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Editor’s Note: Anna finished this post (and a few more) before she went on maternity leave. She gave birth to a healthy girl, Audrey, on December 13. My husband Gus and I have been lucky. I’m 36—and therefore considered an “elderly primigravida” on my charts at my doctor’s office (that’s “pregnant old-timer and first-timer” in layman’s terms). I’ve had a healthy pregnancy—so far—and we avoided the nightmarish saga of infertility...

Here’s a story that caused a bit of buzz in the office earlier in the week. Apparently, researchers in Toronto found that university students who bought “green” products in controlled tests were less generous with strangers, and more likely to tell a fib. The researchers suggest that this is an example of “licensing”: when people act virtuously in one domain, they feel entitled to shirk in another. Or, to put...

We wrote a while back about a claim that was circulating around the interwebs:  that a German Shepherd (or other good-sized dog) has a bigger impact on the climate than an SUV.  When I first heard it, I wasn’t sure what to think—it seemed implausible, but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t true. So looked into the numbers—and even though I’m certain that the New Zealand-based architects who make it...

A stroll down a stretch of 2nd Avenue Northwest in Seattle is practically a walk in the park. The slightly meandering residential street is lined with wide strips of native grasses, small shrubs, and trees. Along the shoulder, interspersed among parking spots, are ponds and swales—gentle depressions—that fill with water during a downpour. What you won’t find are sludgy gutters brimming with muddy water and trash, or deserts of black...

You can adopt a puppy from the pound, or even a soldier fighting in Iraq to whom you can send a care package. And in Seattle, you can adopt a storm drain. That’s right, you can lay claim to your very own portal to the gutter. The city is so understaffed and over-storm drained that it’s asking residents to adopt a drain and remove the leaves and debris that clog...

(Just an average day in the office, clad in thrift store finds. Click for larger image.)

Here in the Northwest, coal feels like someone else’s problem. Maybe the Appalachian miner, a Wyoming rancher or someone watching their asthmatic kid gasp for clean air among the Midwest’s dirty coal-fired power plants. By comparison, flipping a light switch here makes us feel almost virtuous. After all, we know much of the electricity that powers our homes comes from hydropower, which has negligible climate impacts compared to burning fossil...

Sandra Steingraber is my hero. Her book, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, chronicles her own pregnancy from both a scientific and personal perspective. It’s beautifully and lovingly written—yet for a pregnant woman it’s also a tough read. Trained as a biologist, Steingraber meticulously documents the toxic hazards we live with every day, and that threaten each crucial stage of fetal development. It’s not a pretty picture. One point...

Check it out: City-Go-Round, the transit app index to rule them all, created by our friends who did Walkscore. City-Go-Round has transit apps from cities from around North America. It’s live now, with transit data for the Northwest’s biggest cities — Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver — but also for a bunch of smaller cities too. No matter where you are*, City-Go-Round will let you figure out when the bus arrives or which subway to take....

Fascinating.  According to this BBC video, it takes 80 cyclists, biking flat out on stationary bikes hooked to generators, to produce enough power to heat up the water for a single shower.  Behold: This reminds me of the Portland gym that feeds muscle power back into the electricity grid—a nifty idea, but unfortunately not one that’ll generate a lot of juice.  Based on the above video, it’d take 6 hours...