Daily Score Blog

As you should know by now, we're offering an all-expense paid trip to Vancouver, BC, as a sweepstakes reward to one lucky reader who gets their friends to sign up for a Sightline Daily email (and if you’re not subscribed, you can also win by signing up now).

If you're a foodie, you'll be in heaven -- if my experience is any guide, the meals alone will be worth the (low) cost of admission.

But if you're a sustainability geek -- and I know you are -- there are some extra special reasons to visit Vancouver. The metro area is the home of dozens of great ideas, policies, and practices that cities all around Cascadia (and beyond) should consider emulating.

So, to pique your interest, here's a sampling of five sustainable wonders from Vancouver that are worth checking out on any visit...

The extraordinary rise in oil prices since 2003 has sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of the US economy (and the Cascadian economy). High oil prices have been a contributing cause of most recessions: Since 1948, “all large oil price increases but two have been followed by recessions,” as Andrew Hoerner and Nia Robinson of Redefining Progress (RP) write (pdf). “Four of the five recessions since 1970 . . . were preceded by big jumps in oil prices.” The figure above, from the Reserve Bank of St. Louis (hat tip to RP), illustrates the point. Shaded gray bars show the recessions officially declared by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The black and blue lines show the price of oil in inflation-adjusted “real” terms and in unadjusted “nominal” terms.

What’s more, the oil price surges of the recent past helped to trigger the wave of defaults and foreclosures that revealed the overextension of US mortgage lending. High energy prices have severely strained family budgets—especially low- and moderate-income family budgets. Some of those families couldn’t afford to keep paying their mortgages and also buy gasoline.

In short, if we weren’t so addicted to oil, we would not be so vulnerable to price shocks. This fact underlines the importance of seizing the opportunity of the financial meltdown and its resulting economic downturn to break the addiction.

Update 10/20: Crosscut has a version of this post.

What happened to the Olympic Peninsula after its wolves were hunted to extinction in the 1920s? There's a fascinating new study (pdf) out on this question -- the first of its kind as far as I know. As it turns out, eliminating this one keystone species sent shockwaves through the whole ecosystem. Some of the effects were felt almost immediately after wolves were extirpated and some are only just now becoming clear.

It's a shame that reading articles like means hacking through verbiage that can feel as dense as an Olympic rainforest -- it's all "flow-induced shear stresses," "fluvial erosion," and "ungulate exclusion" -- because the study's content is incredibly important for lay people to understand. (Good ordinary language articles are here and here.) The upshot is that researchers have determined that the Olympic wolves were river-keepers, in an indirect but very real sense.

Here's how it worked. Once upon a time, healthy wolf populations kept the native elk herds lean. But when the wolves were killed off, the elk populations spiked (with a colossal and much-noticed-at-the-time boom in the 1930s). The booming elk herds spent much of their time in the lush river bottoms, cropping the living heck out of new tree growth and hammering the seedlings of cottonwood, bigleaf maple, and even some conifers. Those young trees had stabilized the banks along the region's fast-flowing rivers. And without new saplings and their fortifying root-systems, the rivers began to erode their banks, eventually channelizing and "braiding" as they spread out along the newly-unstable valley floors.