Cascadia Scorecard Weblog

FSC for the Feds?

The US Forest Service is finally going to look into the merits of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification for a small number of forests, including the Fremont National Forest in southern Oregon. Continued cutting on federal land, even under FSC standards, is not exactly popular with many conservationists. But the reality nowadays is that federal-land logging is likely to increase because of the Healthy Forests Initiative and, especially, slick new administrative procedures that may reduce environmental and endangered species' reviews. So FSC labelling could be a golden opportunity for conservationists to endorse something positive.

Getting the Forest Service to comply with FSC standards wouldn't be the big conservation victory that many greens have long sought--it won't stop cutting in national forests--but it would be an honorable compromise. FSC would guarantee careful reviews and monitoring that are fundamental to any good conservation planning. That is, the label could perhaps offset the increasingly weak review standards performed by federal agencies.

Economic Good News... Or Is It?

Headline story: the US economy posted tremendous third-quarter growth, 3.8 percent. To quote the New York Times article:

"This is actually fairly amazing..." Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist for MFR Inc. said...

That 3.8 percent growth in GDP is, of course, due to higher spending. Personal consumption, in fact, was up by 3.9 percent. I wonder, could the higher spending possibly have anything to do with the rising fuel prices that--just by pure coincidence--helped oil companies post the highest quarterly profits ever?

And is that spending really a good thing? Consider two other little items from the very same article--the one that characterizes the "strong" growth in an economy that "picked up speed." Disposable income is down and the personal savings rate is now solidly below zero:

• "Adjusted for inflation, disposable income fell 0.9 percent... Some of the drop was attributable to lost rental and business income on the Gulf Coast after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita lashed the region."
• "The personal saving rate fell into negative territory, minus 1.1 percent, from 0.1 percent. That indicates that people were paying for their increased spending by borrowing more money."

I hate to harp on the bad news, but those recent nuggets of trouble (suitable, of course, only to color the headline story that GDP is rising) are just the tip of the iceberg...

• The national poverty rate has risen for 4 consecutive years so that now 1 in 8 Americans lives in poverty.
• The number of people without health insurance coverage is steadily on the rise--by 800,000 last year--so that today 45.8 million Americans have no health insurance.
• Adjusted for inflation, the national median income has either remained unchanged or actually declined in every year since 1999.
• In October, the US Consumer Confidence Index fell to its lowest point in 2 years.

So someone please tell me, in the face of so many countervailing indicators--the sort of indicators that people actually experience--why is GDP growth still reported as the single gauge of economic progress? Why does GDP's growth merit favorable subjective characterizations like "strong"? And why, in the media's eyes, is "GDP" semantically equivalent to "the economy"?

UPDATE 10/31/05: Want to hear more bad news about the economy? According to Oregon Hunger Relief Task Force, new late-October data from the USDA shows..

...the fifth consecutive annual increase in the number of food insecure Americans nationwide. The total number of people living in food insecure households -- meaning those households that experienced difficulty purchasing food due to a lack of financial resources -- increased to 38.2 million in 2004.

Read the full USDA report here.

The Coverage of Climate Change

There's this cheery bit from the Christian Science Monitor: as climate change continues, the Northwest is expected to warm faster than the rest of the planet. In fact, according to climate scientists, the Puget Sound region has already been warming at a "substantially greater" rate than the earth as a whole.

Apart from the usual dire ecological problems--shrinking snowpack, screwed up streamflows, rising sea levels--the news is precipitating considerable worry from some economists. As the article has it:

Economists in the region warn that this could come with a big price tag. Global warming "is likely to impose significant economic costs," 52 leading economists from around the country warned in a recent letter to government and business officials in Oregon.

"The adjustments that businesses, households, and communities will have to make are without precedent," the economists wrote. "Many changes seem largely unavoidable, and some are clearly imminent."

For just one example of the costs of climate change, remember the Northwest's ski industry, which took a beating last winter because of the lousy snowfall. Today's Seattle Times covers the ski industry's woes and, in a positive development for media coverage of this issue, the Times mentions the connection to climate change (though in an oddly elliptical way).

Readers of this blog may remember that I covered this ski-less season ad nauseum last winter (here, here, and here, for example). Despite tons of Northwest media coverage of the skimpy snowfall--and a pretty direct link to climate change--the media almost never attributed the shuttered businesses to climate change. But less than a year later, the media appears to have (finally) connected the dots--yet another promising sign that the public consciousness of global warming is evolving rapidly, if none too soon.

UPDATE: Seattle's conference, ""The Future Ain't What It Used to Be -- Planning for Climate Disruption" was attended by a number of heavy-hitters, including Christine Todd Whitman. Read the coverage in the Seattle Times, here, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, here.

So Long Caribou?

In a troubling new development for mountain caribou, the BC government is considering abandoning efforts to sustain the most threatened and isolated populations of mountain caribou in the province. That decision would almost certainly be a death knell for the few remaining caribou, the Selkirk herd, that continue to visit the continental United States. (Read the full reporting in the Globe and Mail.)

The Selkirk caribou roam in remote areas of British Columbia, Idaho, and Washington, but they are clinging to precarious existence with fewer than 3 dozen animals, despite repeated "augmentation" efforts. Cross-border cooperation and restoration efforts have been critical to the survival of the Selkirk herd and without BC support those caribou are not likely to be long for this world. Protecting these last visitors to the lower 48 is a good example of the big hurdles faced by those who would protect and restore ecosystems. Not only are the ecological problems thorny, but the problems are complicated by the fact that wildlife, habitats--and environmental problems generally--don't observe the political boundaries that are usually the foundation of our policies for restoration, such as they are.

UPDATE: A good article in the Seattle Times on the reactions from both Canadian and American conservationists. For example:

"The international transborder herd would be written off for extinction," said Joe Scott with Conservation Northwest of Bellingham. "That's totally and completely unacceptable."

Canada Questions Feebates

We're a little late on this bit of depressing news. A report issued last week by Canada's National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy recommended against implementing feebates, one of the most promising market tools around for encouraging the purchase of energy-efficient products and for tugging the entire car and truck market toward better fuel efficiency. (The NRTEE was charged with studying feebate options after the idea was proposed last spring.)

