Editor's Take: May 19, 2008
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Chia Pet Politics: Obama's Popularity, and Crowds, Keep On Growing
Barack Obama closes his Oregon campaign with a record crowd in Portland. The Oregonian reports that his Sunday speech drew in 72,000 people. In environmental news, Olympia's marina gets kudos as one of the most environmentally-friendly in the nation. That's no clean bill for oceans though, as hundreds of thousands of pieces of trash float in the Pacific.
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Obama Draws 72,000 in Portland
Oregonian
05/19/2008
Tens of thousands jammed Tom McCall Waterfront Park in Portland on Sunday to watch Sen. Barack Obama wrap up a busy weekend in Oregon and a historic campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
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Olympia Marina Helps Keep Puget Sound Clean
Olympian
05/19/2008
Olympia's Swantown Marina is one of 10 percent in the state to receive certification under a Clean Marina Program offered by the state Departments of Ecology and Natural Resources, the Northwest Marine Trade Association, Washington Sea Grant, the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance and the EnviroStar Cooperative.
And it’s one of 2 percent of the marinas in the state to receive the Leadership Award granted by the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, a Seattle-based watchdog group that monitors and patrols Puget Sound in search of polluters, and has inspected the marina three times in the past year leading up to the award.
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A Sea of Synthetic Trash
Toronto Globe and Mail
05/19/2008
Out in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, hundreds of kilometres from land, Captain Charles Moore stood at the bow of his 50-foot catamaran and looked toward the horizon. But instead of gliding along calm, sapphire-coloured waters glistening in the afternoon sun, his aluminum-hulled Alguita carved through a sea of shiny, modern-day refuse.
For days on end, it was plastic, plastic, everywhere.
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Inertia at the Top: Childhood Obesity
Washington Post
05/19/2008
The problem at first was that the problem was ignored: For almost two decades, young people in the United States got fatter and fatter -- ate more, sat more -- and nobody seemed to notice. Not parents or schools, not medical groups or the government.
But since the alarm was finally sounded in the late 1990s, the problem has been the country's reaction: a fragmented, inchoate response that critics say has suffered particularly from inadequate direction and dollars at the federal level.
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The Grass Grows Greener, On the Roof
Vancouver Sun
05/19/2008
At the moment, the grandest and most ethically ambitious architecture in Vancouver, B.C.--the green, living roof of the new convention centre--resembles a hair plug job. There's a lot of bald up there.
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Native B.C. Village Battles for Return of the Salmon
Vancouver Sun
05/19/2008
A native village in northern B.C. struggling to force Canada to restore a rich salmon fishery destroyed almost 50 years ago has won a rare court decision that will allow it to continue the battle.
The recent decision by the Federal Court of Canada means Ottawa must pay a significant portion of the village of Hagwilget's substantial legal costs in advance of the court battle. Those costs could total about $1.5 million.
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Views: Governor Palin's $1.2 Billion Mistake
Anchorage Daily News
05/19/2008
Alaska Governor Palin's $1.2 billion energy relief plan is probably good politics, but it's a hideously expensive, dangerously short-sighted use of the state's surplus oil money.
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Seattle Energy Assistance Program Cash-Strapped
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
05/18/2008
A Seattle program that provides emergency electric bill grants to low-income families is out of money, and officials have temporarily closed it to applicants.
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Who Loves High Energy Prices? The Environment
Oregonian
05/19/2008
One of the more promising recent pieces of global warming news emerged from a new federal report: We're likely to burn through a lot less energy during the coming decades than experts assumed as little as a year ago.
That means we won't be pumping as much extra greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, making it at least a little easier for states such as Oregon, trying to cut such emissions back to where they were more than a decade ago.
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Chasing Utopia: A Life Without Stuff
New York Times
05/19/2008
Like many other young couples, Aimee and Jeff Harris spent the first years of their marriage eagerly accumulating stuff: cars, furniture, clothes, appliances and, after a son and a daughter came along, toys, toys, toys.
Now they are trying to get rid of it all, down to their fancy wedding bands. Chasing a utopian vision of a self-sustaining life on the land as partisans of a movement some call voluntary simplicity, they are donating virtually all their possessions to charity and hitting the road at the end of May.
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