By Lisa Stiffler Portland’s ecoroof program is enough to turn other sustainability-striving cities green with envy. The City of Roses boasts 351 green roofs and rooftop gardens covering more than 26 acres.* By comparison, Seattle has 62 vegetated roofs totaling about 9 acres. How’d they do it? I had the opportunity to talk to Amy […]
Growth & Sustainability
Posted inHeard Around the West
Milk and cookies
ARIZONA A McDonald’s restaurant in Phoenix learned a valuable lesson recently, but only after an assistant manager ordered a breastfeeding mother — and her 6-month-old baby — to leave. The lesson: Don’t mess with moms! As TV reporters flocked to the restaurant, dozens of nursing mothers converged inside it to protest what they called discrimination, […]
Posted inBlog
At what price aesthetics?
Last weekend I sat outside Los Angeles’ Union Station, the last of the great train stations,waiting as two of my closest friends prepared to marry one another in the station’s sunlit courtyard. They finally arrived, along with their chuppah, by way of the Red Line subway and the station’s main passenger hall. As they joined […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2010: Migration
Lumbering along, barely
Linking beetle-killed trees to viable markets proves difficult
Posted inAugust 20, 2010: A Hell of an Anniversary
Parting the Redwood Curtain
A one-mile highway project could change an entire region
Posted inBlog
Transportation policy’s third rails
We live in a society of backseat drivers. Or backseat urban planners. Or train engineers. But often, no matter how loudly we clamor, we’re not as right as we think. And that costs all of us, even if our convictions rely heavily on rational critiques of public policy. Think of transportation policy in Los Angeles […]
Posted inBlog
Growth, economics and justice
As I fretted over what to write in my debut post for A Just West, my mind kept returning to a controversy I used to follow in my first two professional journalism jobs. At both the Pacific Coast Business Times and the Ventura County Reporter, I covered the story of truck traffic from rock aggregate mines in the Los Padres National […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Health studies gas up
Colorado launches one of the nation’s first health assessments of gas-drilling impacts
Posted inJune 7, 2010: One Tough Sucker
Limbo land: Brownfields for green energy
Renewable energy projects planned for contaminated lands
Posted inHeard Around the West
Gettin’ skunked
IDAHOIn April, staffers at the Idaho Department of Fish and Game decided to correct what they perceived as nature gone awry by sprinkling a handful of hungry predators around an island swarming with birds. The agency introduced three badgers and two skunks to 6-acre Gull Island in the Blackfoot Reservoir in hopes the animals would […]
Posted inGoat
Wildfire costs rising
There’s an old saying that “Floods are acts of God. Flood damage is an act of man.” That is, we mortals don’t control rainfall, but we can decide not to build in flood plains. A similar argument might apply to wildfires, according to a recent report from Headwaters Economics, which describes itself as an “independent, […]
Posted inGoat
More than a starter castle
Tom Chapman, the land developer whom just about everybody loves to hate, is at it again. Chapman’s specialty is buying inholdings — private land surrounded by public land — and then either developing them, or threatening to develop them until he gets a good deal. He’s been the subject of many articles in […]
Posted inWotr
Sometimes water can cost way too much
The multibillion dollar proposal by the aptly named Aaron Million to pump water from the Green River in Wyoming, and then pipe it to the Front Range of Colorado by way of a privately funded project he calls the Regional Watershed Supply Project, may never overcome the many objections to it. But if it does, […]
Posted inMarch 15, 2010: Mobile Nation
Mobile Nation
A motorhome metropolis blooms each year in the Arizona desert.
Posted inGoat
The accidental highway
Glenwood Canyon on the Western Slope of Colorado has been in the news lately, thanks to a big rockslide that happened just after midnight on March 9. The tumbling boulders blocked and damaged a stretch of Interstate 70. It took four days to get the highway open again, just on a limited basis. During the […]
Posted inGoat
This little plaza went to Market
This little “parklet” stayed at Divisadero … And this news might make some San Franciscans go “Wee wee wee,” all the way home. San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom announced last week that the City by the Bay will create four new plazas and five “parklets” by summer, using contiguous parking spaces volunteered by corporations and […]
Posted inGoat
Less parking, better air — a la carte
I salivate over wide-open spaces. Bliss, for me, is a sprawling view of distant ranges and crisp horizons—or a free, fortuitous curbside parking spot five minutes before a crowded event. Yet my environmental better half knows that “free parking” isn’t free, and that there are plenty of other types of euphoria to be had, like […]
Posted inWotr
Kicking and screaming, the BLM makes a deal
It’s taken much longer than it should have, but the world’s longest outdoor art gallery will finally get some protection from the gas drilling that threatens it. What’s at stake is the rich history of eastern Utah’s Nine Mile Canyon. Its red sandstone cliffs contain prehistoric cliff dwellings and are etched with thousands of Anasazi […]