Sunday, March 18, 90 singers and an orchestra will be debuting A Song for Our Planet by Henry Mollicone. It’s a free, classical, interfaith concert for environmental justice.

Commissioned by Plymouth Church and Seattle First Baptist Church, this work speaks to environmental stewardship from many religious traditions. Speakers include Ron Sims and various faith leaders. An environmental justice information fair will follow.

Get more information.

Clark:

Steve Mouzon explores how urban highways kill nearby property values. I feel like the idea could use more and better data—but this is certainly an interesting argument. Mouzon estimates that for every billion dollars spent on interstates, urban real estate has lost nearly three billion in property value.

Does wealth affect your ethics?  These researchers say yes.

“Occupying privileged positions in society has this natural psychological effect of insulating you from others…”

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Ariadna, Morguefile.com

How do we talk about climate impacts so that people start to pay a bit more attention and put their support behind solutions? Make it local, concrete, and personal, say the experts. But fear of drought or sea level rise doesn’t seem to do the trick. And news about receding glaciers—even here in the Northwest—doesn’t touch people’s day to day lives either. Yet. But what if we told you to prepare to say goodbye over the next decades to some of the things that make life fun? Wine, baseball bats, salmon dinners, guacamole, fly fishing. ski vacations, snorkeling. I plan to be around for a few more decades (knock on wood), and these are a few of my favorite things. read more »

Rice Crispy treat: the most delicious road metaphor ever coined; Flickr.

Water is the enemy of pavement. It gets into cracks, freezes, expands, and makes bigger cracks. It makes the ground beneath roads soggy and soft. Drive some heavy trucks over those roads and they can give way, forming potholes and ruts. Even when it’s not destroying the road, water pools on the surface, turning cars into dangerous hydroplanes and splashing buckets of filthy water onto windshields and pedestrians.

Water is the enemy of pavement—unless that pavement is permeable.

Permeable pavement …  read more »