Alan
Little known fact about me: my first publishing venture was not Sightline. It was an alternative newspaper I ran with a friend in junior high school. My co-publisher was Clark Cohen, who went on to have an astonishing career as an entrepreneur in aviation and aeronautics. He recently published a piece for the space-research community that has tucked within it one of the most lucid and insightful arguments for reforming Congress through ranked choice voting in multi-winner districts that I’ve seen (aside, of course, from the superb work of Sightline’s own Kristin Eberhard).
If you want to see what climate change could look like in Cascadia, just read Cliff Mass’s weather blog from this past week, such as Sunday, June 28. The temperature maps look like they came from the Persian Gulf.
In a staff discussion this week, I recounted something I read years ago: that more American households own guns than own bicycles. That appears not to be true anymore, if it ever was. Gun ownership has declined from half of households in the 1970s to 34 percent in 2012. Meanwhile, about 45 percent of American households owned bicycles in 2001, according to this paper. (Reader challenge: find more recent data and assemble time trends for both. Canada? Cascadia-specific data? I wonder which direction the bicycle trend has gone since then: up or down? What year did the lines cross, if they did?)
Keiko
This Sunday: Don’t miss this awesome race and climate justice event at the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in Seattle. Resilience at the Crossroads of Race and Climate Justice falls on the 10 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a tragic disaster that exemplified the lack of resources and support that climate vulnerable communities receive. Jacqueline Patterson, NAACP National Director of Environmental Justice, will be the keynote speaker. Come be a part of an intersectional movement. Plus, it’s free! You can RSVP here.
Climate change is drastically altering Mount Rainier. Global warming is melting its glaciers at six times the historic rate. Is the end near for our Northwest treasure? This multimedia article tells the tale.
Kristin
350Deschutes just made this video about how climate change is hurting communities here in Oregon.
It really makes me mad to hear Lindsay Graham saying that the South Carolina shooting was the act of one crazy individual, completely outside the cultural context of Southern racism. And Rick Perry has the gall to call it an “accident”!!! With a lot of science and a shocking lack of profanity, this essay neatly cuts Graham and other racism deniers off at the knees. It’s not mental illness. It’s racism.
Flashback to 1996, and its all STILL TRUE! This excellent essay describes how our two-party system “gives the appearance of public participation while preventing its substance.”
A nice take down of the unsupported assumptions about Homo-economicus, and the evidentiary research behind Elinor Ostrom’s conclusions that humans are very capable of managing common resources on collective, collaborative ways.
