Alien Invasion?
Biological pollution - the spread of invasive species of plants and animals - is one of the hardest problems to prevent, as this article illustrates. Zebra mussels may rank among the most important threats to Cascadia's hydroelectric and freshwater ecological systems. These fast-breeding bivalves can spread with astonishing rapidity, encrusting pipes, gates, and other underwater hardware of the hydropower infrastructure. So far, the Northwest has avoided an introduction of the pesky mollusks.
Other invasive species -- green crabs, spartina grass, Scotch broom, and English ivy -- have long since established themselves. (Read a regional summary in Sightline's State of the Northwest, which you can download here.) They're hard to get rid of. In the city of Seattle, English ivy has overrun more than a third of public-land forests. And the ivy is choking off forest succession, threatening to deforest these lands over the next 30 years, as the city's already mature trees die off. The city and Cascade Lands Conservancy have launched a program to uproot the ivy.
Unhappy Trails
To many of us, climate change has long been an abstract issue, with distant impacts. Not anymore. As Sightline's Eric de Place details in today's Seattle Weekly, the catastrophic damage wreaked by last October's floods on western Washington's hiking trails has brought climate change uncomfortably close to home. As the University of Washington's Philip Mote points out, no one can say for certain whether global warming caused October's floods. Nevertheless, the floods are the kind that scientists have been predicting-and what they expect in the future. Flood casualties include the Kennedy Hot Springs, the Monte Cristo ghost town, Baker Lake, footbridges and campgrounds in Mt. Rainier National Park, and backcountry trails in the Olympic Peninsula. In a Washington CEO article last year, Eric also detailed potential economic impacts of global warming on Washington state.
Think Globally, Tax Locally
Most northwesterners believe that governments pay for roadwork from gas tax revenue. And they're right about the federal and state/provincial level. But they're wrong about city and county road spending. That comes out of property and sales taxes. Regionwide, we spend several hundred million local, general-fund dollars a year on the infrastructure for cars and trucks. (Read details here.)
A citizen panel in Seattle has studied the city's roads and bridges and found a maintenance crisis. Some of the bridges are in danger of falling down. They recommend local vehicle charges to pay for repairs, though they grudgingly admit that a property tax may be the only viable option in the short term.