Here's their reasoning:

"Instead of using one economic instrument, such as a feebate, the government should develop an integrated and coherent sustainable transportation strategy for Canada focused on all aspects of the transportation sector," the agency said. . . A further study of feebates could be part of that strategy, it added.

Well, sure, nothing wrong with an integrated approach, but feebates could be an important piece of that. They're a much broader solution than NRTEE gives them credit for (and far more far-reaching than tax credits for hybrids, which, strangely, NRTEE does promote).

You can read a whole piece about their promise here, but in short, feebates are what's called a systemic solution--a solution that fixes a bunch of problems at once. They're a plus for the economy, because they help make vehicle price tags tell the truth about the productivity costs of economywide overconsumption of fuel. Because of their structure, they keep the entire market shifting toward fuel savings. They're also a big plus for clean air and a secure climate. And they benefit communities, because inefficient vehicles hemorrhage dollars from local economies.

Finally, with feebates, buyers get paid to choose vehicles that save them money anyway.

The backstory, not surprisingly, is that Canadian automakers are putting the pressure on, citing in this Vancouver Sun story (registration required) that "consumers don't want to be forced into buying vehicles that don't suit their needs."

We'd be willing to bet that these days a wider range of ultra-energy-efficient vehicles--which tools such as feebates will drive the market toward--would suit consumers' needs very well.

Housing Supplies, Housing Surprise

The Eugene Register-Guard notes a problem:  higher land prices are making it harder for nonprofits to build affordable housing in the city.

The New York Times reports on what America's biggest city has done about the same problem:  an inclusionary zoning program, that lets developers build at higher densities, provided that they set aside some housing units for low-income housing.

Now, if anything, the Big Apple's problems with providing affordable housing positively dwarf Eugene's, since both land and construction costs are so much more expensive in New York.  But if the Grey Lady is to be believed, inclusionary zoning can harness the high demand for housing to create more housing options for folks who don't have the money for a luxury condo:

"The traditional equation," said Shaun Donovan, the commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, "has been that the stronger the real estate market, the harder it is to provide affordable housing. These programs turn that old equation on its head because the stronger the market, the greater the incentive for developers to use these programs and, therefore, provide affordable housing."

As we've mentioned before, hundreds of jurisdictions around the country have used inclusionary zoning to try to boost affordable housing, with mixed results.  Here's hoping that New York's recent experience can offer some lessons that other places can learn from.

Is Sprawl Spendy?

This is less of a big deal than I had thought at first, but it's still worth noting: new research (full pdf here) suggests that sprawl may be linked to higher home prices.

The authors looked at housing prices in 452 urban areas across the US, along with measures of a couple dozen factors that can influence housing prices -- including urban form, but also education levels, weather, demographics, recent population influx, the size of homes, and employment factors, among others.  Controlling for other variables, cities that have a higher share of total housing in their "central areas" (as defined by the US census) tend to have slightly lower median home prices, and fewer very-expensive homes, than cities that are more sprawling and decentralized.

This, of course, runs counter to the intuition--and the much-touted arguments from the anti-smart growth set--that housing is cheaper in spread-out, poorly bounded metro areas. 

That said, as careful as this research seems to be, there's good reason not to read too much into it.

First off,the share of housing in a city's "central area" may not do such a good job of capturing what most researchers think of as sprawl:  low-density housing, homes and services strictly segregated, and streets designed for cars rather than walking.  I don't doubt that there's some relation  between "centralization" as defined here, and "sprawl" as most researchers think of it.  But it's possible that the correlation is loose -- and that some "centralized" cities still have relatively "sprawling" layouts by other metrics.

Second, the real story here is that controlling sprawl seems to have a very minor effect on housing prices:  10 percent increase in the share of homes within a city's central area leads to an 0.2 percent decrease in median home prices.  That's a pretty small effect -- and it's overwhelmed by other factors that the researchers looked at.  Household income has about 40 times as much influence on home prices as does "centralization."  Construction costs have about 30 times as much impact.  So in the big picture, there's not much evidence that controlling sprawl makes housing significantly cheaper, or that facilitating sprawl makes it more expensive. 

But perhaps that's the point:  the effects of urban form on housing prices are ambiguous, and can depend on lots of factors that are as hard to predict as they are to measure.  Which can make it just as hard for smart growth advocates to prove that good planning can lead to more affordable housing, as it is for smart-growth naysayers to prove that the unfettered free market makes housing cheaper.

A Minimum Minimum

Just in case you were wondering:  the federal minimum wage in the US--currently $5.15 per hour--is at its lowest level in 5 decades, adjusted for inflation:

The nominal US minimum wage has remained unchanged for the last 9 years; over that time, inflation has whittled away more than a fifth of the buying power of an hour of minimum-wage work.

The (relatively) good news for low-income workers is that, in the Northwest, these minimum wage standards only apply to Idaho and Montana; Washington, Oregon, California and Alaska have adopted a higher minimum wage.  Washington's is currently $7.35 per hour, and is adjusted upward each year for inflation.  In January it will rise to $7.63.  (That's still lower than the inflation-adjusted federal minimum wage during most of the 1960's and 1970's, by the way.)  Oregon's is currently $7.25 per hour, and is also indexed for inflation. 

BC's minimum wage is Can$8.00. Adjusting for purchasing power of the Canadian and US dollars, that's about $6.67 in US dollars.  And this isn't inflation-indexed -- meaning that inflation erodes its value every year.  So, overall, minimum wage standards seem to be one area in which Washington and Oregon may be doing a better job than BC in protecting low-income workers.

How Green Is It?

Many of us in the Northwest have explored “green” options for consumer goods and services. Whether this means purchasing organic fruits from the farmers market or buying hybrid vehicles, we’d like to be healthier and reduce our ecological footprint.

But sorting out fact from fiction when buying green can be daunting. To help you clear up some of the confusion, NEW has put together a short list of some good online sources to answer questions you may have about, say, whether or not that eyeliner truly wasn’t tested on animals.

