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The Sky Is . . . Heating Up

Chicken Little was no communications guru. But what happens when the sky really is falling—or just as bad, when it’s heating up?

The stubborn truth of global warming just keeps coming ("Animals, entire forests could migrate") and coming ("Melting ice may create shipping shortcut") and coming ("Victoria, 2104: Welcome to the tropics").

When you get weary of this truth, don’t tune it out—do something. For example, you can join Washington’s Clean Car Campaign, an effort to opt in to California’s emission standards, by emailing joelle@climatesolutions.org with the subject Clean Cars. (The campaign website will be up next week.)

Because unlike Chicken Little’s problem, we can fix this one.

Cascadian Wolf Populations Growing

When Lewis and Clark reached Cascadia 200 years ago, wolves ranged across most of the Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest. But within a little more than a century, ill-advised “predator control” schemes extirpated wolves from nearly their entire historic range. So the West went wolf-less until the mid-1990s when small populations were re-introduced into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho.

What a difference a decade makes. Wolf populations boomed, and their range expanded dramatically in just 10 years. Today, an estimated 850 wolves inhabit Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, far exceeding biologist’s original expectations. In fact, a couple of summers ago I was lucky enough to encounter a pair of wolves while backpacking in a remote area of Idaho. (I won’t tell you where.)

Not only do wolves help to return the wilderness to its natural wildness, but ecosystems are regaining their health. In Yellowstone, for instance, native trout populations are bouncing back to historic levels because the fish flourish in tree-shaded rivers. And the trees are growing back because elk and beavers now fear to linger by streams where they make easy targets for wolves.

Today, the Department of the Interior announced that the states of Idaho and Montana will take over wolf management from the more stringent federal government. The upshot? It will be easier to legally kill wolves. Officials expect that wolf populations will contract, dulling the luster from a shining wilderness success story.

The Gap

Women live longer than men.  But in the Northwest—as in the U.S., Sweden, Great Britain, and probably elsewhere in Europe—the gap between women and men is narrowing.  Take British Columbia:  in 1975, women could expect to live nearly eight years longer than men.  But by 2004, that gap had narrowed to just over 4 years.  Women are still healthier, on average, but not by as much.

But, surprisingly, that’s not a pattern seen in Japan.  There, the gap between male and female life expectancies is still growing—more slowly, perhaps, than in previous years, but growing nonetheless.  A baby girl born in 2003 in Japan could expect to live past 85 years; a boy, to the age 78.7.  (In comparison, average life expectancy in the United States is about 77.3 years.) 

In the graph below, each dot represents the gap between male and female life expectancies in a given year; Japan is in orange, BC in blue.  In BC, the male-female gap peaked in 1975; in Japan, it’s still on the upswing.

When the life expectancy gap narrows, women’s lifespans still tend to grow; it’s just that men’s lifespans grow faster.  In BC, that meant that life expectancy gains for the population overall actually accelerated after the gap between men and women narrowed.  Which could mean that Japan—which already has the world’s longest lifespans—could further outdistance the Northwest in life expectancy when (and if) their male-female gap begins to narrow.

2004: The Year of 1 Percent

This was the year of small but significant percentages: 1 percent or less. I’m speaking not only of Washington’s governor race, the Montana legislative elections, or the Ohio presidential vote tally.

I’m speaking of budding trends toward a durable way of life in Cascadia. The region reached the vicinity of 1 percent on a number of heartening, if incipient, measures during the past twelve months.

  • In British Columbia’s Fraser Basin-the heart of agriculture in western Canada-there are now almost 100 certified organic farms, as the Fraser Basin Council reports (pdf, page 5). That’s 1 percent of all basin farms. Organic isn’t the alpha and omega of environmental responsibility (as I’ve been saying), but it’s something.
  • The area of Cascadia’s forestland managed under the standards of the Forest Stewardship Council has risen steeply since the late 1990s. It hit 1.8 million acres in 2004 after the announcement of Potlatch’s certifying its Idaho lands. That’s roughly 1 percent of the region’s forestland.

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Preparing for High Water

Most of Cascadia’s coast is equipped with early warning systems for tsunamis, so we’re better prepared than the people of the Indian Ocean. (See, for example, this article from the Newport (Oregon) News-Times and this one from the Eureka Times-Standard.)

But that doesn’t make us immune from giant earthquakes and the resulting tsunamis. The 1964 Alaska earthquake was actually bigger on the Richter scale than Sunday’s Indonesian temblor, and it set off a giant wave that swept a few Oregonians and Washingtonians to their deaths. A similar-scale quake and wave with more-local origins likely occurred around 1700, according to a good article in the Coos Bay (Oregon) World.

