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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

Cascadia and the End of Roe

Takeaways Roe will likely be toothless by summer, and for people in many conservative states, Roe is already dying a death by a thousand cuts. Strong pro-choice states like Oregon and Washington can support women and families from these places by expanding abortion care and related transportation needs. Overall need …

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Going Cold Turkey On Black Friday

Editor’s Note November 2020: Black Friday, like so many aspects of our lives and rituals from Thanksgiving to elections to …
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Things I Hope Never Come Back After the Pandemic: #4. Cheap Beef

Will cheap beef go the way of handshakes and junk mail, among the COVID-19 losses to celebrate rather than mourn? The pandemic is knocking this climate-killing food down a notch.
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Things I Hope Never Come Back After the Pandemic #3: The Hegemony of Fossil Fuels

Sightline Institute executive director Alan Durning on the fossil fuel industry’s flagging hegemony and the impacts of #COVID-19: “Their economic power is crumbling. How soon will their political power follow?”
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Things I Hope Never Come Back After the Pandemic. #2: Junk Mail

Junk mail, an advertising innovation of the 1970s, began its decline a decade ago in the last recession. The pandemic—because it is accelerating the migration from paper to the cloud—could be its bane.
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Things I Hope Never Come Back After the Pandemic. #1: Handshakes

Are there things we’ve dropped during our fight against COVID-19 that we can say goodbye to for good? In this series, I’ll speculate on what (I hope) won’t survive after the pandemic.
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Housing Policy Is… Salmon Policy?

Across the Pacific Northwest, urban sprawl is decimating salmon habitat. Fish scientists who study the effects of urbanization on salmon, …
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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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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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