Current Stories
Editor's Top Picks
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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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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Views: Vanc. Island flooding has manmade roots
Victoria Times Colonist
11/24/2009
I have followed the stories of flooding in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island and heard about the heavy rains, the high tides, and the dikes. What I have not heard about is the underlying reasons for this flooding: urbanization and forest clearing.
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Conservation is key to dealing with CA's water woes
Los Angeles Times
11/24/2009
As climate change, environmental constraints and growth continue to tighten the valve on California's water supplies, the rest of the state is going to feel the pinch too. Not just during droughts but all the time. The reason is simple. Compared to building new reservoirs, recycling or seawater desalination, conservation is one of the cheapest, quickest and least environmentally damaging ways for the state to get more water.
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After the floods: A geological history of the NW
High Country News
11/23/2009
The view from State Route 281, a few miles south of Quincy, Wash., doesn't seem like one of the world's more dramatic landscapes. Not to me, anyway. This is country to be endured (better yet, slept through) on the way to other, more captivating environments. The topography here is mostly flat, and whatever isn't paved is russet or beige or an irrigated green.
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Green redemption
The Economist
11/24/2009
Depending on how you view it, climate change is either the biggest problem mankind faces or its greatest financial opportunity. For example, McKinsey has become known as a climate-change consultant, thanks to its greenhouse gas "cost abatement curve" showing the relative opportunity costs of different abatement activities.
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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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Life in the slow city
Living on Earth
11/22/2009
With no fast food restaurants or big box stores, the bicycle and pedestrian friendly Cowichan Bay in British Columbia has become North America's first Slow City. An offshoot of the Slow Food movement, it's a quiet resistance to drive-thru homogenization.
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Frozen salmon better for the planet
Oregonian
11/22/2009
Frozen salmon is better for the planet than fresh, because it takes so much less energy to make it to your dinner plate than catching fish and flying them to markets around the world. The findings of a study by Portland-based EcoTrust may fly against conventional assumptions that fresh is always better.
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Fatal attraction in acidifying oceans
BBC News
11/22/2009
Ocean acidification could cause fish to become "fatally attracted" to their predators, according to scientists. A team studying the effects of acidification - caused by dissolved carbon dioxide - on ocean reefs found that it leaves fish unable to smell danger.
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Sewer pollution spills into waterways
New York Times
11/23/2009
More than 9,400 of the nation's 25,000 sewage systems have reported dumping untreated or partly treated human waste, chemicals and other hazardous materials into rivers and lakes and elsewhere. As cities have grown rapidly across the nation, many have neglected infrastructure projects and paved over green spaces that once absorbed rainwater.
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Climate change speeds up since 1997 Kyoto accord
Seattle Times
11/23/2009
Since the 1997 Kyoto international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated - beyond some of the grimmest warnings made back then.
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Do it for the polar bears!
Washington Post
11/22/2009
For marketers, climate guilt isn't the easiest thing to sell. Part of the audience thinks climate change is fake, fuzzy or too far in the future to care about. And another segment of the audience believe in climate change so fervently that they're too paralyzed or resigned to respond to new messages. So can you change all these minds with an ad?
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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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Shoppers buy green despite tough economy
Reuters
11/22/2009
Despite the worst US recession in decades, sales of organic and sustainable products have continued to grow, experts say, with shoppers willing to spend a few more dollars in a bid to become more green.
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Canada needs 40 years to stabilize greenhouse gases
Kelowna.com
11/22/2009
Acting on climate change is urgent, but Canada needs 40 years to succeed in its own part of a global plan to stabilize the emissions that are warming the atmosphere, the country's top environment official said.
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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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California recycling program is on the rocks
Sacramento Bee
11/22/2009
For years California has courted a reputation as an eco-friendly, green-minded leader, but the state now finds its most basic program of recycling beverage bottles and cans mired in debt and litigation.
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Views: The Senate’s duty on climate
New York Times
11/22/2009
We cannot rewrite the Bush years any more than we can persuade the Chinese of the merits of a binding treaty to control greenhouse gases. What the United States can do is assume responsibility for its own emissions, and this the US Senate has manifestly failed to do.
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Review: An inconvenient solution
The Nation
11/22/2009
Occasionally, truth be told, Al Gore's book Our Choice verges on the nerdy. Taken as a whole, however, this is the most comprehensive and well-informed survey anyone has ever done of what we need to do to get off fossil fuel, writes Bill McKibben.
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Learning the lessons of the Pahsimeroi River
Boise Idaho Statesman
11/23/2009
Ranchers along the Idaho's Pahsimeroir River area have long pointed fingers at the mind-numbing red tape federal agencies required to eliminate barriers that blocked spawning streams and to provide more water for fish. But today, 10 miles of cold, spring-fed creek habitat that had been lost for up to a century are home to salmon
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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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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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Push on to turn BC pet cemetery into park
CBC BC
11/18/2009
The only pet cemetery in Vancouver could eventually disappear under a developer's bulldozer, but some pet lovers are trying to have the property turned into a park.
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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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