Of course, flooding rivers pose a similar threat. They’re typically not as sudden as tsunamis, but far more Cascadians are exposed to them. Cascadians are settled more on their rivers than on their outer coast. And unlike tsunamis, river flooding is an annual occurrence, with massive floods coming once or twice in a lifetime. (As climate changes, the severity of flooding may be accelerating.)

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Fresher Air

There’s end-of-the-year good news for almost everyone who breathes in Cascadia: particulate pollution is mostly declining, as is ground-level ozone pollution.

EPA released its Particle Pollution Reportlast week, which summarizes trends in concentrations of particulates: tiny specks of airborne pollution. Don’t think of happy little flecks like in Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who. Think of nasty little killers.

Aside from cigarette smoke (a form of pollution that roughly a quarter of adults pay to breathe), these particulates are the most worrisome form of air pollution in Cascadia for human health. Particulates come from burning fossil fuels and wood. They also come from tires rubbing on roads and brakes rubbing on wheels, from forest fires, dust kicked up in construction and roadwork, and many other activities. Some studies suggest that particulates shorten more lives than do roadway crashes in North America.

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Idaho Power

Old timers jest that the state of Idaho is actually named after Idaho Power, the ultra-influential utility that furnishes most residents of the Gem State their electricity.

So it’s welcome news that Idaho Power-among the most old-guard of all Northwest utilities in what is arguably the most conservative part of Cascadia-has recognized the economic advantages of the clean-energy revolution. The company’s latest proposal to the state utility commission is packed full of plans for major investments in energy efficiency and renewable power, including both wind and geothermal. ConWEB reports hereand here.

These proposals would begin to align Idaho Power with the Fifth Plan of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, which we’ve praised. The Fifth Plan is no longer a draft; it was formally adopted earlier this month.

Idaho stands to gain much from clean energy. It uses more energy per capita than any other Cascadian state, as we documented here in the Cascadia Scorecard’s energy indicator.

Guns, Germs, and Measure 37

Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel—which described how quirks of geography and environment (rather than, say, racial or cultural superiority) helped some cultures succeed—has a new book out.  This one analyzes why some cultures fail; it’s titled, appropriately enough, Collapse.  In this week’s New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell’s reviews the book, giving an interesting twist that’s very relevant to the Northwest.

As a caveat:  I haven’t read either of Diamond’s books, though I have read a brief version of his "collapse" arguments here.  Essentially, Diamond argues that cultures often fail because they mismanage basic resources:  soil, trees, water, and the like.  The review highlights an interesting case:  the failure of the Norse colonies in Greenland in the 1400s.  Apparently, the Norse re-created European culture (including agriculture) in two of the more livable corners of the island; but eventually they exhausted the fragile arctic soils, which caused their cattle-based agricultural system to enter terminal decline. Ultimately the settlers were forced (gruesomeness alert!) to eat their pets before they finally starved to death.

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Sin Tax Era

This article from Missoula, Montana’s newspaper (aptly named The Missoulian) highlights a new poll showing that even residents of that traditionally conservative state are increasingly willing to use taxes as a tool of social policy, to reduce the things they want less of.  To wit:

By an 84 to 13 percent margin, Montanans favor raising taxes on electronic gambling machines, with 3 percent undecided.

Similarly, a plurality of poll respondents supported a tax on big box stores (49 percent in favor, vs. 44 percent opposed).  But they aren’t blanket tax raisers, with a plurality opposing a 5-cent tax on soda pop. (Apparently Montanans prefer Coke to Wal-Mart.)

On the down side, the majority of poll respondents would accept a sales tax (Montana currently has none) in exchange for lower property taxes. Sales taxes fall particularly hard on the poor, who spend a larger share of their income on things that would be taxed.  Typically, sales taxes exclude the sorts of things that rich people buy more of, like houses, private education, and better medical care.  (A high sales tax, but no income tax, makes Washington State’s tax system the most regressive in the nation, while Montana’s tax system is among the gentlest on the poor.)

Property taxes are generally progressive, since the wealthy tend to own the most land and the priciest buildings.  In general, taxes on buildings tend to be harmful to the economy, but taxes on land values may actually be a boon by reducing land speculation and encouraging development in downtown areas, among other effects.  (More on all of this in our book Tax Shift.)

Every tax system affects people’s behavior, encouraging certain kinds of activities and discouraging others.  That’s what taxing is all about.  So it’s heartening to see the dawning recognition among Montanans that they can use the tax system to get something that they actually want.  But at the same time, it’s disheartening that so many people seem perfectly happy to shift taxes onto the people who can least afford to bear their burdens.

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The Bell Curves

According to the old adage, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."  But the real story is far more complicated. 

Take a look, for example, at Gapminder.org, a site that looks at global economic and human development trends—and that does a fantastic job of helping people visualize complicated data.  Their most recent take on global income distribution offers competing insights:  material wealth has increased since 1970, but in the U.S. at least, so has income stratification.

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