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Editor’s Note November 2023: What are you doing this Black Friday? This popular Sightline article, from Anna Fahey’s 2012 series My Year of Nothing New, provides tips on how to turn the biggest shopping day of the year into a day of buying nothing. Other alternatives include buying unique gifts at local craft fairs, artisan markets, and second-use markets. You can also find a “Buy Nothing” community near you, where you can post items you don’t need...

Anna: This caught my eye on Facebook this week (it made the rounds a while back, maybe you saw it in April): A map that shows how many hours minimum-wage earners would have to work to afford rent on a two-bedroom apartment in all 50 states. Nowhere is a 40 hour work week enough. In fact, in most states, rent requires more than 70 hours of work—if you can find...

This is just depressing. Media Matters has released a study showing that Joe Biden’s smile was covered far more than climate change during the 2012 election. It may be comparing apples to oranges, but it gives us a pretty good idea of the US media’s skewed priorities and how they “serve” (or fail) their audiences: Climate change was almost entirely absent from the political discourse this election season, receiving less...

Nowadays, in the Northwest as across North America, most people live in houses or apartments that they own or rent. But not so long ago, other, less-expensive choices were just as common: renting space in a family’s home, for example, or living in a residential hotel. Rooming houses, with small private bedrooms and shared bathrooms down the hall, were particularly numerous. This affordable, efficient form of basic housing is overdue...

Today is the beginning of Diwali—one of the most important events in the Hindu calendar—and that seems like a decent reason to take a look at a new facet of the Northwest’s demographic makeup. The world’s largest Hindu country, India, has added a substantial share of its people to some Northwest cities. Bellevue has far and away the highest number of Indian people in the state, though nearby Redmond claims...

It was a long and brutal campaign season for the Northwest, as for the rest of the United States. In the end, it brought a historic vote on marriage equality, a new approach to marijuana regulation, a small leftward shift in the Oregon House and the Northwest’s Congressional delegation, election of a strong champion for clean energy to the governor’s mansion in Olympia, and an awful lot of the same people—or...

What’s in a storm’s name(s)? In hopes of avoiding a “Hurricane Cassandra” (yet another wake-up call that we simply ignore as Joe Romm fears) and moving us closer to a Cuyahoga—the name of the river in Ohio that caught fire in 1969 and set the stage for our major national environmental laws, I’m doing my part to pull something productive from the wreckage. Seeking lessons for communicating about extreme weather...

Ed Ewing‘s love of cycling started young—on family bike trips and riding to work with his father back in Minnesota. His first bike race was in 1984. He’s been cycling (racing, coaching, and doing outreach) pretty much ever since. Ewing now directs the Major Taylor Project at Cascade Bicycle Club, a program (which he developed, recruited by Ron Sims and Chuck Ayers) to introduce bikes and cycling to under-served youth...

Kinder Morgan has big coal export designs for the Columbia River. Before Northwest officials decide whether to give the go-ahead, the public should examine Kinder Morgan’s track record with coal elsewhere because it’s plain awful. And it’s only getting worse. Down south, Jonathan Henderson has collected a series of images of Kinder Morgan’s operations on the lower Mississippi where the firm stores huge coal piles by the river side with...

Northwest homeowners can take advantage of numerous incentives meant to encourage them to hook a rain barrel to their downspout or channel their roof runoff into a rain garden. Local governments provide residents and businesses cash rebates, do-gooder bragging rights, and discounts on utility bills. But one of the most interesting incentive programs I’ve heard about so far comes from Washington, DC. The RiverSmart Homes program, which is run by...