We’d also like to hear about guides and resources that you’ve found helpful in making the right choices—we can’t cover them all! Please comment below to share those sites with other readers.

Bowling Together, One Last Time

Today in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a sweetly-sad story about the closing of a bowling alley in north Seattle. There's nothing terribly profound, of course, about one business closing down, but columnist Susan Paynter does a terrific job of characterizing the place as a nexus of social capital, though she doesn't use the term herself. In light of the recent dialogue on this blog about the role of density, gentrification, and community, I thought I'd toss out this article as food for thought.

"You should start the day off with a little bit of laughter," Wayne Luders told me. He and wife Ruth come from home a few blocks away for the friendship, the circle of acquaintances they count on around the tabletop, and down-to-earth servers like Louise Adams who, Wayne admits, sometimes calls him worse names than "Sweetpea."

Like the other regulars -- the serious night-league bowlers with monogrammed bags, the daytime senior señoritas sporting matching shirts, and the every Tuesday and Thursday railroad retiree -- they dread March when they'll loose their moorings.

That the business closing is actually a bowling alley, gives a certain literal heft to the worry that social capital is declining, a worry that is most commonly connected to Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone. But more to the point, Leilani Lanes is not closing because business is slow (though it's worth noting that league bowling there has declined sharply, as it has almost everywhere). No, the alley is closing in part because real estate values have gotten so high that it's hard for the owners to justify the building's current use.

There's much more money in re-developing the alley into apartments, condos, retail outlets, or more profitable businesses. It strikes me that the closing of this alley--like the passing of many timeworn elements in any city--should not just be shrugged off as a matter of amoral invincible "market forces." It's truly regrettable when places of close community pass away, but it's a problem that's damnably hard to fix.

I'm certainly not a no-growther. I believe, for instance, that much of the new development in Seattle over the last two decades has made the city healthier and better in a thousand and one ways. A profusion of new commercial districts, walkable neighborhoods, and even farmer's markets is breathing a great deal of life into the city. But at the same time, there's something lamentable about the loss of "great good places" like the bowling alley--places where the community has gathered for years--places that forge the bonds that keep cities vibrant and may even keep people healthier too.

Waldal worries it will be the end of social contact for many. That they will sit, immobile and isolated by their separate TV screens.

Longtime bowling-league secretary Mary Pelan, a self-described senior citizen, started bowling at age 17. She guesses she'll walk for exercise -- probably alone -- when the place shuts its doors. "So many connections will be shredded and that's just a shame," she said.

But what to do? In the face of a growing population and the practical need for increasing density (not to mention the environmental and social needs), how do we preserve the "great good places" that make the places where we live worth living in?

Thoughts?

SUV's Rap Sheet

Just noted:  this abstract from an article (pdf) in the journal Crime, Media, and Culture:

Driven to extremes: Fear of crime and the rise of the sport utility vehicle in the United States

During the mid-1980s, the sport utility vehicle (SUV) emerged as one of the most popular automobiles in the United States, a trend that continued throughout the   1990s...Situating the SUV in the context of fear of crime and risk management during the 1980s and 1990s, it is suggested that the SUV’s popularity reflects American attitudes toward crime, random violence, and the importance of defended personal space. While consumer attraction to the SUV is typically attributed to two key features--safety and interior space--these pragmatic justifications may be viewed as euphemistic. Safety is not road safety but personal safety. Space is not interior cargo space but social space, including the privileged ability to traverse inhospitable terrain to remove oneself from society.

Emphasis added.

This seems somewhat right to me.  SUVs aren't particularly safe vehicles to drive.  But they feel safe, at least to some drivers.  And that mostly has to do with being large and imposing -- and being perceived as a menace.  Those things might be important if the threat is other people who mean to do you harm.  But they're irrelevant--or, more accurately, dangerous--if the threat is flipping upside down at 60 mph.

Which makes me wonder if there's any way to convince people that being safe is actually more important than feeling safe.  Sometimes I doubt it.

Geography of Fast Food

An article in the Seattle Times today highlights another link between land use and obesity: access to healthy food. By overlaying maps (pdfs) of house prices, grocery stores, and fast food restaurant locations, UW researchers demonstrate that lower income areas, such as Kent and Auburn, have fewer grocery stores and more fast food restaurants per square mile than higher income areas, such as Ballard and Redmond. Obesity rates show a similar pattern: 27.8 percent of Auburn residents are obese compared to 7 percent of Capitol Hill/East Lake residents.

Access to safe places for exercise may be another factor. Lower income people who don't feel safe walking in their neighborhoods may not be able to afford a gym membership or even bus fare to a community center.

This is just one more link coupling poverty and obesity. Previous research has demonstrated that energy dense foods (like burgers) are generally cheaper than nutrient dense foods (like fruits and vegetables).

Healthy choices have long term benefits, but fast food is easiest in the short term especially if the grocery store is harder to get to. I'd be tempted by the grease too if the kids were hungry now, three fast food joints were closer than the grocery store, plus they're cheaper and I wouldn't have to cook or clean up.

Seems to me that a healthy lifestyle is really a choice only when your life is not overly constrained by time, money, and geography.

Out of Sight, Out of Mouth

New research indicates that we eat more candy when it's close by and visible--and then we underestimate how much we've eaten. But on the other hand, according to the researchers, "If we move food away from us, even 6 feet, we eat less and we overestimate how much we have eaten."

I wonder if this lesson can be broadened to include the larger urban environment. Do we eat more fast food if it's accessible and visible? In light of the growing obesity epidemic, can we realize health benefits simply by making it harder to get to unhealthy food?

Personally, I think our behavior--or at least mine--is often powerfully affected by subtle forms of suggestion. In fact, even as I type this I'm munching on my third or fourth handful of candy corns that someone put in a bowl in the office kitchen. I don't even like candy corns.

Lewis & Clark Go Digital

Lewis & Clark's contact with the natural world just entered the digital age. Courtesy of Oregon State University, their natural history findings are mapped, archived, clickable, and zoom-able. Thomas Jefferson would be so envious.

