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Here’s a good reason to build rain gardens and green roofs, and to plant and protect trees: It’ll save you money. That’s the conclusion of a new report from the American Association of Landscape Architects called “Banking on Green.” The study surveyed green stormwater projects from across the US, plus a handful from Canada, and determined that in 41 percent of the cases, the environmentally friendly approach was cheaper than...

Rain gardens are suffering from an identity crisis. On one hand, there are homeowners who love rain gardens composed of feathery grasses and bushy native shrubs. They even hire landscapers to install them and post signs to let others know that their yard is helping solve the problem of polluted runoff. There are Puget Sound databases and maps packed with examples of the water-sponging plantings. Walking tours in Portland and...

Editor’s note: Eric posted Seattle and Vancouver follow ups to this piece. Whatever you’re craving, you can probably find it on sale at a parking lot in Portland. Barbecue jackfruit fried pie? Try Whiffies on Hawthorne. Foie gras over potato chips? Eurotrash on Belmont. Kimchi quesadilla? Koi Fusion on Mississippi. It’s no wonder Portland has been heralded as a world-class purveyor of street food. But North American attention to the Rose City’s...

Water is the enemy of pavement. It gets into cracks, freezes, expands, and makes bigger cracks. It makes the ground beneath roads soggy and soft. Drive some heavy trucks over those roads and they can give way, forming potholes and ruts. Even when it’s not destroying the road, water pools on the surface, turning cars into dangerous hydroplanes and splashing buckets of filthy water onto windshields and pedestrians. Water is...

Municipal engineers don’t exactly have reputations for being devil-may-care, live-on-the-edge risk takers. Speaking generally, they work hard, take their jobs seriously, and really really want their projects to work. Collapsed bridges and over-flowing sewers don’t look so hot on the resume. But stormwater engineers in Gresham, a neighbor to Portland, and Issaquah, located in the foothills of the Cascades outside Seattle, have built some interesting — even a touch experimental...

Six months ago, we launched the Making Sustainability Legal project arguing that, although the Northwest could benefit from a top-to-bottom remodel of its public-policy house, deep political divides and starvation budgets make big reforms unlikely soon. In the meantime, maybe we can clean out the fridge? Making Sustainability Legal is about pulling moldy regulations out of the back of our law books and composting them. Dozens of regulations, whatever virtue...

Permeable pavement can make old-school road engineers and pavement builders anxious. To them, the idea of water seeping through roads like they’re made of Swiss cheese just doesn’t seem right. Water runs off roads, not through them. Or at least it used to. In the Northwest, there’s a growing acceptance of the use of pervious concrete and porous asphalt for roads, sidewalks, parking lots, and driveways. The unconventional pavement does...

The City of Roses is being transformed into the City of Sedums as nearly 300 Portland rooftops are now blanketed in the drought-tolerant succulents. And as rooftops in Oregon are going green, some of the businesses that design, build, and landscape ecoroofs are having an economic mini boom. News headlines cheer sales numbers that have tripled in the past year for one Portland company. Another is doing cutting-edge ecosystem research...

Imagine for a moment that cities around the world are rolling out fleets of magic carpets and that those carpets are having truly wizardly effects: improved public health and safety, reduced traffic congestion and carbon emissions, and reduced dependence on foreign oil. City dwellers can check them out or drop them off at stations everywhere, and they are free to use for up to 30 minutes. After that, they cost...

What if a stupendously enormous business opportunity were hiding in plain sight before our eyes? What if this same business opportunity would bring gigantic environmental and social dividends? And what if all that was required to unleash these benefits was a simple legal reform? Personal car sharing is such a business opportunity: a chance to trim emissions, crashes, and fuel costs, all while generating a profit for car owners and...