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Two climate things. First, climate change is melting Washington’s glaciers, as the Wenatchee World reports (The World requires subscription, but the piece is republished here.) The article notes: “Nearly all of the state’s 700 glaciers are receding rapidly, and others have disappeared in the past few decades.” (Note the throw-backish disclaimer late in the article: the Wenatchee World’s editorial line dictates that the human role in climate change be termed...

Since 9/11 (three years ago tomorrow), national security has necessarily jumped to the top of all political agendas. Borders have tightened, government installations have gone on alert, and heaven help you if you leave your fingernail scissors in your carry-on bag! But in the midst of the furor over keeping terrorists from crossing North American borders, another set of invaders crosses them daily. They go by names many cannot pronounce,...

Moving around, like travel, broadens your perspectives and opens up your mind. But it also, I believe, disconnects you from the particular ecologies and communities that make us good stewards. (I developed these themes in my 1996 book This Place on Earth: Home and the Practice of Permanence.) Back when I was writing that book, I remember reading that Labor Day weekend is the biggest moving day of the year....

On Monday, the Vancouver Sunreported a slight dip in the number of motor vehicles registered in the city of Vancouver and in neighboring, transit-friendly New Westminster, along with much slower growth in the vehicle fleet across the metropolitan area. In the city of Vancouver, where the population has stabilized in recent years despite a construction boom, the number of registered vehicles dropped by about 1,500 to 304,981, according to [Insurance...

Cascadia’s inland pine forests have been, predictably, catching fire a lot this summer. (From the safety of a boat, I came within a couple hundred yards of a giant blaze on my vacation earlier this month.) And climate change has likely fanned the flames. But climate change’s biggest toll on inland forests, so far, has been to turn them blue – the color, not the mood or the political leaning....

Salmon farming, as is now widely practiced in British Columbia, has introduced a bevy of new threats to wild salmon survival, including disease, interbreeding, and localized pollution hotspots. It’s also ratcheted up pressure on marine food webs, with its demand for fish to feed to the penned salmon. (Salmon are predators. As Dick Manning has argued, raising them in captivity for food is like putting lions in feedlots and raising...

Timber exports from BC, especially from the province’s interior and especially to the United States, are roaring, despite the punishing tariffs Washington, DC, has imposed on Canadian lumber in protest over provincial subsidies. Prices are up by half over last year, the Vancouver Sun reports. (Subscription required.) What’s going on? The US home building industry had a booming spring, thanks to low interest rates and the expectation that they would...

More thoughts on the same item. Fires in the dry, inland Northwest are igniting as usual, near Washington’s Lake Chelan, for example. But such fires are commonplace; in fact, they maintain vigorous ecosystems. Cascadia’s coastal rainforests, especially northern ones, are a different story. They’re not adapted to fire. On our coast, as in tropical rainforests, fire is a sign of something unnatural-most likely, global climate change. North of Cascadia, in...

Provincial electric utility BC Hydro released its 20-year plan a few months ago, and The Tyee has a useful critique. BC’s energy use is somewhat more efficient than the Northwest states’. But there’s plenty of room for progress. The plan calls for modest expansion in wind-power and other clean, renewables. But it also glances yearningly at coal and another mega-dam. The plan is far too cautious about renewables, according to...

Wildfires keep proliferating in British Columbia. A week ago, there were 260 (more than double the record-setting number from the same date in 2003). Today, there are 444. The Santa Rosa (California) Press Democrat, in the extreme south of Cascadia, ran a valuable summary today of that area’s freakish weather. Like the BC fires, Santa Rosa’s weather is more implication, but not proof, of climate change. The gist: The unusually...