A complete day-by-day map of Lewis and Clark's route across the western United States allows users to chart their progress from St. Louis to the Pacific and back. More importantly, each day's record includes a count of the wildlife they saw, animals they killed, human settlements they encountered, and even the vegetation that they passed through.

200 years ago yesteday, for example, on the Columbia, just below the mouth of the Walla Walla River, they recorded 40 dog kills (I presume this means they killed 40 dogs?), saw grouse, and also saw occupied lodges, but found no wood except for small willows.

Even today, the Corps of Discovery's journals are an important resource for biologists establishing the historical abundance and distribution of wildlife. They can also be an important reference point for understanding the current conditions of our natural heritage. Today, for instance, sage grouse no longer inhabit the regions of Washington where Lewis recorded them "in great abundance."

Sound the Alarm

Puget Sound's health is jeopardized by climate change, according to a new report from researchers at the University of Washington. Find the (surprisingly good) media coverage here, here, and here.

The Uncertain Future of BC's Forests

From British Columbia, more evidence of the danger of hitching an economy to resource extraction and commodity exports. As the Vancouver Sun explains today, the BC forest industry is bearing the brunt of a "perfect storm." A rising Canadian dollar, higher energy prices, and the ongoing softwood lumber dispute with the United States are combining to cripple the forest industry.

Not surprisingly, the industry wants relief from the government in the form of tax credits and write-offs. But how much more coddled can BC forest companies get?

As Will Horter, executive director of the Victoria-based Dogwood Initiative, recently opined in the Tyee, Canadian logging companies are already paying ridiculously low fees to cut on crown land. In fact, in seven forest districts, more than half of the cut logs were paid for by just 25 cent stumpage fees. Not only is that a bad deal for government coffers, which could reasonably extract much more revenue from public timber sales, but the low stumpage fees are a big contributor to the softwood trade wars that result in tariffs at the US border. Raising the stumpage fees might resolve the softwood dispute, generate more revenue, and put a fair price on public forest resources to boot.

Of course, even that optimistic scenario would still leave the industry coping with the trade effects of a strong Canadian dollar and high energy prices. But future high energy prices are likely unavoidable. And the fact that the forest industry is susceptible to high prices is just more evidence of its fundamental weakness. In fact, the Canadian economy is already among the most energy intensive in the world. (That is, it takes more energy to produce a dollar of wealth in Canada than almost any place else in the world, including the United States.) Continuing to rely on energy intensive industries like the forest sector for jobs, revenue, and economic growth is probably a recipe for disaster.

"Five Finger Discount" in National Forests

The ugly flip side to the US Forest Service's budgetary inability to prepare old-growth timber sales: the agency's finances are so anemic that it can't prevent thievery of other forest products.

Now admittedly, the harvest of mosses, mushrooms, and huckleberries doesn't have the aesthetic impact of clearcut logging. But even so, the biological capital in our national forests' is being drawn down unsustainably by collectors both commercial and private. What's especially annoying is the echo of the bad old days of rampant cutting on federal land: The common storehouses of the country's natural heritage, national forests, are once again being pilfered for profit.

A good article today in the Oregonian, with special attention to the Siuslaw and Gifford Pinchot National Forests.

UPDATE: Also, today on ENN, a first-rate article on the sociology and economy that surrounds the harvest of non-timber forest products.

UPDATE 10/20/05: A federal judge just ordered the Forest Service to re-open national forests to non-timber harvesting activities, such as mushroom collecting and Christmas tree cutting. The Oregonian has the coverage.

Gas: Still Cheaper than Roads, Insurance, and Parking

An interesting article from the Washington Post finds that taking Metro -- DC's light rail system -- into downtown may not save suburban commuters all that much money.  Even with gas at $3 per gallon, the savings on fuel, plus wear and tear on vehicles, are offset by increased spending on transit fares.  You really only start to save if you can use transit often enough that you can ditch one of your cars; otherwise, it's a bit of a wash.

It's a useful piece of analysis, as far as it goes -- though since DC's Metro tends to be more expensive than transit systems in the Northwest, the lessons may not be transferrable.  Still, the most important part of the analysis is what's left out:

• Parking:  The article doesn't look at downtown parking costs.  That's all well and good if you get "free" parking (that is, parking that someone else pays for).  If you don't, deciding not to drive downtown could save you a bundle:  if my experience with DC is any guide, parking is way, way more expensive than gas.
• Insurance:  The article counts car insurance as a fixed cost -- which is basically right. Under the current way we pay for insurance, reducing the amount you drive doesn't necessarily reduce what you pay for car insurance.  However, if you could pay for car insurance by the mile, rather than in an "all you can drive" plan, taking transit could also save insurance costs -- which are substantial.
• Congestion and Road Space:  Road space only seems free.  But if traffic is clogged, every car on the road delays every other driver backed up behind it.  Those delays have a real-world cost -- but the driver who's imposing them doesn't have to pay.  However, if drivers actually had to pay a toll to use the roads -- and if the tolls were high enough to keep traffic flowing -- then they'd save even more by taking the train instead of driving.

The big lesson for me here is that, as a society, we've arranged things so that very few of the costs of driving accrue by the mile.  We pay for insurance a couple of times a year, and rates are only partially adjusted to account for how far we drive.  We pay for "free" parking as lower wages, higher real estate costs, and higher prices for goods and services.  We make other people pay with their time for the congestion we create, rather than paying tolls to use the roads. 

All these decisions -- and they really are decisions -- to externalize the costs of driving have this concrete result: even in one of the most congested regions of the country, one with an effective and popular transit system, it can still make financial sense to drive rather than take the train.

Driving Reign

A few weeks ago, President Bush encouraged Americans to conserve fuel by cutting back on non-essential driving.  Unlike some, I think that it's actually helpful to use the bully pulpit this way.  I just don't think it's terribly meaningful: people respond far more to prices than to jawboning.  And as  Brookings Institution scholars Robert Puentes and Bruce Katz point out, the sprawling layout of American cities makes an awful lot of our driving "essential," for all practical purposes:

[W}hat the President doesn't get when he asks Americans to curtail their "non-essential travel" is that a half-century of government policies have fueled and subsidized the growth of sprawling, haphazard metropolitan communities and have dramatically increased the amount of "essential travel" required for people to live their daily lives. Driving may not be the best option, but it is often the only option for Americans to get around.

