Rotary International Theme 2020-2021	THE ROWEL Rotary Club of Durham		Rotary International President: Holger Knaack Rotary District 5160 Governor: Mark Roberts Durham Rotary President: Jen Liu _____________ Editor: Phil Price Publisher:  Jen Liu
	January 26, 2021	The  2021 Harvest Festival scheduled for Sunday, September 19, 2021.

This was our twenty-second Zoom meeting.  It took place with our President absent.  There were 14 members present, including President Jen Liu from Taiwan, where it was 10:00 AM in the morning. The Meeting   President Elect Eric Hoiland opened the meeting.  He reported problems with having the Club Bell at home.  His kids love it.  Eric asked Jessica Thorpe to lead the pledge, which she did.  Eric then asked Jim Patterson to give the invocation, which he did, talking a lot about Clint Goss (see below).

FUTURE MEETINGS:

All meetings at BCCC are cancelled until further notice.  But there will be meetings on Zoom as follows:   February 2nd:  Clint Goss Scholarship discussion.   February 9th:  Clint Goss retrospective.   February 23rd:  Eric Hoiland will present Walt Schafer on the Honey Run Covered Bridge   March 9th:   Kelly Lotti   March 23rd:   Mike Crump   April 6th:   Jen Liu   April 20th:    Phil Price   May 4th:  Dave Jessen

 

Program

Glenn Pulliam introduced Carl Ochsner of the Chico Noon Club.  Carl presented his program “Rotary’s Early Days in Chico-Part 1”.  In his program he talked about each of the original 12 members of Chico Rotary when it was formed 100 years ago.  Along with this he showed photographs of most of these members and of their places of business in Chico.  (I must be getting old because I remember when some of those building looked like they did in the pictures).   Anyway, it was a very interesting program.  He is currently putting together Part 2 of the program which will be ready by April.

 

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on February 2, 2021.  It will be an interim meeting to discuss how to honor Clint Goss with a scholarship.

 

Reports and Anouncements

 

President Jen’s Announcement

 

It is with great sadness to inform you of the passing of member Clint Goss on Sunday, January 24^th. Clint has been a valued member of our club since 1971.  He is quiet, unassuming and a hardworking member of our club.  He and his family were the backbone of our BBQ chicken at the Harvest Festival for the past 20+ years.

Jackie, Clint’s widow suggested that in lieu of flowers, she prefers a scholarship to DHS in commemoration of him.

District Grant for Chrome Books

 

For those who missed the Interim Rowel, Steve Heithecker previously reported that the Chromebooks had arrived and are at the High School.  A check presentation ceremony was held on Thursday, Jan. 14^th, 2021 in front of Durham High School.  This check in the amount of $13,421.81 includes a grant from Rotary District 5160.  It is made out to Durham Unified School District to cover for the 45 Chromebooks donated to Durham High School by our Club.

 

Virtual Crab Feed

The Crab along with other dinner elements were delivered on Saturday, January 16^th to the 5 winners.

 

See the photos below for the elements of the dinner that was delivered.

 

District Conference

2021 will be here faster than COVID testing at CVS. With the new year came hopes of a return to enjoying the company of our fellow Rotarians – in person!

But that will not be.  The District Governor has announced that, after a lot of research by District Conference Chair Arne Gustafson and other members of the planning committee, it was decided that the probability of being able to hold an in-person conference for 300+ people this spring in Sacramento were slim and none. So we’re converting our ALL ABOARD! Conference to a virtual format but on the original weekend: April 30-May 2. Folks who made their reservation with a $20 payment are all set – and you too can register for a total fee of $20 if you do so by February 15^th! Just visit the district website, Rotary5160.org, scroll down the home page and click on Learn More to register. More info to follow!

All Aboard!  Place your deposit today!   (See the email you received).

 

From the District Governor

 

Greetings, fellow District 5160 Rotarians!

Well, 2021 isn’t quite three weeks old but it’s already memorable. I just want to update you on a few things that are current or happening in the not too distant future.

FIRST, I have heard from a number of clubs that were inspired by the Virtual/In-Person meeting video that was distributed last month which also encouraged Rotarians to get involved in the COVID-19 vaccination effort. Members want to volunteer to help speed the process at which shots get into people’s arms. I applaud and encourage this effort BUT I have to urge a little patience and research.

The USA doesn’t have a coordinated vaccination program and the State of California has created a regional program that really relies on individual county Public Health departments to determine who, how, when and where groups of people can be vaccinated. (Some large health care agencies, such as Kaiser Permanente and John Muir Health, are receiving vaccine supplies directly from the state and reaching out directly to their members.) So the vaccination plan in Contra Costa County, for example, may be quite different from the plan in Shasta County.

