Current Stories
Editor's Top Picks
Swift buses ready for fast lane
Everett Herald
11/25/2009
A new $29.6 million fast bus system, four years in the making, begins service Monday between Everett and Shoreline, just north of Seattle. It will be the first of its kind in Washington.
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Whidbey Island grocery turns nonprofit
Everett Herald
11/25/2009
A newly nonprofit Whidbey Island supermarket takes the revenue from cereal and lettuce sales and reinvests it into the island community. It's cultivating relationships with local farmers who can sell their harvest to the store seasonally.
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Tacoma brownfield project a US model
Tacoma News Tribune
11/24/2009
HUD is expanding its formerly narrow focus on housing to encompass a larger mandate: developing better communities through better transportation, schools, and environment. These principals are exemplified by the new housing being constructed on a Tacoma brownfield.
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WA 'biorefinery' to cut recycling costs, carbon footprint
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
11/24/2009
A biorefinery that aims to turn yard and food waste, sewage waste, and trash from construction, demolition and land clearing into renewable energy is coming to Eastern Washington, creating green jobs and cutting recycling costs.
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Thanksgiving shopping: Going local
Seattle Post Globe
11/24/2009
Washington's Cascade Harvest campaign has attracted more than 3,000 pledges from people promising to serve at least one locally grown, harvested, or raised food for the holiday.
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Whatcom growth plan allows farmland development
Bellingham Herald
11/25/2009
A controversial update of growth areas in Whatcom County was approved by the county council last night, allowing for growth into areas some wanted protected for farming.
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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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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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Restoring saltwater, and nature, to the Nisqually River estuary
Crosscut
11/24/2009
Earlier this month, the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge celebrated the restoration of the Nisqually River estuary. The cold salt water of Puget Sound poured onto the old diked pasture of the refuge at the beginning of October, undoing the late-19th-century "improvement" of the land, and beginning what refuge manager Jean Takekawa calls the largest estuary restoration in the Northwest.
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Food-safety lawyer's wish: Lay me off
Seattle Times
11/23/2009
You might say that E. coli has been very, very good to William Marler. If there's an outbreak of food-borne illness anywhere in the country - spinach, cookie dough, hamburgers, you name it - chances are Marler will be filing lawsuits on behalf of those who were sickened. But now he's lobbying to be put out of business.
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KC Metro won't cut bus service after all
Seattle Times
11/23/2009
Metropolitan King County Council members say they've figured out how to maintain existing bus service for two more years - instead of cutting service 9 percent as earlier proposed.
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New economy cities: A Seattle slew of advantages
The Christian Science Monitor
11/22/2009
Seattle is the prototype city of the future. It embodies in one leafy landscape virtually all of the forces driving the New Economy – exports, an educated workforce, a vibrant high-tech base, a budding green-tech sector, and an enviable lifestyle. Still, Seattle is far from perfect.
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Biologists rush to save fish after landslide
Seattle Times
11/20/2009
A gigantic landslide that buried a highway, uprooted homes and rerouted a river in Washington state's Cascade Range left hundreds of smaller victims: fish. Fisheries biologists from 10 government agencies and private groups are working shifts to try to save the salmon and trout.
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'Under-insured' growing as fast as uninsured
KPLU
11/19/2009
The trend of people no longer being able to afford health insurance has been getting worse, Washington officials say. A new state study predicts the number of people here without insurance will hit 1 million by the end of 2011.
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Wage confusion delays weatherization program
Olympian
11/19/2009
Washington's home-weatherization efforts have fallen at least two months behind goals set under the federal stimulus aid, the result of a mix-up over conflicting wage requirements under federal and state laws.
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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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Low-income housing reimagined
Real Change
11/19/2009
The Seattle Housing Authority unveiled a plan last week to remake Yesler Terrace's 561 units of public housing into a mixed-use area of office, housing, and retail with buildings up to 22 stories high.
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Infuriated mom: Why can't I protect my body?
Seattle Post Globe
11/18/2009
Kim Radtke of Seattle was pregnant with her now nearly three-week-old son when tests detected in her blood 11 chemicals, including mercury.
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Defending science: the disease of denialism
Seattle Times
11/18/2009
Fear is as infectious as any virus, and gives many Americans a warped view of the dangers posed by vaccines, genetically engineered crops and other beneficial technologies, New Yorker writer Michael Specter said in Seattle Tuesday.
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Endangered frogs released at Fort Lewis
Seattle Times
11/18/2009
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife says about 500 endangered Oregon spotted frogs have been released this fall at a lake on the Fort Lewis Army base near Tacoma.
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Physicians detail health hazards from coal
Oregonian
11/18/2009
A new report from the advocacy group Physicians for Social Responsibility concludes that pollutants from coal-fired power plants contribute to four of the five leading causes of mortality in the US: heart disease, cancer, stroke, and chronic lower respiratory diseases. Coal plants still provide about 40 percent of the electricity used in OR and nearly 20 percent in WA.
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Study shows toxins present at birth
KUOW
11/17/2009
Pregnant women are often extra careful to avoid toxic products, like certain plastics and chemicals in household cleaners. But a new study of West Coast mothers shows those efforts only go so far. Babies are born already exposed to toxins linked to serious health problems.
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520 plan would add second Montlake drawbridge
KPLU
11/17/2009
There's a potential milestone in the decades-long search for a replacement for the SR-520 bridge over Lake Washington, but a coalition of Seattle neighborhoods is vowing to torpedo it. A proposal approved Tuesday calls for widening the freeway and adding a second drawbridge in Montlake.
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A Q&A with Al Gore
Seattle Times
11/17/2009
On a book tour in Seattle, former Vice President Al Gore weighs in on the Copenhagen climate summit, Obama's efforts so far, the prospects for US legislation, pseudo-science and garden-variety denial.
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