Americans venture out in their cars to find housing they can afford because housing opportunities closer-in are thwarted, while new developments on the suburban fringe are subsidized. Taking transit, biking, or walking to the corner market or to jobs located off the highway exit is neither safe nor feasible because of policies that segregate uses and cater to the car rather than the pedestrian. Federal and state policies make highways easy to build and relegate transit and other alternatives to second-class status.

These policies come with a huge hidden price tag for families, in the form of higher local taxes (to pay for needed infrastructure) and the ever-rising costs of buying, driving and maintaining cars.

Neil Pierce has similar thoughts in today's Seattle Times. 

Measure 37: Down, But Probably Not Out

This is big news:  last Friday, a judge in Oregon  ruled that Measure 37 violates the state constitution.

To recap:  Measure 37, which was approved overwhelmingly by Oregon voters last fall, required state or local governments either to compensate landowners, or to waive development restrictions, whenever land-use rules reduced the value of private property.  The measure was strongly supported by timber interests, who faced limits on logging near streams and sensitive areas.  And its passage wreaked havoc on the state's growth management system--which had been largely successful at protecting farmland from suburban sprawl--while creating an administrative nightmare for state and local governments who faced a deluge of complex Measure 37 cases.

As written, Measure 37 was supposed to apply only to people who bought their land before land use and zoning laws came into effect.  People who bought after that, allegedly, understood what they were getting into, and weren't entitled to compensation.  But the judge ruled that this violated the "equal privileges and immunities" clause of Oregon's constitution, because it created two separate classes of landowners: one with special rights and remedies for diminished land value, one without.

Last Friday's ruling was definitive and sweeping.   But it's not the end of the debate -- not by a longshot.   Appeals are already planned, and Measure 37's supporters will undoubtedly be back soon with another -- perhaps even more sweeping -- property rights proposal.  And if I had to guess, the proponents of Measure 37 will be looking to open up the system to all landowners, not just recent purchasers.  If that were to pass, of course, it would make the chaos engendered by Measure 37 look tame in comparison.

A Beacon in the Smog

I doubt that most residents of leafy suburbs paid a lot of attention to air quality when they chose their homes.  But it’s not hard to believe that, when suburban commuters return home from work each night, they breathe a little easier in the belief that they’ve escaped the smog and fumes of the city.

Only, maybe they haven’t.  At least, not in the greater Puget Sound, anyway.

The Puget Sound Clean Air Agency maintains a network of air monitoring stations throughout the region.  Some are in central Seattle, some in smaller cities, and some in suburbs and rural locations.  And--perhaps surprisingly--there doesn’t appear to be a decisive air quality advantage to living in the suburbs.  (See this pdf for more details.)

Or, to be a little more accurate:  air quality tends to be both highly variable and very localized.  Monitoring stations in the neighborhoods surrounding Seattle’s downtown tend to report that the air is pretty clean -– cleaner, in some cases, than at more suburban monitoring stations in Bellevue, Lynnwood, or Lake Forest Park.  On the other hand, the air in Seattle’s industrial zones can be pretty dirty; but then again, so can the air in Kent and Marysville.

The Beacon Hill monitoring station, a mile or so southeast of downtown Seattle, is worth a special mention. 

The Beacon Hill neighborhood is just to the east (i.e., downwind) of I-5, the heavily trafficked West Seattle Bridge, and the Port of Seattle; to the north it's bordered by I-90.  Given its location, you might expect the air quality on Beacon Hill to be pretty bad.  In fact, if you had to pick one residential neighborhood in Seattle that’s likely to have outdoor air quality problems, Beacon Hill might well be it.

But Beacon Hill’s air is, surprisingly, pretty clean. For fine particulate matter (i.e., soot, largely from diesel vehicles), it does moderately well: 3rd best of 7 regional monitoring stations by one measure, 7th of 16 by another, best among 5 by yet another.  It has less ozone than any other monitoring station in the region (not surprisingly, as concentrations of ground-level ozone are typically lower in city centers than in leafy suburbs and exurbs).  And its carbon monoxide levels were the lowest among 7 stations.  I'm not sure why Beacon Hill does as well as it does -- perhaps it's just a function of altitude and prevailing wind patterns. But whatever the reason, it's good news for the people who live there.

Clearly, the monitoring station results don't offer definitive proof that Beacon Hill residents have nothing to worry about from their air.  But it does mean that a move from Beacon Hill to, say, Lynwood or Bothell or Lake Forest Park or Marysville—all suburban locations—won’t necessarily buy cleaner air.

Three more points are worth mentioning here.  First, as we mentioned in this post, the air in your car is typically among the worst you’ll breathe all day.  Second, for most pollutants, indoor air is more polluted than outdoor air –- and most people spend 90% or more of their time indoors.  And third, outdoor air quality seems to have improved pretty substantially since the early 1980s; King County has had no “unhealthy” air quality days since 1999, and only 31 days in 6 years in which the air has been “unhealthy for sensitive groups.”  That’s not a perfect record, obviously, but it does represent a substantial improvement from where we once were.

To me, these facts suggest that at this point improving the air that you breathe depends, in large measure, on keeping yourself off the highway, and keeping hazardous products out of your home.  Obviously, clean outdoor air matters too -– it’s just that living in the suburbs doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’ll get it.

Update:  I should mention that "A Beacon In The  Smog" is, or at least was, the official tag line of Grist Magazine.  Plagiarism, like imitation, is a sincere form of flattery.

Starving the Timber Beast

The Oregonian today reports on an unexpected consequence of a tight federal budget:  the US Forest Service doesn't have enough money to prepare timber sales in old-growth forests.

