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Sustainable Living

The decisions we make in our everyday lives and in our homes can help to promote a greener, healthier Northwest. From installing a rain garden to buying less stuff to opting for public transit or biking when possible, small everyday actions by engaged, informed consumers accumulate to big impacts.

Latest Research

Sustainable Living

Sightliners’ 2023 Giving Tuesday Recommendations

At Sightline Institute, our efforts focus on building sustainable communities throughout Cascadia; we believe we are all in this place together, sharing its burdens and benefits, rising or falling as one. Sightline stands for strong communities. To ensure our communities thrive, we must also work together to support the unique …

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Equity Bike Ride in Portland

What kind of equity is most important to you? Racial equity? Economic equity? Environmental equity? All of the above? On August 25, join organizations like ODOT, Portland Bureau of Transportation, TriMet, and others as they lead cyclists through neighborhood streets and along the I-205 Multi-Use Path in Portland. Stops along the route will highlight equity efforts that are underway by local diversity organizations. Here’s the full scoop:
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Are You a Banker or a Gambler?

Not every commercial fisherman is convinced that curbing carbon emissions is necessary to stop global warming. But the evidence that fossil fuel pollution is making the oceans more corrosive—and removing building basic building blocks of the marine world—starts to get their attention. In Alaska, commercial fishing supports one-sixth of the state’s economy and employs 70,000 people in high season, more than any other basic industry. Mark Vinsel, the executive director of United Fishermen of Alaska, the state’s largest commercial fishing organization, last year ranked his concerns about ocean acidification this way:
I’d say probably on a scale of 1 to 10, it would be 20 or 30.
If you sliced open the bellies of our most popular eating fish, at one point in their life cycle you would probably find krill, plankton, oceanic snails or other shelled creatures—the kinds of species likely to run into trouble as the oceans absorb more carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and other industrial processes.
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Sharing = Serious Cash

Here’s a nifty infographic on all the online services that make it easier for people to share the stuff they rarely use, and in some cases, make some serious cash. It’s a powerful visual reminder of all the things in your house that aren’t being used most of the time—cars, spare beds, weed whackers, backcountry skis, DVDs, the dollhouse your kid never liked, the clothes in your closet that won’t actually ever fit you again.
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Making Sustainability Tasty

I’ve spilled my fair share of ink here singing food carts’ praises. It hasn’t just been idle chatter; right now the City of Seattle has the opportunity to take one more small step toward making sustainability legal with one giant leap for street food. First, let’s review why food carts help to make a sustainable city:
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Legalizing It (Your Rain Barrel)

Just a few years ago, a Washington state homeowner who simply stuck a rain barrel at the end of a gutter to collect water for watering a garden or washing a car was arguably breaking the law. Sure, people did it anyway. But if one really wanted to get persnickety, there was an argument to be made that anyone collecting rain needed a water right, since the state at one point in its history laid claim to regulating all waters “above, upon and below” the Earth.
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Sightline Art: Pastorale's Edge

Here at the Sightline office we recently said goodbye to our previous artwork collection, “Bloom” by Susan Melrath, and welcomed the latest exhibit, now on display! Thanks to our curator Becky Brooks, our rotating art gallery now features local artist Chris Cantu’s “Pastorale’s Edge,” a collection of acrylics on canvas. You can take a look at the artwork below, in person at our downtown office, or see more of her work here.
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Meet your researcher

Kathryn (Kate) Anderson

Senior Researcher

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Research Collections

Long Rotations Forestry
Wildfire Management
Climate-Smart Farming

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Meet the Team

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Marketing Manager

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Marketing Manager

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Marketing Manager

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Marketing Manager

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Marketing Manager

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Meet the Team

Michael Andersen

Senior Housing Researcher and Transportation Lead.

Michael leads Sightline’s work transitioning Cascadia away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner energy sources.

Catie Gould

Senior Researcher

Laura is a fellow with Sightline Institute, focused on energy policy, particularly natural gas infrastructure and building decarbonization.

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Farms and forests cover much of the Cascadia bioregion, and how we care for these lands is key to a sustainable future. Rural land owners, managers, and workers are devising ways to work with nature, regenerating and protecting healthy soils, rich biodiversity, and clear and bountiful water. All the while, they are supporting thriving rural economies and producing healthy foods and plentiful timber. 

Unfortunately, such approaches are not yet widespread. On our farmlands, we often rely on practices that tax both the land and workers. In places, these methods have eroded our soils and polluted our rivers. Agriculture could be a carbon sink, but instead it’s a major carbon emitter. In our forests, short timber harvest rotations and careless clear-cuts pollute and desiccate water sources, disrupt habitat, and imperil the most carbon-rich bioregion on earth. 

Sightline’s Farms & Forests program spotlights and supports the innovators who are restoring our working lands and rural economies. 

We identify the barriers that hold these innovators back, researching and promoting strategies, especially in public policy, that help Cascadia’s rural leaders scale up their solutions for the environmental and economic challenges of Cascadia’s working lands. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Meet the program lead

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Kathryn (Kate) Anderson, Senior Researcher. Follow her on Twitter: @CollaborKate.

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Select projects and resources 

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Managing wildfires 

Cascadia is trapped in a wildfire catch-22: the more we suppress fires, the worse they get; and the worse fires get, the more we suppress them. Sightline examines how the region could interrupt this cycle, from fire hardening homes and reintroducing beneficial fire to the land, to making hard decisions about where and how to build our communities. View our wildfires research. [/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Long rotations logging 

“Long rotations,” or the practice of delaying logging and growing forests past a short life, can deliver not just greater timber yields, but also greater carbon storage and water and habitat benefits. But foresters face barriers, financial and otherwise, in trying to make the switch from the typical 40-year rotation to a longer 80-year harvest cycle. Read more, including ways to support the shift. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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