those years include attending college at what is now Southern Oregon University, which will honor him with a distinguished alumni award as part of 2018 Commencement. 

Did we mention Jeff once worked for JPR?  We think he can still find the way to the studio. 

How Oregon and other tree-rich areas use their forests will figure prominently in both the creation and capture of greenhouse gases. 

Emissions studies show that Oregon's forest products industry creates the largest single chunk of the state's carbon emissions, through burning of fossil fuels in logging, among other activities.  At the same time, the forests themselves are capable of soaking up carbon emissions. 

A study that included Oregon State University calculated the carbon effects of several forest events: logging, reforestation, and fire among them. 

Remember when news got to us once a day, maybe twice?  Yeah, we barely do either. 

It bombards us all the time, through news and tweets and texts and more. 

Once a month we take stock of the media landscape with Precious Yamaguchi and Andrew Gay, who teach Communications courses at Southern Oregon University. 

It's another rich month of material to consider: think Roseanne Barr and the tweet that killed a TV show. 

Spend too much time consuming news, and you can get a real sense the world is in trouble.  Ignoring the news competely is probably not the answer. 

But perhaps an adjustment to our definition of hope is in order. 

Kate Davies certainly recommends such an adjustment in her book Intrinsic Hope: Living Courageously in Troubled Times.  This is a bit different from the kind of conventional hope most of us grew up with. 

It's not a bar fight, exactly, but it is a beer fight.  Or competition, let's say. 

Microbreweries are finding some difficulty in getting people to buy their beers in stores, so they're focusing attention on direct sales: people come into the taproom or brewery and buy beer there. 

Which limits the choices in stores and in bars that serve many different beer brands. 

Larry Chase of Standing Stone Brewing Co. in Ashland also sits on the board of the Brewers Association in Oregon.