From the article:

[T}he administration and Congress are starving the U.S. Forest Service of money to plan sales of the big trees, and fight the inevitable appeals and lawsuits by their defenders. Forest managers say they are no longer pouring their shrinking funds into thankless conflicts they rarely win.

"We can't afford expensive timber sales -- the kind where controversy is engendered," said Gary Larsen, supervisor of the Mount Hood National Forest. "We're trying to find those where people can agree on the benefits."

Nifty:  we can save money and old-growth in one step.  How come it took so long to figure this out?

Is Seattle the New Singapore?

That's what mossback Knute Berger argues in his latest Seattle Weekly column.

As near as I can decipher his rantings, Berger thinks that density and gentrification in Seattle are tantamount to becoming a police state in the model of Singapore. Also, houses in the city are unaffordable. And, oh yeah, the University Village is--gasp--basically just a tony shopping mall.

Really, it's hard to know where to begin.

According to Berger, increasing Seattle's density is functionally equivalent to gentrification, which in turn implies Singapore-style law and order:

Proponents argue that the [neo-Victorian] laws work, the streets are safe, and that such rules are necessary for dealing with high urban density. As Seattle floats atop a real-estate bubble that increasingly makes the city affordable mostly to the affluent, we can probably look forward to more laws intended to make the whole town more like Singapore (recycle or else!). That is part of the price of urban gentrification, the signs of which are everywhere.

It's precisely these sorts of hysterics that make it hard for me to take anti-density arguments seriously.

Leaving aside the notion that gentrification may actually be a good thing for a city, it's not at all clear why increasing density would imply gentrification or Singapore-style law and order. It doesn't in, say, Vancouver or San Francisco.

Affordable housing is, I think, a legitimate concern. (Incidentally, that's why Berger's repeated lionization of the suburban Eastside in this column is so puzzling. Housing prices there are higher than in the city, so Berger's affordable housing spleen should presumably be vented there.)

I'll hazard one guess why Seattle's prices are a little lower: density. It's easy to bemoan the high prices in once anemic neighborhoods like Madrona and Mount Baker, but it seems to me that the best remedy for high demand and high prices is, well, more supply. The only (slim) hope of keeping Seattle's single-family neighborhoods even moderately affordable is to create an array of other housing choices.

I could go on and on about this week's column. Speaking as a mossback myself (though younger than Berger), I too often miss the "old Seattle," a quiet and unpretentious place with a character all its own. But time does not stop and cities are by nature dynamic. I wish Berger would quit gnashing his teeth and start using his column more constructively--perhaps finding ways to preserve the best features of the old place while we're trying to build something even better.

(Okay, okay, one last jab: Berger's flippant Singapore-bashing is awfully ill-informed. While Singapore is not a good model for liberal Western democracies, it's impossible to understand the place without reference to its geopolitical context and history. That is to say, it's a damn sight better than anything else in southeast Asia. Oppression comes in many guises and Singapore has managed to avoid the oppressive evils of poverty, race-riots, and Islamic fundamentalism that are even now wracking its nearest neighbors. The price of Singapore's freedom is government by a rather benign one-party psuedo-democracy that has built a prosperous and peaceful nation on the foundations of education, multiculturalism, and free trade. That and Singaporeans are denied their inalienable rights to litter and vandalize. The horror.)

BC's Forestry Losing Streak

There's an interesting article in today's Vancouver Sun on the woes of BC's coastal forestry industry -- which, apparently, has had only one profitable year over the last decade.  That seems like a pretty astonishing losing streak -- and pretty clear evidence that the industry needs to do some serious thinking about itself.  From the article:

Hammered by changing markets, global competition, softwood-lumber tariffs and now a Canadian dollar that is stripping export industries of revenues, the coastal industry is fighting for its life, said Rick Jeffery, president of the Coast Forest Products Association.

We've written before about the risks of shackling your economy to commodity exports; you subject yourself to all sorts of hazards, ranging from exchange rate fluctuations to tarriff policies to competition from a globe full of low-cost producers.

But here's the kicker of the article:

The light at the end of the tunnel, ironically, is the mountain pine beetle. It is ravaging Interior forests and in five to 10 years, when the beetle has killed most of the province's pine trees, B.C. will face a timber shortage. That is when the coastal companies -- if the needed cost reduction, consolidation and re-investment takes place -- will be in a prime position to fill the lumber void by harvesting second-growth timber for export markets.

Oh, great.  When the pine beetle is done decimating the interior forests, timber companies can start making a profit cutting down the coast.  I can't wait.

Biomonitoring Bill Terminated

In California, Gov. Schwarzenegger just vetoed a bill that would have required the state to begin monitoring synthetic chemical pollutants in the bodies of California residents, and to explore the connection (if any) between such chemical "body burdens" and human health.

To me, what seems notable here is the reason the governor gave for the veto:

"While the intent of the measure is worthy...the bill will only provide a partial snapshot of chemicals present in tested participants without proper context of what the presence of (a) specific chemical means or how it interacts with other health factors.

Translation: it's better to keep flying blind than to start opening our eyes.   According to the Oakland Tribune, the governor has pretty much lifted this argument from the chemical industry's talking points -- so I'm sure it won't be the last time we hear it.

Of course, it's not quite true that we're flying blind here.  Plenty of people are doing biomonitoring, including the US Centers for Disease Control.  But those programs have pretty definite limitations -- biomonitoring studies by academics, state labs, and public interest groups tend to be one-off affairs, rather than long-term, coordinated efforts; and the CDC data provides a useful baseline for some contaminants, but doesn't look at chemical combinations or health effects.  Those are gaps the California program could have filled.  Too bad it was Terminated.

They've Got A Bridge To Sell You

Noted in passing, a Seattle Times article with a mildly galling headline: Rebuild or replace the viaduct?  So, what then, are those the only two options on the table?  Obviously, no.  But it's hard to know that from the Times' coverage.

The article highlights the musings of a retired structural engineer and I-912 supporter who claims that the Viaduct could be patched up for the low, low cost of $200 to $300 million (perhaps using Viaduct tape), as opposed to a minimum of $2.5 billion for a whole new structure.  His reasoning:  only one section of the Viaduct needs to be replaced. "We think the rest is simply OK."  (One hopes that "I think it's ok" doesn't become the default health and safety standard for highway projects.)

