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Seattle is simply gaga for gardening. As I describe in an article for seattlepi.com, elected officials, nonprofit groups, churches, businesses, and schools are pushing all sorts of programs to promote in-city farming, even naming 2010 the Year of Urban Agriculture. It’s exciting stuff. But the Emerald City is not alone in its love of fresh, seasonal homegrown pickings. That made me wonder what Seattle’s farms-and-foodies neighbor to the south is...

Spring has sprung and for thousands of northwesterners, thumbs are turning green. But for apartment or condo dwellers—like me—urban gardening can be a challenge. Many new buildings are being outfitted with rooftop gardens for tenants’ use, but they’re still spendy and scarce; most of us will have to look to home-owning friends with a few square feet to spare or vie with neighbors for a plot in high-demand community gardens....

My 1994 Oregon-made Burley bike trailer-stroller (above) is still dear to my heart, but innovations in newer Burleys and in other companies’ offerings show that tools for human-powered urban mobility are developing at a rapid clip. The 31-year-old Eugene company Burley and four manufacturers outside the Northwest offer bike trailer-stroller-cart-jogger hybrids that convert into so many mobility tools they are like something out of Transformers. Almost every Burley model is...

When I was growing up in Seattle in the sixties, the neighborhood grocery where my mom shopped let her and other regular customers push purchases home in the store’s shopping carts. We lived two blocks away, and we returned the carts promptly to safeguard the privilege. It was sometimes my older siblings’ job to return the cart while the rest of us put away the provisions at home. Consequently, my...

There’s been a baby boom in the local orca population. Last year five orcas joined the pods that frequent Puget Sound and the waters around the San Juan and Gulf islands. And two more killer whales have been born so far in 2010. That brings the current number of southern resident killer whales to 89, and an official count of 87 for 2009 (orca calves aren’t officially tallied until they’ve...

My co-presenter at last weekend’s Carbon Neutrality Unconference, smart-guy Pete Erickson of Stockholm Environment Institute, used four slides that are worth sharing again. Taken together, they’re an excellent—if somewhat wonky way—to think about the basic structure of reducing emissions.   1. What are the cheapest reductions? Full size image here. This McKinsey Institute chart depicts the cost of various carbon “abatement” (i.e. “reduction”) strategies given current technology. The bars that...

Recently, Professor James Lovelock sounded a fatalistic note about climate change as he pitched his new book, “The Vanishing Face of Gaia: Final Warning.” Lovelock, a charming 90-year-old with a history of ground-breaking science behind him, has concluded that the effects of climate change are irreversible and that human beings will be largely extinct in the near future. Not all human beings but “as many as 7 out of 8...

They were an unlikely ally for urban agriculturists, but genetic engineers in Seattle’s biotech industry finally succeeded in developing a sustainable backyard farm animal for the Northwest: a hybrid salmon-goat. Enthusiasts are touting the new salmon-goat as victory for the local food movement, a strategy for achieving carbon neutrality, and even an antidote to the threat of peak oil. Seattle city council president Richard Conlin plans to introduce legislation loosening...

One thing regional leaders can do if they want to support long-term sustainability, along with investing in creating green jobs, is buying art. And I mean lots of art, really big art. Just how big are the art projects I am thinking about? Big enough to cover the Columbia River! And this isn’t about wrapping the river in pink satin, either. I’m talking about the Confluence Project, an ongoing project...

The undemocratic design of the US Senate is a huge obstacleto progress in the Northwest. How did the Senate get set up in the first place? Richard Rosenfeld, writing six years ago in Harper’s answers that question. The 1787 Constitutional Convention created the Senate in a triply split vote won by states representing just one third of the fledgling nation’s (free, white, male, propertied) electorate. In doing so, the convention...