Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility

This anthology, edited by Leah Stenson, conveys the enormity of Fukushima, the first nuclear disaster of the 21st Century on both the environmental and human scale. The second edition features all new prefatory material, including contributions by Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Helen Caldicott, Fairewinds Energy Education founder Maggie Gundersen, and professor emerita Dr. Norma Field. The essays examine the status of Fukushima ten years after the disaster through the lens of social, political, and environmental concerns.

What an extraordinary time for Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility to be celebrating our 40th anniversary. With the support of our members, donors, and volunteers, we’ve accomplished so much in these past four decades!

Challenging times can be times of profound growth and learning, and this has certainly been the case for Oregon PSR. The movements to promote peace and justice and to protect our climate continue to grow, and I encourage you to read about our ongoing work to make our world more just, peaceful, and healthy for all.

Oregon PSR is celebrating our 40th year of work for a more healthy, peaceful, and just world in 2021. We began from the powerful vision of our founders who sat on the living room floor in Dr. Karen Steingart’s house and strategized about how a health message could help prevent nuclear war. Over the next forty years, countless members, volunteers, and donors brought their passion and leadership to the organization, bringing a broad public health frame to issues such as environmental justice, gun violence, and climate health, learning and growing along the way.

Though 2020 and the early months of 2021 have posed a unique set of challenges to Oregon PSR’s work, we continue to learn and implement new ways to grow our movement for a more healthy, just, and peaceful world. With the support of our members and volunteers, we have taken advantage of online meeting technologies to broaden the reach of our Peace Program efforts well beyond the borders of our state, involving new partners and reaching new audiences. If you missed any of our recent events, be sure to check them out on our website, Facebook page, or our new YouTube channel.

Mass incarceration is a major public health issue in the United States. With over 2 million people currently incarcerated, the US leads the world by far in incarceration rates. The negative health impacts created by mass incarceration are present not only in prisons, but also in the communities that prisons are located and the communities where adults in custody come from, which are disproportionately lower income communities and communities of color.

In early March 2021, our Executive Director Kelly Campbell led an interactive skills-building workshop titled Growing the Nuclear Abolition Movement through Local Resolutions during the Ending Nuclear Weapons Before They End Us online conference organized by Back from the Brink and the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). 

The Greenfield Peace Scholarship 2021 application deadline has passed, and we received 43 qualifying entries in a wide variety of mediums from youth all across the state. The anonymous judging process has been completed and the winning entries selected. The Greenfield Peace Scholarship 2021 Awards Ceremony will be a virtual event premiering on Oregon PSR’s YouTube channel on Thursday, April 29th beginning at 6:30 PM.

Learn more about our Greenfield Peace Scholarship 2021 judges:

Leah Altman

Leah grew up in the Portland urban Native American community and comes from a background in Portland-area social service and environmental justice nonprofits, primarily in grant writing and donor development. She works for the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation and is on the Board for Advancing Gender Equity in the Arts and the Advisory Board for Portland State University’s book publishing program. She has been published in several magazines, including Indian Country Today, PSU’s Metroscape, and online brass magazine, and she is working on her first book.

Yukiyo Kawano

Yukiyo, an artist, performer, educator, Cascadia Arts Film Festival co-coordinator, and Oregon  PSR Advisory Board member, is a third-generation hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) who grew up decades after the bombing of Hiroshima. Her artwork is “a direct response to the tragedy of the past,” she states, “but the past I depict wants to remember the present. People say my work is like a dream; it is not meant to deliver certainties. It asks us to remain in the present, so that we can develop a new relationship of mind and body, confront the ongoing deceptive rhetoric that surrounds us, reject violence, and save ourselves from our own extinction.”

Lamarra

Lamarra (she/her) emigrated from Kingston, Jamaica to Portland at the age of 7 and has been in Portland ever since. Her high school art teacher, Charlene Simmons, helped foster Lamarra's interest in art. Lamarra creates colorful 2D mixed media work. She sometimes shares that work on Instagram @melancholymaker.

Kezia Setyawan

Kezia is a recent graduate of the University of Oregon where she majored in journalism. She is currently a general reporter at The Courier and Daily Comet newspapers in Houma-Thibodaux in south Louisiana. Setyawan believes that beauty is found in small details of behavior. Her work centers and amplifies the voices of those who have been pushed to the margins through storytelling.

Matt Smith

Matt is from Phoenix, AZ, but before arriving in Portland, he taught in South Korea for four years as an ESL teacher. He's been writing for eleven years and had short stories published in a handful of digital publications. He is currently working on his first full length novel, a sci-fi tale about captives in space.

Thanks so much for joining us for Remembering Fukushima 10 Years Later: A Film Screening & Panel Discussion. In case you missed any of the panel discussion webinar, or to watch it again, you can view video of the panel discussion here.

We were honored to have the filmmaker, Hitomi Kamanaka, along with panel members Norma Field, Ruiko Muto, and Leona Morgan, discuss the film and the disastrous impacts on communities from radioactive contamination released from the explosions at the Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima on March 11th, 2011. Our distinguished panelists also shared their thoughts on nuclear technologies, from uranium mining at the beginning of the nuclear cycle to the precarious and dangerous burial of nuclear wastes.

In many ways, the state of Oregon is at a crossroads: amid the unprecedented and traumatic crises of COVID-19, wildfires, and white supremacy, our state can choose between the status quo or a bold path forward towards a healthy and livable future. We cannot afford to go “back to normal” when “normal” wasn’t working for far too many people. Instead, our lawmakers have the opportunity to lay a foundation for a world where everyone is treated fairly, lives in a healthy home, and has a bright future.

Oregon PSR is hard at work under challenging circumstances to push for a bold state legislative agenda in 2021. We are excited to be focusing on the emerging Oregon Clean Energy Opportunity campaign to advance environmental justice, chart a course towards 100% clean electricity, and provide energy relief for families who need it most. We are working to address the public health crisis of mass incarceration, stop ill-advised nuclear power exemption bills, and advance progress on gun violence prevention, police accountability, and racial justice.

Oregon PSR and Oregon Justice Resource Center are continuing our discussion on mass incarceration and public health with regard to Oregon state prisons and adults in custody in Oregon. We are entering into our second year of working together to both better understand and better advocate for the health and well-being of adults in custody in Oregon state prisons.