Dr. Robert Bentley is a Portland ophthalmologist with more than 30 years of experience.
As a physician and practicing ophthalmological eye surgeon with more than 33 years of clinical experience, I ll be among the first to tell you how important a different profession, that of optometry, is for overall eye health care. Optometrists perform valuable services, including routine eye exams and prescriptions for eyeglasses and contacts.
But optometrists are not medical doctors; they are not physicians. They do not have years of medical school education and post-med school residency or surgical training. Nor do optometrists have the direct clinical experience that helps ophthalmologists like me manage and avoid difficult, or even life-threatening, patient safety situations.
There s no escape from plastic.
Look around your kitchen, walk around your favorite park or beach and you ll likely find yourself in the presence of plastic pollution.
The United States produces enough plastic waste every 15 hours to fill Cowboys Stadium, the largest football stadium in the country. We eat about a credit card s worth of plastic every week because microplastics are so omnipresent in our environment. If our waste patterns continue, by 2050 the oceans could have more plastic than fish.
How did it get this way? It s not because people have been clamoring for more plastic in our lives. In fact, it s become nearly impossible to avoid plastic in packaging and consumer products.
March 05 2021
Graham Trainor is president of the Oregon AFL-CIO, the federation of labor unions representing more than 300,000 working Oregonians. Reyna Lopez is executive director of PCUN, representing farmworkers and Latinx working families.
In times of crisis, real leaders are forged.
During the year since Oregon s first confirmed case of COVID-19, countless examples of empathetic, worker-centered leadership have been showcased. When elected officials listen to workers, the policies they pass are stronger and more responsive to the needs of working families. For example, Oregon created and funded the Oregon Worker Relief Fund to ensure farmworkers who help put food on our tables and are least likely to have access to enough paid sick time could quarantine when needed.