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This weblog’s beat is seven trends and one cross-border region: Cascadia, which includes British Columbia, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and adjoining parts of Alaska, Montana, and California. In order do a better job of covering such varied terrain, we’ve been adding guest contributors to our list of Weblog authors. Gordon Price—one of the region’s most thoughtful commentators on urban planning and transportation issues—posts from Vancouver, BC, where he served for many...

Snowpack: Going, gone   If you love the Pacific Northwest—its forests, its coastlines, its abundant natural and economic systems—the new Consensus Statement from the region’s best climate scientists will make you weep. Titled “The Scientific Consensus Statement of the Likely Impacts of Climate Change on the Pacific Northwest” and issued by nearly four dozen scientists, it includes a litany of arresting projections. Here are a couple: In 25 years, a...

Industries that are based on extracting natural resources—mining, forestry, fishing, and farming—are particularly vulnerable to booms and busts. Commodity prices, you see, are especially volatile: small oversupplies can lead to huge price drops, while tight supplies can send prices soaring. (See, e.g., petroleum.) British Columbia’s timber industry is a case in point. The price of BC timber—much of which is exported to the U.S. or overseas—gyrates not only with the...

Today’s blockbuster health news is that, prior reports notwithstanding, birth control pills are quite beneficial for women’s health. They reduce the risk of cancer and heart disease. Earlier reports that the pill boosts women’s risk of cancer were particularly influential among American women, depressing rates of pill use here compared with other industrial countries. With this definitive repudiation of those reports, more American women may opt to use the pill....

It was a great weekend for reading: This New Yorker article (mostly about an impending AIDS crisis in Russia) makes an important observation: Russian males’ life expectancy has declined by six years over the last four decades. In 1965, a Russian baby boy could expect to live to be 64. For the time, it was a reasonably respectable figure, just three years shy of the 67 years an American male...

Portland fares poorly in one measure of smart growth compared with Washington cities: how many people live downtown. As the table below shows, Portland trails not only Seattle and Tacoma but also Seattle’s suburb Bellevue. Still, all of these cities are pale imitations of greater Vancouver, BC’s various downtown centers, as illustrated in this 2002 report we did. The city of Vancouver itself has roughly one fourth of its people...

More evidence that wind power is a mature technology, this time from Vancouver Island. Sea Breeze Energy has received the go-ahead to develop the first large commercial wind development in the province: a $700 million wind farm that could provide enough power for 350,000 people. The truly exciting thing, though, is that wind power was found to be cheaper than natural gas-fired power plants: Wind energy comes in at seven...

British Columbia often comes off smelling like roses in the Cascadia Scorecard – energy consumption, sprawl, lifespan, etc. But the province lags far behind the Northwest states in the most basic step toward water conservation in homes and other buildings: charging by the gallon. The last figure I saw for British Columbia had more than 80 percent of residents paying for their water at a fixed rate. Most BC buildings...

The mothers in the Sightline study tell why they were tested for PBDEs and what they think should be done about the problem of toxics in humans.

A study of flame retardants in northwesterners suggests that all northwesterners are contaminated with PBDEs. Sightline tested 40 Northwest mothers for PBDEs–chemical flame retardants widely used in consumer products such as furniture and computers–and found in the breastmilk of every woman in the study, at levels much higher than in other countries.