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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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Food-safety lawyer's wish: Lay me off
Seattle Times
11/23/2009
You might say that E. coli has been very, very good to William Marler. If there's an outbreak of food-borne illness anywhere in the country - spinach, cookie dough, hamburgers, you name it - chances are Marler will be filing lawsuits on behalf of those who were sickened. But now he's lobbying to be put out of business.
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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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KC Metro won't cut bus service after all
Seattle Times
11/23/2009
Metropolitan King County Council members say they've figured out how to maintain existing bus service for two more years - instead of cutting service 9 percent as earlier proposed.
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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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Recovery invisible to OR's small towns
Salem Statesman Journal
11/22/2009
Oregon's economy has hit bottom, and a slow recovery is under way, state lawmakers learned from forecasters. But the folks in Willamina, Dallas and countless rural towns across the state - which in some cases are one mill closure away from 80 percent unemployment - aren't celebrating.
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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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Oregon tax votes foster competing claims
Oregonian
11/22/2009
Mike Roach makes a decent living selling clothes. Bess Wills doesn't do too badly selling cars. Both believe strongly in the role small business plays in the local economy, and both consider themselves die-hard public school supporters. Yet they stand at opposite poles of Oregon's upcoming tax election.
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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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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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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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San Francisco's health care a model
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
11/20/2009
San Francisco did not wait for Washington's health care overhaul. Most uninsured adults here are already reaping the benefits of a government-run health care program -- seeing doctors, filling prescriptions, and getting surgeries they could not otherwise afford.
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Oregon tree farmers invest in the majestic redwood
Ashland Daily Tidings
11/19/2009
Oregon tree farmers are planting at least 20,000 coastal redwood trees a year in Lane and Douglas counties. They're driven less the awe the big trees inspire in many people, than by the best return on their investment in 30 or 40 years, when the trees are harvested.
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Biologists rush to save fish after landslide
Seattle Times
11/20/2009
A gigantic landslide that buried a highway, uprooted homes and rerouted a river in Washington state's Cascade Range left hundreds of smaller victims: fish. Fisheries biologists from 10 government agencies and private groups are working shifts to try to save the salmon and trout.
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'Under-insured' growing as fast as uninsured
KPLU
11/19/2009
The trend of people no longer being able to afford health insurance has been getting worse, Washington officials say. A new state study predicts the number of people here without insurance will hit 1 million by the end of 2011.
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