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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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Trouble on the Half Shell

Four summers ago, Sue Cudd couldn’t keep a baby oyster alive. She’d start with hundreds of millions of oyster larvae in the tanks at the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery in Netarts, Oregon. Only a handful would make it. Sometimes, they’d swim for a couple of weeks. But they’d stop developing before they grew a critical shell structure, or maybe the foot or eyespot. They’d feed poorly. One day, the larvae would simply die. A hatchery that has supplied seafood businesses for three decades had virtually nothing to sell for months.
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The YMCA Should Not Need a Guide-Outfitter Permit, a Special Use Permit, a National Environmental Policy Act Assessment, and a Business Plan to Take Poor Kids into National Forests

Last summer, I took a four day hike through the high backcountry of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area in the Washington Cascades. I’m an experienced mountaineer, accustomed to rugged terrain and steep slopes, so I was impressed when after a long day and miles of off-trail travel I heard the voices of young teenage boys wafting toward me from near the Tank Lakes. These remote tarns are in a place that feels like God’s own patio—clean-polished stone slabs holding aloft crystalline ponds that reflect the surrounding summits of black rock and glacier ice. I later met the intrepid boys, expecting them to be a group from the high-priced and famously hardcore National Outdoor Leadership School. Instead, I found a dozen teens many of whom had never previously camped a night in their lives.
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The Locavore's Non-Dilemma

Over at the Boston Globe in a piece titled “The Localvore’s Dilemma”, Harvard professor and author Edward Glaeser makes the argument against urban agriculture. He’s a smart guy—and makes some good points. There are good reasons to keep large-scale farming farther out from population centers: transporting food isn’t that big of an energy cost, and not every locality is equipped to produce the variety of fruits and vegetables that consumers demand. Keeping people in close proximity to one another is far better for the climate than trucking in produce. But I think he’s doing a disservice to the local food movement.
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Making Sustainability Legal

Some of the smartest, most innovative solutions for building thriving and sustainable communities in the Northwest are, at present, simply illegal. Even the best-intended rules to protect people and shared assets can become outdated. From business strategies (think buggy whips and typewriter ribbons) to the stuff forgotten in the back of your fridge, almost everything has an expiration date. Luckily, weeding out the counterproductive rules rendered irrelevant by time can have a big impact—making it easier and cheaper to do the right thing.
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Northwest Food Deserts?

Grant County, Washington has no shortage of food. There’s plenty of land devoted to growing wheat, potatoes, apples, mint, grapes, …
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Baby’s First Flame Retardants

Among the warning labels and safety instructions plastered all over your extensively-researched, top-dollar, highest-safety-rated, Consumer Reports-approved car seat, there is …
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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

Related

Cultural fire and sovereignty: CA legislation acknowledges burning practices

How to Stop Building in Wildfire Zones

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Meet the Team

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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.

Transportation + Transit research in the news

Seattle set to double down on arbitrary parking mandates

The Urbanist

Spokane just ditched parking mandates. What’s stopping the rest of Washington?

The Urbanist

Here’s what happened after the city of Anchorage axed parking mandates

The Progress Playbook

Proposal would add another $100 million to Seattle transportation levy

The Columbian

Mobility Advocates Find Strong Support for Bigger Levy in Poll, Council Deliberates

The Urbanist

Why parking reform goes hand in hand with more housing

Planetizen

[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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