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May the Schwartz be With You

Oregon and Washington have done a better job of protecting rural land from sprawl than they have at encouraging growth inside city limits.

If you want to build a cutting-edge, smart growth development in a designated growth center in Washington, for example, you should expect an arduous process of jumping through bureaucratic hoops. (We posted on this problem here.)

Now, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is quietly moving to clear away some of the similar regulatory brush that slows such projects in the Golden State. Applause! (The Sacramento Beereports.)

California, Here We Come? V

Our own guest contributor KC Golden co-authored an op-ed yesterday in the Seattle Times. In it, he and Bill Ruckelshaus argue for Washington (and Oregon) to adopt California’s clean-car standards.

Yesterday was a big day for contributors to this blog, what with Gordon Price’s op-ed in the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Tall, Skinny III

"Not long ago skyscrapers were so distasteful we banned them. Now we want to live in them."

That’s the kicker of a great column by Danny Westneat in today’s Seattle Times.

He shows how Seattle’s attitude toward downtown has changed for the better in fifteen years.

Low Flow

The latest from the wacky (and worrisome) weather files: today’s Tri-City Herald reports that the Columbia River’s flow is between a fifth and a quarter below average, raising worries of an impending drought this summer.

As always, low flow in Cascadia’s biggest hydrological artery means conflict between farmers (who need irrigation water), electricity ratepayers (who get a price break by selling hydropower to the Southwest), and salmon (who just can’t live without the wet stuff). The economic costs of a drought can be daunting—as the west coast’s electricity crisis in 2001 made abundantly clear.

It is impossible to say for certain that the Columbia’s low flow is the result of climate change. But it is also worth noting that low river flow—which, in the spring and summer, is the direct consequence of low snowpack—is precisely what the Northwest’s scientific experts predict to result from global warming. So even if 2005’s nascent drought is not induced by climate change, it is exactly the sort of thing we can expect under warming conditions—which is just one more piece of evidence that the time is past for a "wait and see" approach to climate change.

Tall, Skinny II

Former Vancouver city councillor (and Sightline board member) Gordon Price welcomed Seattle to the tall, skinny club with an op-ed in the P-Iabout what Vancouver’s learned in its pursuit of a compact and livable downtown. (See news about Seattle’s zoning changes here.)

– High-rises, for example, should be not just tall but thin, since thin towers offer more privacy and light to residents. And stagger building heights for variety and preservation of views.

– Pedestrian-friendly ground floors—ie, storefronts instead of parking garages—are key. As foot traffic increases, vehicle congestion may even drop (!).

– Increased housing supply may help free up affordable rentals for low-income residents.

– If high-rise living is done right, people of all ages will choose it. That’s one reason Vancouver recently opened its first new downtown elementary school in decades.

Melting Mountains

There is new evidence that the world’s glaciers are melting, reported today in the Denver Post. A glacier expert at the University of Colorado calculated that the total volume of the world’s glaciers has declined by a tenth over the past 40 years. And the melting has been even more severe in Alaska, the Andes, and the Alps. To see some arresting imagery of the vanishing glaciers in Alaska, see our recent post on the subject.

Melting glaciers are not news to long-time mountain climbers. Lou Whittaker, for instance, Cascadian climber extraordinaire who runs Rainier Mountaineering, Inc., believes that changing climate conditions are altering the glaciers on Mount Rainier, a peak he’s bagged more than 250 times. The Denver Post article taps several Colorado-based climbers who agree.

In truth, glacial retreats happen for a variety of reasons, not all of them related to human-induced climate change. But global warming almost certainly exacerbates the trend. In the Northwest, nearly fifty scientists recently issued a consensus statement, pointing out that in a quarter century, a quarter of the Cascade’s snowpack will be gone.