Meanwhile, engineers who've actually...you know...studied the issue say that this is bunk, and the whole thing could come down in a big quake.  Repairing the Viaduct to meet reasonable safety standards is nearly as expensive as building a whole new one, and would extend the structure's working life by only a few decades -- which makes the high cost hard to justify.

Now, I don't personally know whether this retired engineer guy is onto something, or just a crank.  I suspect the latter.  But, quite clearly, the Times thought that the thoughts of a rogue engineer (I didn't know there was such a thing) were worth front-page coverage. So when do they start covering the rest of the debate -- including the people who think that replacing the Viaduct's capacity is still too expensive at $2.5 billion, let alone $4 billion for a tunnel?

Update:  It's a good idea to read the comments here -- seems like I was pretty unfair to suggest that the retired engineer, Neil Twelker, might be a crank.  Apparently, he's quite a renowned figure, and an exceptionally well qualified engineer.

And, just to be clear, I intended the title "They've got a bridge to sell you" to refer to the Times' coverage -- which seemed to assume that the two poles of the Viaduct debate were "repair" or "rebuild" -- and not to the engineers themselves.  Sorry if that seemed like a swipe at the engineers.

Climate Consensus

The Seattle Times ran a front-page Sunday article on the scientific consensus behind manmade climate change -- probably one of the better summaries of the central issues written for lay readers. Here's my favorite paragraph:

As one study after another has pointed to carbon dioxide and other man-made emissions as the most plausible explanation, the cautious community of science has embraced an idea initially dismissed as far-fetched. The result is a convergence of opinion rarely seen in a profession where attacking each other's work is part of the process. Every major scientific body to examine the evidence has come to the same conclusion: The planet is getting hotter; man is to blame; and it's going to get worse.

Plus, four short corollary articles clarify the debates about those prickly rejoinders you may have heard skeptics employ: the sun's effect, the "hocky stick" graph, the urban heat-island effect, and complicated satellite readings.

Read the articles here.

It's a Gas Gas Gas

Wouldn't you know it -- as soon as the New York Times puts its editorials behind a subscription-only wall, they publish something worth reading:  semi-libertarian John Tierney waxing rhapsodic about gas taxes (sorry, the link is subscription only).

To summarize, Tierney argues for a 50 cent per gallon gas tax, with all receipts used to fund private Social Security accounts.  This, he says, would simultaneously reduce gas consumption, pollution, congestion, and all the other costs that drivers impose on the rest of society, all while enhancing retirement revenue.  And if gas taxes revenues are split evenly among all citizens, the poor (who drive little) will get far more out of the deal than they put in.

Now, I'll ignore his Social Security proposal -- which isn't a real proposal, just a sketch of an idea -- except to say that I'm skeptical, but (hopefully) open-minded.  But what's important to note here is this:  Tierney is calling for gas taxes to be used for something other than transportation.  And that seems like a really big deal to me.

Traditionally, gas taxes are earmarked for roads and highway spending:  the federal gas tax is devoted almost entirely to transportation projects.  Likewise, Washington state's gas tax receipts must be spent on highways.  It's in the state constitution, even. 

All of which means that gas taxes are mostly used to build new roads and "improve" old ones -- which encourages more driving.  That's good news for oil companies, auto manufacturers, and for people who really like to spend time in their cars; but obviously bad in lots of other ways.

Now, the thing is, gas taxes are fairly unique in this regard. Sales taxes aren't earmarked for programs to increase sales; income taxes aren't earmarked for programs to enhance income; so why are gas taxes, and gas taxes alone, treated as a dedicated funding source that can only be used to increase driving and, indirectly, gas consumption?  It doesn't make much sense -- and, obviously, it's a major reason that our society spends so much money on roads and transportation generally.

It doesn't have to be that way.  There's no reason that gas taxes can't be treated as just another general revenue source, just like sales and income taxes; or that they can't be earmarked for something other than transportation.  That, rather than his thoughts about Social Security, seems to be the important thing to take away from Tierney's article.

Good Air Day

This is pretty cool. Real-time air quality measurements for 17 locations around Puget Sound. At the moment, every monitoring station is showing good air quality. It'll be interesting to check back periodically as wintertime inversions trap pollution in the basin.

Anyone know of other web-based measurements like this one for other places in the Northwest?

UPDATE: Here's a clickable map of county-by-county air quality for Washington state. (Hat tip to the ever-vigilant Alan Durning.)

SUVs Kill the Elderly

A sensationalist headline, perhaps, but it's apparently true: a new article in the British Medical Journal reports that SUVs pose a special risk to pedestrians, particularly over the age of 60. 

A few relevant facts:

• Pedestrians over 60 are more than four times likely to die if injured by a car than younger people.
• For any given collision speed, getting hit by an SUV or light truck is nearly twice as fatal (pdf link) as getting hit by a passenger car.
• Studies consistently show higher rates of severe injury or death when pedestrians are struck by SUVs.

Apparently, SUVs are so dangerous to pedestrians not because they're heavy, but because they're tall -- leading to more injuries of the head and abdomen, rather than the legs.

The report's authors recommend labelling SUVs with warning notices that they're hazardous to pedestrians. Sadly, I'm doubtful that that would do much good--it seems to me that many people buy SUVs precisely because they're a menace to others on the road.  (It feels safer that way, you know.)  More effective--though less politically viable, perhaps--would be changes to liability laws, possibly coupled with up-front charges to SUV buyers, that make SUV owners and manufacturers pay for the safety risks they're imposing on everyone else.

(Hat tip to Eric Sorensen for the head's up.)

The Nature of Trend Watching

High gas prices may be grabbing headlines, but there's another trend worth watching: the Northwest's faltering ecosystems. Our (in)attention to ecosystem health is an example par excellence that we should measure what matters. All too often the converse is true: we let what matters be dictated by what we can measure.

