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Lately it feels like Northwest wilderness protection can’t catch a break. Not only has it proved damnably difficult to pass even popular new wilderness designations, but much-loved trails and access roads are gettingpummeled by winter storms. Routinely it seems.  But maybe—just maybe — there’s a golden opportunity amidst the storm wreckage. Maybe we’ve been given a cheap and easy way to expand our wilderness areas. After all, a washed-out or heavily-damaged road means more than just frustrated hikers:...

Random factoid from a recent New Yorker article (not online, unfortunately) on, among other topics, the international shipping business: For a pair of shoes made in China and sold in this country for fifty dollars, only about seventy-five cents of the retail cost derives from transportation. And the main costs in international shipping come from friction in the pipeline, particularly at the points of ship loading and unloading. [Emphasis added.]...

Oregon State University just won a $3.6 million grant for sagebrush ecosystem restoration. That’s good news because sagelands conservation always seems to take a back seat to other landscapes. I wonder if the explanation for sagebrush’s short shrift isn’t surpisingly superficial (how’s that for alliteration?). Looks matter and sagebrush just doesn’t sell like the prettier places do. If so, sagebrush ecology is paying the price for its lack of glam...

Seems to be a slow news day in Cascadia—so here’s something from farther afield.  The economics-oriented Angry Bear blog has a nifty post on economic forecasts, in this case, of US Gross Domestic Product. To a remarkable extent, economic forecasters from the private sector, the White House, and the US Congress tend to agree with one another about their predictions for economic growth.  Most of their forecasts agree within a...

I’m a day late on this, but the Seattle P-I had an interesting series on Seattle’s ailing urban forests. The principal threat is the rapid spread of invasive species, which essentially throttle standing trees and smother healthy new growth: "At first glance, the most prolific tree-killers seem pleasant enough, aesthetically speaking—a splash of green on a bare tree trunk, a burst of pretty flowers on the ground. But tendrils of...

If you’ve been following Eric’s pieces on sage-grouse, goats, wolves, orcas, salmon, caribou, and other Northwest critters, you may have gathered that Sightline is doing research on wildlife in Cascadia—and what it tells us about the health of our natural heritage. In fact, as we described in a Cascadia Scorecard News article this week, Sightline is introducing a wildlife index as part of the Cascadia Scorecard project. The index tracks...

To the casual observer, the sage brush country of the American West looks like the Big Empty—undisturbed land stretching to the horizon. So vast is this landscape that early travelers dubbed it "the sagebrush sea." The reality, however, is that the rich native biological integrity of this Inland Northwest ecosystems has been substantially diminished. And no single creature is better proof of this than the sage-grouse. The sage-grouse is a...

We all know them: English ivy, European starlings, Himalayan blackberry, Scotch broom. No, they’re not foreign exchange students or international meals. They’re part of the legion of exotic invasive species that threaten the ecological integrity of the Northwest. Of course, the Northwest is hardly alone. The American south is overrun with kudzu, for instance. The poster children of over-abundance are deer, as anyone in the Upper Midwest or the Northeast...

The US National Forest system turns 100 this year, as today’s San Francisco Chroniclereports. (The precise centenial birthday is either February 1 or March 3, depending on your intepretation of events.) The article focuses on policy changes in the Forest Service, which today faces a welter of pressures related to logging, forest fires, off-road vehicle use, grazing, watershed degradation, and invasive species. National forest issues are critical to Cascadia. In...

The discouraging thing about invasive species generally , and microscopic ones such as P. ramorum (which causes sudden oak death) in particular, is that controlling them in any kind of elegant, systemic, fool-proof way is essentially impossible. The dominant trends in the global economy-rising trade, travel, and migration-favor their spread. As throughout human history, when we move around, we bring other species with us. All we can do is inspect...