The Hanford Files

Here’s a clear example in which an ounce of prevention would have been worth at least a pound of cure:  The Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the facility in central Washington that, for four decades, produced plutonium for the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

The site is severely contaminated, and cleanup costs are absurdly expensive, somewhere in the range of $50 to $60 billion through 2035.  Now, as the Tri-City Heraldnotes, new liabilities are piling up, this time to compensate workers from Hanford and other federal nuclear sites whose health has suffered as a result of their on-the-job exposures.  The Department of Labor has just taken over one such compensation program, after it languished in the hands of the Energy Department.  Through the end of 2004, a similar Labor Department compensation program for nuclear workers had racked up outlays of about US$ one billion.

All of this, obviously, is being paid for by federal taxpayers, adding expenses to an already out-of-balance federal buget.  It all makes me wish that someone had been taking precautions earlier on.  That way, my kids wouldn’t still be paying in their middle age for toxic blunders that were made before their father was born.

A Win for Cascadian Women

Oregon is usually the Cascadian state best known for its political "firsts." But with today’s inauguration of Christine Gregoire as governor and with two female US Senators in office, Washington marked its own “first” as the first US state to have women holding the three top posts in state government.

It’s not surprising that Washington was the first to reach this milestone. For the past decade, the state has boasted the highest percentage of female legislators in the US, and it currently has a female majority on a state Supreme Court (five out of nine), and women serving as both the House and Senate Majority Leaders. Washington’s share of women in the state legislature-33 percent-far surpasses the share in the federal legislature (16 percent).

The participation of women in government is a good indicator of the overall standing of women: countries that have a high percentage of women in government-like Sweden and the Netherlands-also tend to rank high in the UN’s Human Development Index (pdf, women-in-government rankings on page 96).

Sweden and the Netherlands—where Sightline draws its goal for the Cascadia Scorecard population indicator, another proxy for the well-being of women overall—enjoy equality not only in government representation, but also in the workplace, education, and in access to health care. Washington’s milestone is one sign of the region moving closer to this level of equality for all of its residents.

P.S./Update: Among Oregon’s firsts were the first secret ballot, first to make beaches public property, and the first bottle bill, as referenced here and here.

Wolves and the Ripple Effect

There’s a great article on wolves in today’s Seattle Times. The article describes the ecological changes in Yellowstone National Park that an Oregon State University researcher, Bill Ripple, has been documenting. Ripple’s findings show that wolves have a, uh, ripple effect on their native ecosystems. Plants flourish, as do red foxes, beavers, and songbirds. Coyotes and elk fare less well. 

There are a couple of lessons we can draw. First, the return of the wolf to its native ecosystems means a return to a more natural state, a point we made in a post last week. Second, ecosystem dynamics are incredibly complex and we are only just beginning to understand the role that even a single species can play.

Wolves already inhabit two of Cascadia’s four jurisdictions, British Columbia and Idaho. They’ll likely soon be returning—if they have not already—to the more remote areas of Oregon and Washington. Let’s hope Cascadians welcome them back as the agents of ecological restoration that they are.

See Saw

According to this article yesterday in the Puget Sound Business Journal, timber cutting in Oregon and Washington’s national forests was up by 50 percent in 2004, as compared to 2003. In 2005, cutting may be even more rapid. The article implies that increased cutting on public lands will also increase jobs in the forest sector. But that’s not necessarily true.

Cutting in Washington’s national forests declined dramatically in the wake of the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan—and the overall timber harvest declined too, though less precipitously. But according to a Washington Employment Security Department report, from 1992 to 1998, "employment has been relatively stable in forestry services" ("forestry services" is the largest sector of forestry). And, in fact, from 1981 to 1998, total forest sector employment actually increased by 2.6 percent, despite overall declines in logging.

Weirdly, the reverse can also be true. Just as less logging does not necessarily mean fewer jobs, so more logging does not necessarily mean more jobs. As this recent post on timber industry growth points out, because of new technology investments, more cutting has not brought many more jobs. What’s more, in Oregon, as in Washington, the economic importance of the forest industry (and other resource extraction industries too) is waning.

All of the above to say that the old saw about increasing logging to create more jobs may be more myth than reality. But now may also be a good time to consider a new way to manage our public forest resources—one that’s good for both workers (and the larger economy) and the environment.

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