Dan Chasan

Bill Ruckelshaus made the nearby residents of Tacoma's ASARCO smelter face the choice: kill a few people a year from arsenic, or gamble to save 575 jobs?

“Lynx are good sentinel species for climate change,” says Dan Thornton, an assistant professor in Washington State University's School of the Environment.. “They are like an early warning system for what’s going to happen to other climate sensitive species.”

Here in the Pacific Northwest -- at least the dank western part of the region -- planting trees seems a natural. If there's one thing we can do here, it's grow trees. And we should. But not every place is Western Washington or Oregon. And even here, there are caveats.

Can Washington manage its vast forests in part to, say, slow climate change or protect drinking water, or must it manage them exclusively to generate money for public school construction and the budgets of cash-strapped counties? This question is not merely rhetorical.

If wolves lose all federal protection, as is now threatened, they still have the state. But Washington state policy looks uncertain.

"Fishery managers and NOAA could resolve this by moving Southeast Alaska’s Chinook fishery in or near the Alaskan rivers where their Chinook were born, allowing Chinook from down the coast to migrate back to their home rivers along the coast, and giving Southern Resident killer whales a chance to feed.”

Good riddance to 2019 and the fall of the MAX. With hopes for 2020, and electing leaders with a clue.

There’s no way to cast the recent report as substantive progress. Or to see it as evidence of Jay Inslee's gubernatorial leadership.

Forecasts for the Columbia Basin aren’t encouraging. Over the coming century, “a lot of the lower Columbia will become unsuitable” for salmon, one expert says.

The court's logic was simple: If the government is going to forbid or penalize false statements, it has to establish what's true. Do we want government deciding what political statements are true and false?