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Vancouver just opened its first new downtown school in half a century. Elsie Roy Elementary, located right on the False Creek Seawall in the Concord Pacific project, opened its doors on September 7 to 250 children, most of whom could walk to the school from their highrise homes. Many were already familiar with the location, since they likely graduated from the Dorothy Lam Child Care Centre right next door and...

Matthew Preutsch, formerly of the New York Times in Seattle and now the Oregonian’s Bend correspondent, had a fascinating article yesterday that illustrates the principle of slow news. It describes the gradual die-off of a unique patch of forest among the dunes of central Oregon. Is the cause of this forest plague nearby irrigation? Off-road vehicles? Climate change? As is so often the case in slow news, the story is...

The City of Seattle is moving forward with its plans to Vancouver-ize its downtown, encouraging residential development to create a vibrant walking core, as the PI reports. The wacky thing about media coverage of downtown living in places that have relatively little of it-such as Seattle-is the presumption that housing must have yards because it needs to accommodate kids. The PI article spends most of its breath describing how a...

I’m two years behind on this, but I recently read Eric Schlosser’s best-selling book Fast Food Nation(Perennial, 2002). It’s a stunning expose of the working and sanitary conditions in the quick service industry. I take notes on most books, recording salient points. Here are this volume’s highlights. “In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2001, they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more money...

If you’re born poor, what’s the likelihood that you’ll be poor as an adult? Well, it depends on where you live. This paper (pdf) suggests that in the United States, children born into families in the bottom quintile tended to stay put: about 42 percent of bottom-quintile children stayed in the bottom quintile as adults, and another 24 percent moved up to the second-to-lowest quintile. That means that 2/3 of...

Moving around, like travel, broadens your perspectives and opens up your mind. But it also, I believe, disconnects you from the particular ecologies and communities that make us good stewards. (I developed these themes in my 1996 book This Place on Earth: Home and the Practice of Permanence.) Back when I was writing that book, I remember reading that Labor Day weekend is the biggest moving day of the year....

Not surprising, but worth a mention: incomes grew over the 1990s in Washington, but the gains were lopsided. Adjusting for inflation, annual wages at the 25th percentile grew by $800 over the decade. At the 90th percentile, wages grew by $8,864—ten times as much. Don’t get me wrong—the gains in the 25th percentile were probably good news. (I say “probably” rather than “definitely” because inflation adjustments are a tricky business:...

In case you’ve been living under a log, forest fires have been a serious problem lately. So far this year just over 6 million acres have burned nationwide, almost double the ten-year year-to-date average. Out of the 25 currently reported large fires in the US, 17 are burning in the Pacific Northwest, totaling 65,391 acres. The story north of the border has been even more dire. And forests fires aren’t...

 (This post is part of a series.) Last night, I spoke briefly at a lively public debate about the future of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the elevated highway hugging the Seattle waterfront through downtown. Constructed in the early 1950s, the Viaduct is aging and considered seismically unsound, and is slated for replacement. The Washington Department of Transportation is looking at several alternatives for replacing the facility, including a tunnel, a...

To understand ways that Cascadia might reduce its rate of unplanned pregnancies, and slow the increase of its population, we’ve done a fair bit of research on, shall we say, reproductive behavior. And in this field of learning, one puzzle keeps popping up. Let’s set it up this way: William James’s doggerel captures an enduring truth, or is it myth? Hogamous, higamous; Men are polygamous. Higamous, Hogamous; Women monogamous. Most...