Gauging the biofuels backlash

Some would have you believe that making fuels from crops and other biomatter is responsible for food shortages. Probably not, but there are legitimate questions about the net gain — is there one? — of producing and using biofuel versus conventional petroleum.

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Salmon on the Columbia: See you in court

The federal agencies are back for a fifth round in federal court, still cooking up very strained arguments for minimal efforts to save the fish. Two things might change the impasse: a new case for saving dams due to climate change, and the bestirring of Congress. Here's a survey of the high-stakes issues.

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The 100-year gamble to save our quality of life

A close look at the ambitious "Cascade Agenda," which hopes to preserve the central Puget Sound region's natural systems from a Pugetopolis that sprawls all the way to the Cascades. The mechanisms are known, but it's not clear they can work well enough or soon enough.

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Washington candidates, campaigning on your dime

Public campaign financing might be on the ballot this November in Seattle and King County. While most people speak of public financing as a "cleaner" way to fund political campaigns, it remains to be seen whether it alone can create beacons of good government. The only compelling case to be made is that it diversifies the candidate roster.

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Social progress in White Center

The neighborhood is the focus of several programs designed to boost test scores, encourage early learning, improve living conditions, and provide a positive example of community pride and success that can be applied elsewhere. Part 2

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Gentrifying White Center

White Center is an unincorporated neighborhood and cultural melting pot, sandwiched between Seattle proper and the suburb of Highline. Despite grappling with urban crime and the difficulties of providing subsidized housing for low income residents, both Seattle and Burien believe there is hope. Part 1

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The real battle in Seattle was one of futility

A fictional film account of the 1999 World Trade Organization protests opens the 2008 Seattle International Film Festival this week. Battle in Seattle might be spectacular for the action and drama it portrays, but the historical legacy of the actual events is something short of momentous. In the end, the anti-globalization movement went nowhere.

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The long leash of the law

Domestic violence, custody, malpractice, wrongful death: Today's animal legal issues and challenges are not unlike those of humans.

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There's nothing new in a plan to save Puget Sound

While the Puget Sound Partnership works to include citizen comment in the process of developing a plan to save the Sound, some scientists say they already weighed in — back in 2006 — but it looks as if their comments are being ignored.

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Another Teton Dam

The golden age of dam building has long since passed, capped by the tragic failure in 1976 of the last big dam, an earthen structure on the Teton River of Idaho. Few new dam projects are being proposed these days, and many dams are being purposefully breached. But that hasn't stopped some from resurrecting the possibility of a new Teton Dam.

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An Earth Day accounting of planet-saving efforts

Washington has enacted greenhouse gas-reducing measures and has signed the Western Climate Initiative. But about the most you can say for those efforts so far is that they don't do any harm — they're symbolic first steps.

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Go fish: The government's answer to depleted stocks

While officials are calling for a moratorium on commercial salmon fishing along much of the West Coast, they're opting for a different tactic in Puget Sound: continued fishing.

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The real first Starbucks

The modern chain is "going back to its roots" and launching a house coffee called Pike Place Blend. Our author well remembers the first Starbucks store and the first day of business, since he happens to have been the first customer.

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Tacoma: Dam if we do

Tacoma's Cushman dam reduced parts of the Skokomish to a trickle years ago, and the time to repair the damage — to salmon habitat and to the Skokomish people — is now.

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It's their party, they can cry if they want to

Washington state's parties are looking for the silver lining in the top two primary system, but they're not going to find it.

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Changing and challenging winds in the power industry

It's an awkward time in the energy business. Coal is plentiful, but coal-gas generation is carbon-spewing, and the body politic won't tolerate that. Wind is promising but might not be enough. In the midst of this transition is Energy Northwest, the public-utility consortium whose customers are still paying for nuclear plants that were never built.

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Don't we remember? Denying the parties their caucuses was unconstitutional

Are we done yet with whining about Washington's ludicrous caucus and primary system? Sometimes, reading those whines, you start to wonder: Is the writer or are the people talking about wolves or other predators? (It isn't pretty, but where would we be if caucuses didn't cull out the elderly and disabled?) Is this about TV ratings? (If we dumb this show down enough, we can boost our audience share.) They certainly aren't talking about political parties as the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals views them.

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As the snow goose flies

A trip to Skagit Valley reminds us of what we've lost — and what we still have.

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Orca recovery effort: more of the same

A plan to save Puget Sound orcas calls for $50 million spent over 28 years but amounts to doing no more than we're already doing. Meanwhile, no one knows why the orca population is declining, and the only clear culprit is a lack of their favorite food: chinook salmon. A moratorium on chinook fishing may be the only solution.

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Again, it's the economy

We're discussing the Super Tuesday results over coffee and looking out the café windows at the gray morning light, when in walks Stuart, who owns a small auto parts shop. January receipts were 20 percent worse than January receipts a year ago, Stuart says, but the first week of February has been dynamite. He figures that in January people just didn’t have enough money to fix their cars. As soon as they got their first February paychecks, they rushed out and bought parts. This suggests a lot of people are living close to the edge. Stuart figures we may indeed be on the brink of a recession. He wonders if his business can survive. He’ll be going to the Democratic caucuses this Saturday. He used to vote Republican. Never again.

