The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is moving to permanently block the proposed Pebble Mine project, which would locate a mile-square copper and gold mine between two of the most productive river watersheds supporting the salmon fishery of Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

The Olympic Tennis Club near Seattle’s Madison and Boren streets (atop First Hill, then a fashionable neighborhood) was founded in 1890, with courts scattered around and  early club dances held in a “large riding stable.” It was later named the Seattle Tennis Club and moved to Lake Washington.

The legal protections Seattle affords its trees are minimal compared to other American cities. For instance, New York and Boston aggressively protect their urban forests.  New York has 7 million trees, and it’s not clear to me that Seattle even knows how many it has. 

Some history is called for.

Though he was never a fan of the egotistical desire to build the world’s tallest building, he saw some recompense in the fact that sending the towers into the air would create room for a large plaza at the base that would grant relief from the dense urban fabric of Lower Manhattan.

Our chef called MID. They informed him that they didn’t handle these issues. He then called the police, four different times throughout the day. They did not come until well after the fourth call, at which time they parked and watched from their car as our staff dealt with the harassment of customers on the patio.

For those with long memories, it is incredible to believe that we are still discussing women's reproductive rights nearly half a century after the U. S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade by a 7-2 majority.

If an objective is to tip the scales in favor of local interests and away from international ones, then some control on the type and location of outside investment is going to be necessary. Limiting the location and number of airbnbs owned by a single person or company is one method.

Santa Fe is a unique and bewitching place, rich with cultural amenities, surrounded by stunning countryside and with lots of progressive thinking. It's a place where one can make friends easily, receive more types of alternative health treatments than ever imagined, and feast on the famed regional cuisine.

The most likely scenario now, with two weeks until the Sept. 20 election, is for another “hung” parliament in which no party wins a majority.

Rumsfeld’s gone and Bush and Cheney have the sense to keep their heads down. But their neocon cheerleaders (Bill Kristol!) have risen from their crypts to pile onto Biden and proclaim that we coulda shoulda woulda won in Afghanistan. It’s a bumper crop of shamelessness.

One adverse consequence of democracy vouchers in Seattle elections has been the increasing clout of independent-expenditure PACs. So much for getting big wealth out of our elections.

"Compassion Seattle" is a voter initiative which would have amended the City Charter to require emergency housing (2,000 units within the first year of adoption), dedicate at least 12% of the City's general fund revenues to address homelessness, and required the City to take action to ensure that parks, playgrounds, and public spaces remained clear of encampments as housing and services became available.

Alaska is changing fast. All told, according to climate records kept by the Matanuska Experimental Farm near Anchorage, the average yearly temperature has jumped by 6.9 degrees during the past century.  The annual number of frost-free days measured at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport has grown by 17 days.

Seattle is already one of the most progressive cities in the nation with respect to diversion-from-jail programs, yet it has a serious frequent offender problem.

Like so many things, it strikes me that modern brain science is confirming what traditional and spiritual wisdom have long taught: moderation is wise. Fasting is a necessary complement to feasting. But we’re up against a culture and economy that tell us to indulge, to enjoy, and to feast all the time as we try to fill some deeper emptiness.

Seattle candidates respond, in their own words, to three key issues in the election: single-family zoning, abolishing misdemeanor prosecution, and solutions to homelessness. This is Part One.

District 7 will have to shed some territory, and the South End districts will have to shuffle voters. Nearly all the districts will have to change.

One historian, Murray Morgan, helped establish the term "Skid Road," correcting the misnomer of Skid Row. Morgan left a rich trove of historial anecdotes.

The popularity of Persian Gulf refuge for discredited leaders reflects the shift in global turmoil to the Middle East and Asia from previous decades’ fighting and coup-waging that toppled Latin American strongmen and Eurasian Communist dictators.

Without Julie Brown's reporting and without her painstaking reexamination of justice gone astray, Jeffrey Epstein might still be flying high, consorting with the elite, and abusing young women.

Compassion Seattle had a difficult birth, steering a course among the business community, the service providers, and the good-government types who opposed the charter-amendment route. Even with the court setback, the group may have political legs.

Nearly all of the focus to date on COVID’s impacts has been about hospitalizations and deaths. We have assumed that if we can prevent those two outcomes, we’re past the worst of the crisis. But long COVID might be the third bad outcome, emerging from the shadows.

It’s comforting to know my morning coffee is being brewed by sunlight. And I’ve become addicted to the app that tells me our excess rooftop electrons are flowing back to the Jefferson PUD, which promises to return the favor, watt for watt,  when the sun migrates south next winter.

The ball is back where it should be - on those holding office now and those we elect in November, to create a workable strategy to reach those goals.

Biden could pull back from his Everythingness to focus on one big goal, such as climate change. In Seattle, that big single goal could be housing.

We are used to life in a region surrounded by envy. As such, we have underestimated the speed at which impacts of climate change would arrive.

The attacks claimed by the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) at an airport gate thronged by those desperate to flee the Taliban demonstrated that the extremist force claiming to be in power has no control over rival militant factions or even many in its own ranks.

Newspapers have seen their traditional ad-supported business models fray and fall apart, while Google, Insta, Facebook et al have grown fat and sassy. And news publishers look at Google & Co.’s pots of money and cry “foul – you’ve stolen our ad dollars.” Surely reparations are in order.

For me, in-person worship, the worship of a gathered community, falls in the category of “burdens that we should not want to be rid of.”