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Stormwater—the rainwater that streams off roofs, parking lots, roads, and yards, carrying with it toxic pollutants—poses a costly, intractable problem for governments and businesses. In Washington, efforts to control stormwater have cost its cities hundreds of millions of dollars. The problem with stormwater comes from its massive volume, which floods homes and blasts through streams, flushing salmon eggs, gravel, and everything else out to sea. And it comes from the...

You may have seen the meme circulating around the internet:  some researchers from Australia New Zealand are claiming that owning a dog has as much impact on the planet as owning an SUV.  I’ll let New Scientist summarize their case: [A] medium-sized dog…consume[s] 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food…So that gives him a footprint of 0.84 hectares… Meanwhile,...

Editor’s Note: This post is part of Sightline’s Getaway to Seattle Sweepstakes. Sign up for one of our emails and be entered to win a two-day trip to Seattle. Seattle always ranks high on lists of US cities with green buildings, with more than 80 large buildings and nearly 50 homes now certified by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. Since the city began mandating green construction practices...

First-grade teacher Linda Erickson is a devout believer in the power of summer school. After 14 years in the classroom, she knows that for struggling students, the extra lessons help them keep hold of newly gained reading skills. Summer school provides them with breakfast and lunch—possibly their only solid meals of the day. And the routine of school can anchor young lives unhinged by parents absent because of work demands,...

This photo, submitted by the Lebers, caught my eye in Sightline’s photopool today. With National Park(ing) Day fresh in our minds, it’s apt to look for alternative uses of pavement we normally reserve for cars. The pictures shows a much more efficient use of space: a few dozen bikes in the space only three or four cars could fill. Have other photos of sustainable solutions in the Northwest or beyond?...

Some of the Sightline crew took a field trip today down the street to visit the folks celebrating National Park(ing) Day. Here are some snapshots. (More available on Sightline’s Flickr Photopool. Have your own pictures of Park(ing) Day or other sustainable wonders? Submit them!) Architecture firm Perkins+Will demonstrates their green roof design: More below the jump And Cascade Land Conservancy: And some were just there enjoying the weather:

A report released last year from the Livable Seattle Movement declared that Seattle’s existing zoning is more than enough—three times more—than we need to accommodate expected growth. Phew! What a relief. And here we thought the Seattle region would have to undergo some painful, politically-rending rezones in order to sop up all the new people—as many as 106,000 households—arriving in the next decade. And, by extension, it would also mean...

Ripples, and sometimes waves, of the economic tsunami continue to roil through cities across the United States. One product of the downturn is stalled real estate projects. Many shelved projects have left vacant lots, derelict buildings, or parking lots where housing or office space was planned. The need to put these spaces back into use has motivated some great thinking about how to integrate open space and farming into the...

The most common sense of the word “density” in land-use terms is simple: more people in a smaller area. Frequently the only way to accomplish this is to build taller, multi-unit buildings. High rises. But in areas with low concentrations of people, increasing density can mean something different than building up to the sky. There are ways to create more diversity and choice in single-family neighborhoods—accessory dwelling units (ADUs) can...

If you read beyond the dubious headlines today, “Think Twice About ‘Green’ Transport, Say Scientists” and “Train Can Be Worse for Climate than Plane,” you’ll find an interesting study that suggests policy makers go beyond tailpipe emissions when calculating the carbon impacts of planes, trains, buses, and cars. University of California-Berkeley researchers attempted to also account for greenhouse gases released when building the vehicles, generating fuel to run them and...