To find out if and how the members of a club can help with the vaccination effort, I recommend you contact your county’s Public Health Department (PHDs) to learn how you can help. I understand that some counties are hiring additional health care workers and are not seeking volunteers at this time. Others, I believe, most certainly are. Many PHDs are overwhelmed by inquiries from people seeking vaccination info so some patience might be needed; check the website first instead of trying to call. Assistant Governors may want to get this info so that they can share it with all the clubs in their area that are in the same county. Members who are current or retired health care professionals may be especially helpful.

After 10 months when many of us have not been able to participate in hands-on service projects, I know how much we want to help. Hey, we’re ROTARIANS! Please let me know what you find out from your county PHD so I can share your experience and tips with other folks in our district. THANKS!

(His announcement that the District Conference was going virtual was remove from here in placed above)

FINALLY (for now), I’m announcing that Camp Royal will also be going virtual this June. The good news is that the company that provides the curriculum has all of it ready to go virtual. So the members of the Camp Royal Committee are just working on the dates – probably not a full week – and the details that will make the experience as enlightening, rewarding and FUN for our campers as possible. More good news: the sponsorship fee per camper paid by the clubs will be substantially lower since there will be no food or lodging involved. Again, stay tuned for more info.

THANKS, as always, for your interest and participation!

Mark Roberts
Rotary Club of Lamorinda Sunrise
District Governor 2020-2021
Rotary District 5160
Mark@Rotary5160.org
Cell: 925-788-5239
Home: 925-254-9246

The Rotary Foundation Donations

When every Rotarian gives every year, no challenge is too great for us to make a difference. The minimum gift to The Rotary Foundation is $25.00.   An annual $100.00 gift is a sustaining member.  Once your donations accumulate to $1,000 you become a Paul Harris Fellow.

It is possible to learn more about The Rotary Foundation on the Rotary web site.  Your gift can be made online or by sending Jim Kirks a check made out to The Rotary Foundation.  Send your check to James Kirks, 1199 Diablo Ave., Apt. 246, Chico, California 95973.

Recognitions

Eric was assessed $10 by Glenn Pulliam.  Something about mixing things up on opening the meeting.

 

Your editor contributed $38 for his 62^nd anniversary.

 

Bruce Norlie contributed $79 for his 79th Birthday.  I had to leave the meeting at that point when Cindy came in and advised me that something large had landed in our backyard.  Turned out it was the skylight from our carport roof.

Membership

When we have live meetings again, bring guests, who you think you can interest in becoming a member, to meetings.  Your dinner and your guest’s dinner will be paid for by the Club.  In the meantime, please invite Durham business owners and/or managers to one of our Zoom meetings.  Actually, you can promote membership by having a guest sit with you during one of our Zoom meetings.  Also, bring a guest to one of our occasional social gatherings in the Durham Park.

Conclusion

Steve Heithecker was asked for a quote in conclusion of the meeting.  He quoted a portion of Amanda Gorman’s poem, that she read during the Inauguration, as follows:

We've learned that quiet isn't always peace

And the norms and notions

of what just is

Isn't always just-ice

And yet the dawn is ours

before we knew it

Somehow we do it

Somehow we've weathered and witnessed

a nation that isn't broken

but simply unfinished

 

__________________________________________________________________________________

From Rotary International

 

(This article in the News and Features section of Rotary International’s web page is a led in to five separate but related articles.  The first one on “Philanthropy” was presented in the last Rowel.  Below is the second one on “Water”.  I intend to present the other 3 in subsequent weeks of the Rowel.  They are “Environmentalism”, Leadership” and “Migration”.)

 

As we stand at the threshold of the third decade of the 21st century, imagine where we’re headed

Illustration by Aubrey Pohl

In 1915, writing in Rotary magazine, Paul Harris remarked: “What Rotary will be 100 years hence, none living can imagine.”

More than a century later, there’s no need to imagine: Rotary has thrived. As we stand at the threshold of the third decade of the 21st century, we are imagining where we’re headed — and what to expect when we get there.

The golden age of water is over

The water systems humans have created and rely on will look inadequate in the face of climate change

by Charles Fishman

I was in Charleston, South Carolina, to talk about water, and a university faculty member there explained how dramatically life has changed in the past few years in that beautiful waterfront city.

As recently as the early 2000s, she said, Charleston had experienced a few flooding events a year — eight or 10. Not even one a month.

But in the past few years, Charleston has annually had 40 to 50 intrusive flood events. The flooding is so common and so disruptive, the woman explained, that she and her husband had to plan their lives around it. Their kids went to day care in one part of the city; they worked in another part. When the low-lying streets and intersections filled with seawater — as happens on average three times a month now — they were cut off from their children.

Half of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from waterborne diseases. More than a billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water. That’s very disturbing in the 21st century.

Fatima Lahmami Langlois | Rotary Club of Montreal
“Philanthropy Matchmakers,” July 2019

“We have to watch the weather, we have to watch the tides, we have to talk to the people at the day care,” she said. “Because we could easily end up at the end of the day with no way to get the kids.” There have been occasions when they didn’t take the children to day care, because flooding was predicted during the day.

You don’t have to imagine the future of water: It’s here. It’s happening right now, all around us.

That’s the most obvious lesson from the flooding in Charleston, a single problem in a single U.S. city: The flooding is not devastating, but it is sudden, it’s new, it’s relentless, it’s hugely disruptive, and it’s not going away. When it comes to water, we aren’t ready for what’s happening to us right now. So we certainly aren’t ready for the future.

In the past decade, we have made dramatic progress in water. In the 10 years between 2005 and 2015 (the most recent year for which there is U.S. data), the typical American went from using 100 gallons of water per day at home to using 83 gallons. If we were still consuming water at the rate we did in 2005, we would be using 5 billion more gallons of water a day than we are.

We’ve also made dramatic progress across the past 50 years. The United States today uses less water every day, for all purposes, than it did in 1965. We have tripled the size of the U.S. economy in that half-century without using a single new gallon of water. Which is to say, every gallon of water we use today does three times the work it did in 1965.

Learn more about Rotary’s efforts to provide clean water, and how you can get involved.

Farmers today use a little less water than farmers did in 1965 — but they irrigate 45 percent more land and raise twice as much food.

That’s all good news. If climate change weren’t transforming everything about who gets water, and how much, it would be great news — the foundation of a new water ethic. As it is, the progress we’ve made in the United States and around the world will cushion the impact of climate change. But that impact is likely to be so dramatic, we may not notice.

We don’t often connect the dots when we talk about the impact of climate change, but it is almost all about water. Rain that doesn’t fall anymore where we expect it. Rain that falls in fewer events — fewer rainy days and fewer storms — but with much more intensity and volume. Snow that now falls as rain, stealing from a kind of “water savings account” that whole regions rely on, where winter snows pile up in mountain ranges, then melt gradually through the spring and summer to provide a steady flow of water.

Every day we’re seeing the dawn of a kind of brutal intensity to the climate, and to the weather, that feels all new. Fueled by one record-dry summer after another, megafires rage across the American West. Nourished by unusually warm ocean temperatures, slow-moving hurricanes in the Atlantic and supertyphoons in the Pacific explode with power and intensity just before coming ashore, where they release torrential, flooding rains.

We’re used to separating out our experience of water, especially in the developed world. There’s the water we use every day at home, in offices and factories, on farms. And then there’s the water out in the environment — the water that either comes, sometimes in destructive torrents, or doesn’t come, for months that add up to drought.

Water woes

Should current trends persist without mitigation:

1. By 2030, annual global water requirements will exceed current sustainable water supplies by 40 percent.
2. By 2040, nearly 600 million children will live in areas of extremely high water stress.
3. By 2050, the number of people at risk from floods will increase to 1.6 billion from 1.2 billion.

SOURCE: National Intelligence Council; UNICEF; World Meteorological Association

Climate change is going to erase that convenient distinction. The human water systems we’ve created, and that we all rely on, are going to look brittle and inadequate in the face of what’s coming.

The most important principle for adapting to the new world of water is this: Water does not respond to wishful thinking. Water problems don’t get better on their own. Just the opposite: The longer you wait to tackle a water problem of any kind, from a leak in the ceiling of your living room to a sea-level rise in your city, the harder, and the more expensive, that problem is to solve.

That’s not just true directly. Well-managed water undergirds the entire economy. But we don’t appreciate that very often. A city that floods once a week, a city that has to ration drinking water, a city that has to brace for destruction with every hurricane season or every fire season: Those are not places with stable, appealing economic futures.

We need to adapt to a new world. And we need to appreciate two more key ideas when it comes to water. First, we know how to solve every water problem that exists in the world — in engineering terms. We don’t need a Manhattan Project or a moon shot to tackle water. But the hardest part of most water problems is the people part. It’s getting people to see the water situation in a clear-eyed way — with realism, not optimism. And then getting people to change their behavior.

The second thing to appreciate is that all water problems are local — and that’s where they must be solved. The United States is a perfect example of a rich, smart country with a wild array of water problems. Not only is there no active national strategy for tackling them; in most cases there isn’t even national guidance.

But that can be liberating for cities, for regions, for states. The smartest communities — in the United States and around the world — aren’t waiting to tackle water and climate change. They aren’t waiting for the alarm from Washington, or the guidance, or even the financing.

Especially in the developed world, we’ve had a century-long, highly engineered golden age of water, in which we left the management of it to the experts, and most of us never had to give water a thought. It was invisible in our daily life. We need to see the new age of water turbulence with realism, with urgency, and with a sense that water is something all of us are going to have to grapple with.

The golden age is over. Water isn’t going to be invisible anymore. The future of water is now.

Charles Fishman is a frequent contributor to Rotary. His most recent book is One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon. He is also the author of the bestselling The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water.