Current Stories
Editor's Top Picks
Portland's not a global city -- luckily
Oregonian
11/24/2009
Here's an interesting take on why Portland remains a livable, attractive city. Forget about progressive land-use policies or green lifestyles. Turns out we're not globally important enough to have an elite that drives out the middle class and attracts a service class.
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Dignity Village: A place to call home
Oregon Public Broadcasting
11/25/2009
Oregon is conducting a unique social experiment called Dignity Village. It's a collection of about 45 yurts in the corner of a Portland leaf-mulching yard where a group of homeless people live and operate a semi-permanent campground.
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OSU report finds shrinking snowpack, healthy forests
Oregonian
11/24/2009
Snowpack in some of the Oregon Cascade Range is dwindling, but western Oregon's Douglas fir forests appear unchanged, according to an analysis of climate change by researchers at Oregon State University.
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Western senators sponsor bill to attack pine beetles
San Francisco Chronicle
11/23/2009
More than 2.5 million acres of pine trees in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming have been killed by tiny beetles that burrow under the bark and lay their eggs, turning the green needles to the color of rust as they feed on the tree and restrict its ability to draw water.
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Data shows health reform would help Oregonians
Salem Statesman Journal
11/24/2009
National health care reform would help thousands of Oregonians, the Obama administration said Monday. Pending health care legislation would allow 715,000 residents who do not currently have insurance and 257,000 residents who have nongroup insurance to get affordable coverage through a health insurance exchange, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates.
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Study finds 17,650 creatures living in 'eternal watery darkness'
Oregonian
11/24/2009
Census of Marine Life scientists have inventoried thousands of deep sea species that have never known sunlight -- creatures that somehow manage a living in a frigid black world down to 3 miles below the ocean waves.
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Working plan looks closer for NW salmon protection
Oregonian
11/24/2009
Many hoped more than 10 years of lawsuits over protecting Northwest salmon and running Columbia Basin dams would finally come to a close in a Portland courtroom Monday.
They didn’t, but the end could be in sight.
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EPA cracks down on soil runoff from construction sites
Oregonian
11/24/2009
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today issued new rules to help reduce soil and sediment runoff from construction sites. The rules will begin to take effect in February 2010 and be phased in over four years. They require construction site owners and operators that disturb one or more acres to use best management practices to ensure that soil disturbed during construction activity does not pollute nearby water bodies.
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Recovery invisible to OR's small towns
Salem Statesman Journal
11/22/2009
Oregon's economy has hit bottom, and a slow recovery is under way, state lawmakers learned from forecasters. But the folks in Willamina, Dallas and countless rural towns across the state - which in some cases are one mill closure away from 80 percent unemployment - aren't celebrating.
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Views: Try spending less, giving more
Oregonian
11/22/2009
For three years now, families and churches - including many in Portland - have given more than 300 communities clean drinking water in an attempt to take back Christmas by worshiping fully, spending less, giving more and loving all.
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Bitter fight developing over sugar beets
Marketplace
11/22/2009
If the Midwest is the nation's breadbasket, then Oregon's Willamette Valley might be called its "seed basket." Organic growers who fear that genetically engineered sugar beets grown nearby could pollute their seeds with biotech-infused pollen are suing the USDA and hoping to keep that crop out of the ground next spring.
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Oregon tax votes foster competing claims
Oregonian
11/22/2009
Mike Roach makes a decent living selling clothes. Bess Wills doesn't do too badly selling cars. Both believe strongly in the role small business plays in the local economy, and both consider themselves die-hard public school supporters. Yet they stand at opposite poles of Oregon's upcoming tax election.
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Eugene seeks to sustain ‘green’ manager’s future
Eugene Register Guard
11/23/2009
When Eugene’s first sustainability manager left her job last summer, environmentalists thought the city would quickly find a replacement to lead the city’s quest for a greener future. But that hasn't happened.
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Oregon tree farmers invest in the majestic redwood
Ashland Daily Tidings
11/19/2009
Oregon tree farmers are planting at least 20,000 coastal redwood trees a year in Lane and Douglas counties. They're driven less the awe the big trees inspire in many people, than by the best return on their investment in 30 or 40 years, when the trees are harvested.
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Forests fight climate change on two fronts
Oregon Public Broadcasting
11/19/2009
And at a hearing on Capitol Hill, forest officials and lawmakers discussed ways that federal forestland could help combat climate change on at least two fronts.
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Oregon wolves again star in video -- with pups
Oregonian
11/20/2009
They walk in single file -- black- and gray-coated wolves gliding through a snowy open forest in eastern Oregon. The remarkable video, captured last week by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, is further evidence that wolves are re-establishing themselves here.
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RV park tenants face eviction from affordable housing
Oregonian
11/19/2009
A pastoral campground on the banks of the Columbia River has for decades provided about 60 low-income residents with a clean, cheap, and safe place to live in an Oregon county with a dearth of decent affordable housing. But regulators say it's operating illegally and the long-term tenants must go.
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Questions arise over Obama's salmon plan
Oregonian
11/19/2009
On Monday comes the latest in the long-running court battle over the government's plan to run its hydroelectric dams without pushing Columbia Basin salmon closer to extinction.
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Possible park at Fernhill Wetlands
Oregonian
11/19/2009
Wetlands near a Forest Grove sewage treatment could be turned into a park, a plan that delights area birdwatchers, but there's no money budgeted for the effort in the city west of Portland.
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Views: Sliding backward on climate change
Oregonian
11/19/2009
Portland may be at the edge of the continent, but in so many ways it's right at the center of Al Gore's green thinking.
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State gets grant to study green jobs
Salem Statesman Journal
11/20/2009
The state of Oregon has received a $1.25 million grant from the federal government to study green jobs.
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Oregon entrepreneurs see profits in carbon market
Oregon Public Broadcasting
11/18/2009
Many hope the Copenhagen summit will set up a global carbon trading market, along the lines of what's now being established in California. In Oregon, some entrepreneurs see a public good -- and private gain -- in these markets.
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A bridge over rising waters
Oregonian
11/19/2009
December is the big season for Willamette River cruises on the Portland Spirit, but that's also the big season for heavy rains. The ship's owners worry that the deluge will be so sudden and so great -- courtesy of global warming -- that the river will rise too high for the Spirit to pass under bridges.
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Tap water far 'greener' than bottled in study
Oregonian
11/18/2009
Even in a best-case scenario, drinking bottled water boosts greenhouse gas emissions 46 times more than drinking water from the tap, an analysis from Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality concludes.
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Gore insists on switch to clean energy, new politics
Oregonian
11/18/2009
The person most responsible for raising public consciousness on climate change, Nobel laureate and former Vice President Al Gore, is touring the country to tell us how to avert the calamities he has long projected.
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