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One dam after another

The Black Rock reservoir project in arid Eastern Washington might be dead, but there are four more proposed dams where that came from. State lawmakers and two governors have helped keep hopes alive in an area where irrigation politics go all the way back to the New Deal.

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Tukwila: cradle of Puget Sound civilization

From site of one of the earliest white settlements to crossroads of the metro area, the once-humble Seattle suburb is looking back on more than a century of history. That history includes a disappearing river and an airplane that never flew.

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Seattle's pedestrian attitude toward pedestrians

What keeps us planted on the corner, waiting for that little light to tell us to "walk"? Frankly, we're a bunch of walking wussies, and if the city's going to call itself foot-friendly, it's time step up to the challenge.

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New Years' Eve memories, of Kabul

What do we remember of the past tonight? Our correspondent recalls a long-ago journey through Afghanistan and the images that became indelible.

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Should King County be in the ferry business again?

The county once before ran ferries, only to be rescued by the state. Now the state is too broke to keep the passenger boats running, and the county has got the bug again. It's expensive, there are other solutions, and Vashon Islanders were once dead set against passenger-only ferries. But hey, nostalgia springs eternal.

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Stormwater runoff: an impermeable problem

Our built environment has forced the ecosystem to accommodate precipitation in high and fast volumes. The rush of water from pavement and compacted landscape destroys the natural order. It's also a huge source of Puget Sound pollution.

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Tax-reduction redux

Once again, Washington lawmakers are about to make law from flaw, correcting what Tim Eyman got wrong but embracing what voters clearly want: a crimp on taxation.

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Eternal dam nation

The life cycle of Columbia River salmon might be endangered, but not so the cycle of litigation over how to save the fish. The feds so far have refused to consider breaching dams in the vast river system, while federal judges are rejecting as insufficient all other measures to help fish pass through. We seem to be years from resolution.

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The last election day

When I walked out of my old polling place Tuesday morning, Nov. 6, I felt depressed. Not just because there were so many complex ballot issues (all those constitutional amendments with virtually no public discussion) or because, for the first time that I could remember, I didn't see Bonnie Shride, a longtime poll worker who died earlier this year. No, as I walked out I realized that I had just participated in my last real election day. I started going to the polls with my mother when I was a little kid. I’ve always valued the ritual. I know people say we don’t have time for these little rituals any more. Give me a break. This is a society that has elevated Super Bowl Sunday to a national event, a society in which adolescents rent limos for high school dances. We have plenty of rituals. Voting just happens to be one on which we no longer want to waste our time.

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A great big dose of antiestablishmentarianism

Updated through the day: In an evolving thread, Crosscut's writers analyze Washington's general election. They see an electorate distrustful of the people in charge.

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Change the climate on Saturday

Preaching to the choir may be better than not preaching at all -- and it's a start. On Saturday, the National Day of Climate Action as Step It Up 2 calls it, rallies will let people in Seattle, Portland, and elsewhere across the country urge their federal representatives to do something serious about global climate change. It's a new-media-savvy, grass-roots project strongly endorsed, naturally, by Al Gore. It promotes rallies and other small events to which people are inviting their own senators and representatives, plus all the Presidential candidates. (Representative Jay Inslee, King County Executive Ron Sims, and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels were featured speakers at Seattle’s first Step It Up rally on April 14.) Step It Up was the inspiration of writer Bill McKibben.) You can get specifics at their website

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The 20-year war over Hanford clean-up

So much nuclear waste to dispose of and so many barriers — technical, political, and legal. Here's an update on where things stand at the federal reservation in Washington. The solutions — glassification of radioactive waste, fast-reactor processing of spent nuclear fuel, and shipment to permanent burial in Nevada — are all encountering hurdles to progress.

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Proposition 1: the arguments against, deconstructed

It's fairly easy to propound better solutions than the roads-and-transit measure about to be voted on. But it's not easy to see how they would be enacted.

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The new hot spot in the environmental protection war is the Arctic

With the ice cap melting, nations are stampeding north to tap the likely bonanza of natural resources below the sea floor. Environmentalists, meanwhile, are already in court trying to slow the gold rush, fearing for polar bears and whales.

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A wilderness discovery brings to bear new problems

The possibility that grizzlies aren't extinct in Idaho presents no less a political challenge than when they were thought to be long gone.

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Want to save Puget Sound? Do the science first

Inadequate data to measure results have undercut restorations of other large bodies of water, like Chesapeake Bay. Leaders of the new Puget Sound Partnership know this, but whether they can avoid that mistake here remains to be seen. Bureaucracies have a tendency to keep throwing money at projects that aren't working.

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Deja vu in the wilderness

Ever come on a scene that you've never seen and yet it looks familiar? So much of our sense of place is informed by books, movies, TV, photographs, and imagination that any forest, mountain, or stream can be a setting we know.

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