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Interesting stuff in today’s "Rethinking Portland" issue of the Portland Tribune. The Trib explains the rationale for the special series thus: For decades, Portland has been viewed across the nation as an icon of livability and progressiveness, a community that introduced the nation to regional planning and prevention of big city sprawl, a steward of the environment and a proponent of diverse transportation systems, including light rail. But as we...

Three stories around Cascadia mark the spread of biofuels: biomass for heating schools, biodiesel for heating homes, and a new cross-border biodiesel project for trucks. Brush fires in the schoolThe AP recently reported on a Forest Service program, Fuels for Schools, that sends the slashed brush and limbs from forest thinning to heat schools in several states including Idaho and Montana. Replacing oil furnaces, biofuels reduce cost, air pollution, and...

Driving is far and away the biggest source of climate-warming emissions in the Pacific Northwest.  Together, motor gasoline and highway diesel account for about 40 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels in BC, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.  (In Washington, the figure is 36 percent—click on the graph for details.) Nothing else we do comes close to matching the amount of CO2 that we emit when we drive....

Yoiks:  A southern Idaho reservoir is contaminated with mercury at levels up to 180 times higher than those found in lakes in the northeast US.  From the Idaho Statesman: "Nobody’s ever seen a hot spot like this before," said Mike DuBois, an air quality analyst at the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality. The likely culprit:  four gold mines across the border in northern Nevada, which emitted 15,000 pounds of mercury...

Following Oregon’s lead, Washington’s governor asked the federal government to reinstate protection for all of Washington’s roadless areas (those areas that are untouched by roads but are outside the formal protection of national parks or wilderness areas). Here’s the backstory: Bush administration policies devolved protection of those roadless areas to individual national forests, which resulted in roughly 700,000 acres in Washington losing protection. Rather than submitting a new (time-consuming, expensive,...

The US Forest Service is finally going to look into the merits of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification for a small number of forests, including the Fremont National Forest in southern Oregon. Continued cutting on federal land, even under FSC standards, is not exactly popular with many conservationists. But the reality nowadays is that federal-land logging is likely to increase because of the Healthy Forests Initiative and, especially, slick new...

In a troubling new development for mountain caribou, the BC government is considering abandoning efforts to sustain the most threatened and isolated populations of mountain caribou in the province. That decision would almost certainly be a death knell for the few remaining caribou, the Selkirk herd, that continue to visit the continental United States. (Read the full reporting in the Globe and Mail.) The Selkirk caribou roam in remote areas...

Just in case you were wondering:  the federal minimum wage in the US—currently $5.15 per hour—is at its lowest level in 5 decades, adjusted for inflation: The nominal US minimum wage has remained unchanged for the last 9 years; over that time, inflation has whittled away more than a fifth of the buying power of an hour of minimum-wage work. The (relatively) good news for low-income workers is that, in...

High gas prices may be grabbing headlines, but there’s another trend worth watching: the Northwest’s faltering ecosystems. Our (in)attention to ecosystem health is an example par excellence that we should measure what matters. All too often the converse is true: we let what matters be dictated by what we can measure. Biological systems are enormously complex and are inherently dynamic. So precise up-to-the-minute trend data is usually not available. And...

Based on figures through August, per-capita gasoline consumption in British Columbia in 2005 has dropped to its lowest level since 1978, which is the earliest year for which records are available.  BC’s gas consumption is on track to fall to 19.2 liters per person per week—just a hair lower than in 1990 and 1991, but a significant landmark nonetheless. Just as important, per capita gas consumption in the province seems...