Current Stories
Editor's Top Picks
Vancouver redevelopment as social experiment
New York Times
11/24/2009
Downtown Eastside, a notorious high-poverty neighborhood in Vancouver, BC, known for its concentration of homeless people and drug and crime problems is getting a massive makeover that some view as a panacea for the city's social problems.
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Parents beware: Hazardous toys still on shelves
Los Angeles Times
11/24/2009
Are the toys we're buying any safer than they were a couple of years ago, when millions of playthings were recalled because of high lead levels and other hazards?
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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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Missoula County goes green with grass parking lot at development park
Missoulian
11/24/2009
They've grassed over a park and put up a parking lot.
Finishing touches were applied last week on a unique $250,000 reinforced grass parking lot in Missoula County's Development Park.
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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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The changing SF skyline
San Francisco Chronicle
11/22/2009
For more than 20 years, San Francisco planners have nudged the city's burgeoning financial center towards these principles: don't drive cars, make street-level life more appealing, and let the skyline rip with ultra-tall high-rises. Now they've tweaked that thinking with intriguing specifics, including a "crown" of 1000-foot-tall towers.
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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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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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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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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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Bottled water sucks
The Nation
11/19/2009
With style, verve and righteous anger, a new documentary exposes the bottled water industry's role in suckering the public, harming our health, accelerating climate change, and contributing to overall pollution.
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Waste Not Baskets ready for Winter Olympics
Vancouver Sun
11/20/2009
Rooms in the Vancouver and Whistler athletes' villages will feature recycling containers -- called Waste Not Baskets -- made from recycled plastic.
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California rejects energy-hungry TVs
Los Angeles Times
11/18/2009
California moved to crack down on the sale of energy-gobbling big-screen television sets that now account for about 10 percent of a typical household's monthly power bill.
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Vancouver endorses plan light on parks
Vancouver Sun
11/18/2009
Vancouver's city council has unanimously endorsed a plan to create a high-density neighbourhood with a civic plaza, residential and office space on the final undeveloped section of the former Expo lands. What it doesn't include is the 2.75 acres of park space per 1,000 people that city council holds as a goal.
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Paying more for flights eases guilt, not emissions
New York Times
11/17/2009
One of the first travel companies to offer airline customers the option of buying so-called carbon offsets to counter theit planet-warming emissions has canceled the program. While it might help travelers feel virtuous, the offsets were not helping to reduce global emissions and might even encourage people to travel more.
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EPA has new 'green homes' Web site
Oregonian
11/17/2009
The US Environmental Protection Agency has a new "Green Homes" Web site that aims to guide homeowners and renters toward environmentally friendly home improvement and yard care.
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Green Wave Energy may turn wind power on its axis
Los Angeles Times
11/17/2009
The company and investors are banking on the unconventional design of its microturbines that can generate energy by capturing breezes from any direction.
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Innovator and writer looks ahead
San Francisco Chronicle
11/15/2009
The founder of the Whole Earth Catalog lives on a tugboat with shrubbery on top and solar panels in front of the steering wheel. And yet he makes no apologies to the cow he just washed down with a frosty cup of ice cream. Stewart Brand's new book, "Whole Earth Discipline," thrusts him in the middle of the global climate debate, and not in an easily digestible way.
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Portland project forages for urban edibles
Oregonian
11/15/2009
For many Portlanders, and increasingly others across the nation, fruit picking parties are a way to incorporate the bounty of our city into their diets. The idea behind this type of urban foraging is to use food that's all around us but often overlooked.
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Views: Bellying up to environmental change
Washington Post
11/15/2009
We know more than we've ever known about the innards of the global food system - that food can both nourish and kill, that is production can both destroy and enhance our environment. So it's hard to avoid concluding that eating cannot be purely personal. What I eat influences you. What you eat influences me. Our diets are deeply, intimately and necessarily political.
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Paint it green: the house that soy built
CBC BC
11/12/2009
A house with furnishings and fixtures fashioned from soy products is showing off the versatility of the bean, billed as a green alternative to petroleum.
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UBC floats sustainable-building sciences program
Georgia Straight
11/12/2009
Professors and students at the University of British Columbia are hoping the federal government will fund a sustainable-building-sciences program to help solve urban problems.
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