Biological systems are enormously complex and are inherently dynamic. So precise up-to-the-minute trend data is usually not available. And because we can't measure and report on ecological conditions in a timely fashion that keeps pace with the demands of the 6 o'clock nightly news or the frenetic blogosphere, we often simply ignore the state of our ecosystems.

But for a change from fast news to slow news, consider today's news reports on the state of biological systems in the Northwest.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports today that a joint study from the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and Friends of the San Juan Islands shows that 957 species in the Puget Sound area are at risk of extirpation. In addition to habitat loss, the principal agent of harm, the report fingers the usual suspects: "Pollution, climate change and invasions by non-native species..." (Read CBD's press release here.)

And in California, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that an attempt to expand the range of southern sea otters is now considered a failure. Members of the southern sub-species, now restricted in range to California, were unable to achieve viable population stability after being relocated to San Nicholas Island near Santa Barbara. Of the 140 otters transplanted there roughly 15 years ago, only 32 remain today.

In Oregon, the Eugene Register-Guard reports on the findings of a study by the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Xerces demonstrates that forest insect outbreaks, an increasingly nasty problem for Northwest forests, cannot be addressed by logging or thinning the forests. In fact, cutting may actually make the problem worse. That's germane to the awful situation for forestry in British Columbia, where the mountain pine beetle is steadily wrecking havoc on the province's interior forests. A good piece on the economic implications for BC appeared recently in The Tyee.

None of these trends changes in a meaningful way on an hourly or daily basis. Each of them takes years to develop, the aggregate of many days of slow trends compounding, but their effects are far reaching. Will Puget Sound's biodiversity continue to diminish? Are the southern sea otters long for this world? Will the Northwest's forests--and forest economies--fall victim to a plague of insects?

The answers to these questions matter, but they are not easily quantifiable and they do not fluctuate often enough to warrant regular reporting. So we tend to lose sight of their significance and even the direction of the trends.

It's not that gas prices and economic trends don't matter--they certainly do--it's that our society's obsession with new data is blurring our vision. We see only the daily headlines, not the long term slow trends that may have a greater effect on the future for our children, our place, and even ourselves.

Happiness Should Count, says NYT

As a follow-up to their story this week, the New York Times editorializes today on the importance of measuring happiness and using it to shape policy.

"A clearer understanding of what makes humans happy - not merely more eager consumers or more productive workers - might help begin to reshape those assumptions in a way that has a measurable and meliorating outcome on the lives we lead and the world we live in."

See all our posts on happiness here.

Pedestrian Safety in Numbers

Pedestrians: be safe, flock to Portland!

In the past 6 years pedestrian crash rates have fallen by 38 percent, according to a report on Oregon Public Broadcasting. The decline is especially impressive because there are likely more pedestrians today because more people (32 percent more) are using Portland's public transit. And similarly, while the number of bicyclist injuries has remained fairly constant, the total number of cyclists has gone up so that, on average, bicyclists are safer than they were 6 years ago.

Crash rates don't increase directly in line with walking and biking rates because there's safety in numbers. A study that looked at walking, biking, and crash rates in several cities found that individual pedestrians and cyclists are safer when traveling in cities with greater numbers of pedestrians and cyclists. The study's authors estimated that if the number of pedestrians were doubled, then the total number of pedestrian injuries would increase by only a third, but the rate of pedestrian injuries would actually decrease by a third. The theory is that the more often drivers encounter walkers, the more they expect to encounter them, and the more cautiously they drive.

Of course, infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists, as well as traffic regulations and customs, also greatly affect safety. I suspect that Portland's reductions are due to both safety in numbers and infrastructure improvements because the number of car crashes dropped as well. But it seems as though investments in pedestrian and cyclist safety could generate a feedback loop of benefits: if a city increases safety with better intersections and more bike lanes, then more people feel safe to walk and bike, so walking and biking become even safer, so more people feel safe to walk and bike. Eventually it would reach a plateau, of course, but we have a long way to go to match pedestrian rates in other countries.

The Not-So-Big Way-Too-Big House

A good news update to my previous post on the up-sizing of houses: Americans may have reached their limit. The New York Times reports that the size of new houses may be leveling off. While the average size of new homes grew by around 50% from 1970 to 2001, the past few years have seen very little increase.

What could be causing the trend? According to the New York Times, people are trading quality for quantity. Not only do builders have anecdotal evidence, but a nationwide survey in 2004 found that, for the same price, 63 percent of respondents would prefer a smaller house with more amenities than a larger house with fewer amenities. That's up from 49 percent in 2000. The article also suggests that houses have finally become as large as people say they want them to be -- reality finally matches the American Dream.

I wonder if the housing boom plus the recession curtailed house sizes: people frenzied to buy a house, who don't have the money for the big house they really want, settle for smaller. But optimistically, I'll hope that people's preferences for McMansions have actually changed (not just as a fad) and that they've realized how much more giant houses cost to furnish and maintain. With rising energy prices, size can make a big difference.

March of the Juniper

For me, there are few sensory pleasures greater than the tangy smell of juniper trees (and especially so when I have a fly rod in hand and an eastern Oregon trout stream is chilling my ankles). But apart from their aroma, junipers are mostly ignored because there is little commercial use for them and they mostly inhabit pretty lonely country.

But we can't ignore juniper much longer. A new study in Oregon by the US Forest Service shows that the native tree is expanding dramatically, quadrupling its range over the last 75 years. Researchers attribute the trees' success to a variety of factors, including incrementally warmer and wetter weather (which favors juniper) and range management techniques like fire suppression (range fires once killed off many juniper seedlings). In many ways, the juniper expansion is a classic example of the unintended consequences of altering ecosystems--the effect may be long-delayed and subtle, but it is often profound.

Juniper expansion turns out to be a bad deal for eastern Oregon's native ecology, including the sage grouse, which depend on certain shrubs and grasses that are getting out-competed. And juniper also soaks up a tremendous amount of water--as much as 30 gallons a day for a single tree--a potentially big problem for both ranchers and ecosystems in an arid region.   

The Forest Service re