Editor's Take: May 15, 2008
UW campus. (Flickr/Crocidillicus)
Green U.
The University of Washington is joining a handful of institutions – including Yale, Duke, Stanford and Western Washington University – in creating a College of the Environment. UW, reports the Seattle Times, aspires to offer the largest such college in the world. In related regional news, the Oregon Institute of Technology, in Klamath Falls, is going 100 percent geothermal.
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UW Plans World's Biggest Green College
Seattle Times
05/15/2008
The University of Washington has released plans to create a new College of the Environment, which would start with 97 faculty members, 1,135 students and a budget of more than $60 million, according to a UW report released this week.
The new college would merge six existing academic disciplines that focus on oceans, the atmosphere and forests.
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Alaska Gas Average Price 1st to Pass $4
Anchorage Daily News
05/15/2008
The average price for regular unleaded gasoline in Alaska rose above $4 a gallon Wednesday, making it the first state in the nation to pass that mark.
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NW Lawmakers Split on Farm Bill
AP
05/14/2008
Northwest lawmakers were split Wednesday as the House passed a $290 billion farm bill that offers more subsidies for farmers and food stamps for the poor and $170 million for the disaster-plagued Pacific Coast salmon fishing industry.
Eleven of 16 House members from Oregon, Washington and Idaho voted in favor of the five-year bill, while five Northwest lawmakers voted against it.
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Salmon Caught in the Carbon Net
Seattle Weekly
05/14/2008
Our mania for wild, fresh boutique fish comes at a high environmental cost. While the famed Copper River salmon are wild, fresh and organic, the miles they travel to get to Washington buyers may not be worth it.
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Peak-Oil Spike Reshapes the Suburbs
Georgia Straight
05/15/2008
The reality of peak oil will see properties classified into two types in the near future, according to Simon Fraser University professor Anthony Perl.
One will be properties from which owners can get to work, leisure activities, and services predominantly by car. The other offers alternatives to the automobile such as public transit, biking, and walking.
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Can Housing Be Green, and Cheap?
Portland Tribune
05/15/2008
A Portland nonprofit agency that builds and sells new homes is showing how cheap, green homes can be done. HOST Development Inc. is finishing work on the first homes in its Helensview Homes development -- the first traditional single-family neighborhood project in town to receive LEED-ND (Neighborhood Development) certification.
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Crunchy Courtenay Opposes BC Carbon Tax
Victoria Times Colonist
05/15/2008
Courtenay city council, which frequently trumpets the city's green credentials, will send a letter to the province opposing the upcoming carbon tax.
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Views: Boise Biking Best
San Francisco Bay Guardian
05/15/2008
By drawing a legal line in the sand between cars and bikes, allowing them different rules in the same environment, Idaho's bike laws ultimately foster a mutual respect between drivers and cyclists. In Boise it's common to see road signs instructing drivers and cyclists to "share the road." It may be common sense advice for cyclists, but to motorists, it's a subtle reminder that bigger shouldn't mean better.
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Timothy Egan: It's November in Oregon
New York Times
05/15/2008
This state is known for many things -- good wine, the imperial branding of the Nike swoosh, a political culture that produces contrarians of both parties -- but ethnic diversity is not one of them. This state has an African-American population of less than 2 percent.
And yet on May 20, when voters here could finally end the Democratic presidential marathon by giving Senator Barack Obama an outright majority of pledged delegates, don't expect to hear much about how a black man has broadened the playing field for his party by winning a heavily white state.
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Conspiracy Theory
Atlantic Monthly
05/14/2008
Climate-change litigation is heating up. Will the legal strategy that brought down Big Tobacco work against Big Oil?
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