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[Note: This is part of a series.] There was an odd little story in USA Today on Sunday, covering the raft of so-called “property rights” initiatives on the November ballot throughout the Western U.S. I say odd, because it almost completely misses the point. As the story notes, a lot of people are pretty exercised about a 2005 US Supreme Court decision in the case of Kelo vs. New London,...

When, oh when, will Eric end this Ahab-like fixation on the takings ballot measures? Don’t hold your breath. Yesterday, Washington’s Office of Financial Management released estimates of the financial impact of Initiative 933. It’s not pretty. Analysts are ballparking the costs to taxpayers at between $7.3 and $9 billion over the next six years. I won’t get into the technical details today—partly because I haven’t studied the analysis carefully yet....

[Note: This is part of a series.] What do the words “fraud” and “unconstitutional” have in common? (Hint: It relates to my latest obsession.) Give up? Okay, the answer is that those words were used by courts in Nevada and Montana to describe the “takings” initiatives in those states. What’s perhaps even more interesting is that those words—and the legal reasoning that engendered them—could easily be applied to the mirror-image...

It seems that wolves are returning home to Oregon. A little more than a decade ago, Oregon was wolf-less, along with the rest of the American West, a legacy of government-sanctioned poisoning, trapping, and shooting to make the land safe for cows and sheep. [Here’s a cool animated map depicting our shrunken wolf range.] But then in the mid-1990s federal biologists reintroduced a few dozen wolves back into their native...

Here’s the deal: there’s a 3 foot long pink earthworm living in the Palouse region of Idaho and Washington and nowhere else on the planet. It can burrow 15 feet underground and it was re-discovered last year after scientists believed it had gone extinct. Also, it smells like a lily. At the risk of sounding unserious: awesome! Anyway, a small group of local conservation groups is petitioning to get the...

One of the most interesting transportation programs around these days is TravelSmart. It’s not interesting because of what it does but simply because it works. You see, in theory, TravelSmart should be a dismal failure. That it performs minor miracles is proof of the flaws of economic theory. And understanding those flaws sheds light on a fascinating paradox of car-less living. It also hints at a massive opportunity to help...

[Note: This is part of a series.] I’ve suggestedbefore that the so-called “property rights” initiatives in the Northwest are not exactly a grassroots movement. They’re ordered and funded by reclusive networks of donors and directors, many from back east, who prize their anonymity. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re bad policy. But it deserves, I think, the skeptical arch of an eyebrow. Enter a fascinating bit of investigative journalism from…...

Cascadia has a wealth of astonishing and pristine natural places. It’s part of why residents here are so committed to this place. One measure of the Northwest’s bounty is the number of world heritage sites—natural and cultural places so unique that they are designated by the United Nations as the most important repositories of the planet’s ecological richness and humankind’s legacy. The boundaries of Cascadia include all or part of...

[Note: This post is part of a series.] In Washington, proponents of Initiative 933 often claim that the measure is a sort of righteous response to certain land protections—protections that they see as burdensome regulations. They allege that such protections reduce the value of land. But do they? This summer, an extension student at the University of Washington, John Abbotts, conducted a study of changes to land values in rural...

The world’s oceans have taken a beating in the past couple of weeks. Off the coast of Lebanon, an estimated 15,000 tons of oil spilled from an Israeli-struck storage facility is being described as “the biggest environmental catastrophe in Lebanon’s history” and a “threat to biodiversity” in the Mediterranean Sea. Clean-up was impossible until Tuesday, for obvious security reasons. In the Indian Ocean, a Japanese tanker collided with another vessel...