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Alan: Sometimes, people ask me how I remain hopeful, given—well—everything. The answer is that action breeds hope. No, action IS hope. And action is breaking out all over the place, as Bill McKibben relates beautifully in his new Rolling Stone piece. “After decades of scant organized response to climate change, a powerful movement is quickly emerging around the country and around the world.” I’ve been on a John Vaillant tear....

Alan At this time of year Cascadia’s best known Orca pod is down south, off the Redwood Coast of California. NOAA Fisheries tracks the pod’s whereabouts daily, and you can follow along here. The nutrition and health book that has most impressed me is Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy. It’s my food Bible. And it basically recommends a Mediterranean diet. So I was gratified and fascinated to see the news...

If you live in Seattle and you haven’t yet seen one of those charming little car2go vehicles humming delightfully up your local hill, I really don’t know where you’ve been hiding. There are 330 of them zipping around the city, and they helped peg Seattle at number six nationally for number of car shares (489). Portland bested its northern neighbor, coming in at number four, with about ten percent more...

Never content, the crew over at Walk Score is at it again. This time, they’ve handed over the keys by letting users provide on-the-street feedback about neighborhood walkability. With their new iPhone app (us Droid users will have to wait), you can mark neighborhood gems, identify problem spots, find neighborhood walking tours, and see what other users have added. This is a huge step forward, adding qualitative real-world knowledge to...

Clark: Conservative blogger James Bacon makes the case for smart growth, largely founded on eliminating government subsidies for cars, and relaxing zoning restrictions so that homes and businesses aren’t so rigidly segregated. An example: Many counties have imposed density limitations on new growth with the thought that they would limit the impact of development on roads and schools. But smearing 1,000 people over 1,000 acres of land is impossible to...

Eric dP: I’ve got a pair of good suggestions this week. In the Vancouver Observer, Barry Saxifrage looks at national emissions trends and reveals that the world leader is—it’s hard to believe it, but it’s true—the United States. And as he points out, US reductions are no small potatoes: How big is a cut of 430 million tonnes of CO2? It’s equal to all CO2 from all Canadians outside Alberta....

Those people at Walk Score just don’t know when to stop: today, they’ve announced new Bike Score rankings. No surprises with the victors: Minneapolis takes the top spot (Bike Score: 79) while Portland and San Francisco settle for second and third (both have a Bike Score of 70). Seattle comes in at number seven (Bike Score: 64). The block-by-block algorithm takes four criteria into account: bike lanes (how good is...

The hotshot team over at Walk Score is at it again. This time, they’ve ranked 25 major US cities based on transit. No surprise, New York City takes the cake, pulling off an impressive 81. San Francisco, Boston, DC, and Philadelphia round out the top 5. The Northwest fares decently with Seattle coming in a #7 and Portland landing at #10. The scores are calculated looking at frequency, types of routes,...

If you’re an urban walkable-neighborhood maven, you’re probably seen Walk Score—a great way to rank the accessibility of goods and services in just about any neighborhood in the US or Canada.  And if you’re a transit-app aficionado, you probably know about Transit Score, which ranks neighborhoods by how well they’re served by transit. Now, the good folks over at Walk Score have built an apartment search smart bomb.  It filters...

Are you in the market for a new place to live with a shorter commute? There’s an app for that. The geniuses at Walk Score just released a nifty new system for finding apartments close to your workplace—and that lets you select whether you want to commute on transit, by bike, on foot, or in a car.  Check out Tech Crunch’s coverage, or just watch the video demo: