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Welcome to Sightline Institute’s redesigned website!

You’ll find our same top-notch solutions research, just with a fresh new look. Learn more here about new features, or simply browse as usual. 

Sustainable Living

The decisions we make in our everyday lives and in our homes can help to promote a greener, healthier Northwest. From installing a rain garden to buying less stuff to opting for public transit or biking when possible, small everyday actions by engaged, informed consumers accumulate to big impacts.

Latest Research

Sustainable Living

Sightliners’ 2023 Giving Tuesday Recommendations

At Sightline Institute, our efforts focus on building sustainable communities throughout Cascadia; we believe we are all in this place together, sharing its burdens and benefits, rising or falling as one. Sightline stands for strong communities. To ensure our communities thrive, we must also work together to support the unique …

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Sightline Institute’s Giving Tuesday Spotlights

Since 2020, Sightline’s Development team has focused Giving Tuesday, the national day of philanthropy, on highlighting organizations in our local …
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Cascadia and the End of Roe

Takeaways Roe will likely be toothless by summer, and for people in many conservative states, Roe is already dying a …
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Giving Tuesday in Cascadia

At Sightline, we know a stronger, more equitable community is only possible when we embody an abundant mindset. With this …
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Going Cold Turkey On Black Friday

Editor’s Note November 2020: Black Friday, like so many aspects of our lives and rituals from Thanksgiving to elections to …
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Things I Hope Never Come Back After the Pandemic: #4. Cheap Beef

Will cheap beef go the way of handshakes and junk mail, among the COVID-19 losses to celebrate rather than mourn? The pandemic is knocking this climate-killing food down a notch.
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Things I Hope Never Come Back After the Pandemic #3: The Hegemony of Fossil Fuels

Sightline Institute executive director Alan Durning on the fossil fuel industry’s flagging hegemony and the impacts of #COVID-19: “Their economic power is crumbling. How soon will their political power follow?”
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Meet your researcher

Kathryn (Kate) Anderson

Senior Researcher

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Research Collections

Long Rotations Forestry
Wildfire Management
Climate-Smart Farming

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Meet the Team

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Marketing Manager

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Meet the Team

Michael Andersen

Senior Housing Researcher and Transportation Lead.

Michael leads Sightline’s work transitioning Cascadia away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner energy sources.

Catie Gould

Senior Researcher

Laura is a fellow with Sightline Institute, focused on energy policy, particularly natural gas infrastructure and building decarbonization.

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Farms and forests cover much of the Cascadia bioregion, and how we care for these lands is key to a sustainable future. Rural land owners, managers, and workers are devising ways to work with nature, regenerating and protecting healthy soils, rich biodiversity, and clear and bountiful water. All the while, they are supporting thriving rural economies and producing healthy foods and plentiful timber. 

Unfortunately, such approaches are not yet widespread. On our farmlands, we often rely on practices that tax both the land and workers. In places, these methods have eroded our soils and polluted our rivers. Agriculture could be a carbon sink, but instead it’s a major carbon emitter. In our forests, short timber harvest rotations and careless clear-cuts pollute and desiccate water sources, disrupt habitat, and imperil the most carbon-rich bioregion on earth. 

Sightline’s Farms & Forests program spotlights and supports the innovators who are restoring our working lands and rural economies. 

We identify the barriers that hold these innovators back, researching and promoting strategies, especially in public policy, that help Cascadia’s rural leaders scale up their solutions for the environmental and economic challenges of Cascadia’s working lands. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Meet the program lead

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Kathryn (Kate) Anderson, Senior Researcher. Follow her on Twitter: @CollaborKate.

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Select projects and resources 

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Managing wildfires 

Cascadia is trapped in a wildfire catch-22: the more we suppress fires, the worse they get; and the worse fires get, the more we suppress them. Sightline examines how the region could interrupt this cycle, from fire hardening homes and reintroducing beneficial fire to the land, to making hard decisions about where and how to build our communities. View our wildfires research. [/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Long rotations logging 

“Long rotations,” or the practice of delaying logging and growing forests past a short life, can deliver not just greater timber yields, but also greater carbon storage and water and habitat benefits. But foresters face barriers, financial and otherwise, in trying to make the switch from the typical 40-year rotation to a longer 80-year harvest cycle. Read more, including ways to support the shift. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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