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  • For One Community, a Simple Hearse Has Profound Effect

    A public hearse, donated by a National Assembly member, helps around three families a day carry their deceased relatives to burial grounds. The minivan, with no seats and a siren on top, has had a profound effect in the area, which is often dealing with disease and occasional armed conflict. Previously, families carried bodies on foot or strapped to a motorcycle, and often had to pay someone to do it. The public service is overseen by a hearse management committee and the city’s 90,000 residents are charged a mandatory fee of about $1.28 per household to cover repairs, gas, and payments to the driver.

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  • As Concerns Over Climate Change Rise, More Developers Turn to Wood

    Eastern Washington University recently built the first tall wood office building in the state joining hundreds of other large “mass-timber” projects in the United States. This growing industry constructs panels, beams, and columns from trees that need to be thinned to curb wildfires in forests. While wood buildings can be more expensive to build than ones constructed from concrete and steel, environmentalists are on board because wood can store carbon, which can help offset greenhouse gas emissions.

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  • Soap on tap? A startup arrives in NYC with a plan to take the plastic out of cleaning products.

    To make food and cleaning products more accessible to those experiencing economic hardship, the startup Algramo has installed more than 2,500 automated bulk-dispensing systems throughout Chile where people can purchase an item and come back to refill it using the same container. Instead of competing against other consumer good companies, Algramo works with them to help change their packaging practices to reduce their plastic waste. Algramo is scaling the service to New York City and Indonesia to help cash-strapped and eco-friendly shoppers.

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  • The art of fire: reviving the Indigenous craft of cultural burning

    A 3-year pilot is developing a traditional fire management program for First Nation communities using cultural burns, a practice banned for over a century. Cultural burns are used to reinvigorate the landscape so that seeds and berries grow and animals return. The low intensity, slow burns also reduce wildfire risks and other issues linked to climate change, such as infestations. Stories about cultural burns are being recorded from tribal elders to preserve the rich cultural knowledge about traditional fire management techniques. First Nations hope to be able to use cultural burns on their tribal lands.

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  • Three Approaches to Rural Rejuvenation

    Despite the pandemic-induced economic slowdown, three small cities have managed to thrive due to successful economic development plans that have led to “rural rejuvenation” in an effort to attract young families to live there. The city of Taos, New Mexico has used a regional strategy to increase tourism while Durango, Colorado, chose to diversify the economy by focusing on its other resources such as high education, natural gas, and healthcare. Bozeman, Montana focused on nurturing local business instead of enticing outside businesses.

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  • Community Journalism: A Troubled Industry

    Local newspapers that have weathered the past decade of decline in the journalism industry have needed to innovate and pivot their strategy to stay afloat in the wake of the pandemic. With a worldwide economic slowdown and entire communities struggling to recover, local newspapers found that transparency was key in raising funds from subscribers. Diversifying revenue streams, embracing digital models, and raising money allowed these newspapers to continue providing local news and vital information regarding the pandemic.

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  • The Wayback Machine and Cloudflare Want to Backstop the Web

    The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine crawls and caches websites to preserve a history of deleted pages. The Wayback Machine has archived a large amount of the public web over the past two decades, adding more than a billion URLs a day to its databases. The archive has over 468 billion web pages in total, and more than 45 petabytes of data. A new partnership with the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, which caches a static version of websites, has had promising results. Powering Cloudflare’s work with the Wayback Machine’s interface has allowed them to find more sites to archive.

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  • As call for police reform grows here, some look to Oregon for possible answers

    Protests over police officers' conduct in the death of Daniel Prude prompted Rochester, N.Y., officials to look to Eugene's CAHOOTS program for an alternative model in responding to mental health crises. But CAHOOTS officials caution that their longstanding practice of dispatching mental health counselors as first responders, in place of police, has resulted in a safer, more caring response only because the agency is part of a broader system of social services. CAHOOTS teams are on call 24/7, replacing police on up to 8% of 911 calls and calling for police backup a fraction of the time.

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  • Health Board: Can't we all just get along?

    When the coronavirus pandemic complicated matters for local government, the Teton County public health office devised a process to enact state mandate that was effective, transparent, and led to rational decision-making. Although discord continued to a degree, the model is still providing guidance to Jefferson County as officials determine "how to best serve the public health interests of its residents."

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  • The David And Goliath Story Playing Out In Alaska's Fisheries

    A small, southeast-Alaskan fishing community banded together to protect the source of its livelihood from industrial fishing. Legislation officially protected 70,000 square miles of pristine waters in 1998. The ban on industrial fishing has resulted in much smaller, sustainable fisheries that have kept the ocean habitat flourishing and business booming for local fisheries. A cooperative model prevents overfishing and maintains a healthy ocean habitat.

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