Portland

Portland’s newest high-rise has wind turbines on the roof

The cermonial urban-turbine installation.indigo12west.comTwo weeks ago in Portland, Oregon, a new 23-story building added something you don’t usually see in an urban setting: a series of four Skystream wind turbines, with a total capacity of 9.6kW. There are several reasons why wind turbines are a rarity atop highrises — beyond the obvious one: our power […]

The 15 most sustainable U.S. cities

Seattle is the most sustainable big city in the nation, according to a list compiled by Smarter Cities, an NRDC project that looks at the progress American cities are making toward going green. Not surprisingly, San Francisco and Portland are the runners-up. Using data from the EPA and the U.S. Census Bureau, as well as […]

How transportation wonks can make your city rank

Here's an interesting ranking. For each major U.S. city, the list-happy editors at Men's Health calculated the negative effects of driving. They aggregated scores on transit ridership, air pollution, fuel consumption, and driving miles. (Presumably, the data are for metropolitan areas, not city limits.) Northwest cities do exceptionally well: Seattle ranks number one, Portland ranks third, and Spokane is eighth.

Men's Health doesn't appear to include a methodology on the web, but I'll take a stab at the explanation. First, a minor point. Seattle and Portland benefit from a felicitous geographic situation: prevailing westerly winds tend to keep our air some of the cleanest in the country, so we do relatively well on air pollution scores. Second and more importantly, the list illustrates that urban areas control their own destinies. Smart policy matters, even if it's relatively small-caliber.

Early appearances of climate change in popular literature

Last week, I picked up a copy of the newly reissued 1971 Ursula Le Guin classic The Lathe of Heaven, which takes place in dystopic, post-collapse Portland, Ore., circa 2002 or so. It's typical brilliance from Le Guin, of whom I can't read enough, but I was interested to see that the novel begins by describing Mt. Hood devoid of snow due to the greenhouse effect. The climate is entirely different from that of the 1960s, with blue skies a thing of the past and rainfall patterns completely shifted.

It's the earliest "popular literature" mention of global warming I've come across. Le Guin is often way ahead of her time (she invented Harry Potter and Hogwarts in 1968's A Wizard of Earthsea, for example), though perhaps there are earlier instances of authors adding climate change to the collective body of literature.

Yes we can! (ride bikes)

“It’s time that the entire country learn from what’s happening right here in Portland with mass transit and bicycle lanes and funding alternative means of transportation. That’s the kind of solution that we need for America.” — Barack Obama, speaking to a rally in Portland, Ore., where an estimated 8,000 out of 75,000 attendees arrived […]

Events in Seattle and Portland sure to inspire

Renewable energy installations in remote communities of developing nations encourage indigenous and rural communities to stay put and keep their traditions alive. With remarkably small power systems, these underserved villages can store vaccines in a refrigerator, pump water, light a clinic at night, or contact the outside world.

One of the key grassroots groups doing this work is Green Empowerment, which approaches all of their projects in Central/South America and Southeast Asia through a lens of generating social as well as environmental progress for communities with renewable energy & potable water delivery. GE interviews community members about what their power or water procurement needs are, recommends a system that would be appropriate -- including small hydropower, biomass, wind or solar -- supply the system, and then train a team of community members to plan, install, and maintain that system. That team can then help neighboring communities do the same, while maintaining its own.

GE is bringing two of their inspiring partners, engineer/activists from the Philippines who run NGOs there, to give folks in Seattle this Friday and Portland next Thursday a better sense of the huge possibilities of their shared projects. Highly recommended!

A poet takes the measure of Portland — on foot

Starting early this century, poet and professor David Oates set out to walk the boundary line that Oregon drew around the city of Portland decades ago to concentrate its development and discourage sprawl. What is today called "the New Urbanism" is not new in Portland: it's been part of the political process since l973.

As Oates writes in a forward to a book he recently published about his adopted state's experiment in urban utopianism:

We hope to grow in, and in some places, up. To get richer in connections and cleverness -- to get deeper -- instead of wider, flatter, and shallower.

That simplicity of language and depth of thought is part of the charm of City Limits: Walking Portland's Boundary. Like Thoreau, to whom Oates alludes in his first chapter -- titled "Where I Walked, What I Walked For" -- Oates has a knack for linking a bold action, such as walking over 250 miles around the city, to a self-deprecating description.

Oates lightly mocks himself for getting lost, for his fear of dog attacks in redneck neighborhoods, and even for his own occasional tendency to stereotype people. This willingness to reveal his flaws helps the reader trust Oates' discussion of the issues raised by Portland's boundary (known as the UGB, or Urban Growth Boundary). Oates also dares include in his book brief essays from others, including philosopher/writer Kathleen Deen Moore and winemaker Eric Lemelson, as well as a planner, a landscape architect, and even a developer -- the sort of voices not usually heard in "environmental" books.

Most surprising of all, on his walks Oates occasionally encounters legendary figures -- such as John Muir, Paul Shepherd, Italo Calvino -- who just happen to have inspired Oates. These ghostly figures turn out to be quite chatty, and yet utterly themselves, giving the book a jolt of originality to match its open-mindedness. Each encounter with these ghosts has a wistful quality; one can tell that Oates hates to see them go.

Calvino especially inspires, with his discussion of the city of the labyrinthian spiral, the city of multiple desires, the city "that fades before your eyes," he tells Oates. "Like all of Portland's inhabitants, you follow zigzag lines from one street to another ... all the rest of the city is invisible. Your footsteps follow not what is outside the eyes, but what is within, buried, erased."

It's a wonderful, original, eye-opening book. Although sometimes the multiple introductions and voices give it a patchwork quilt quality, in the end the book resembles the city Oates obviously adores: vibrantly alive, defiantly progressive, fearlessly contentious. For Grist, Oates kindly agreed to answer a few questions about Portland and its attempts to control its development:

Birds die in Portland neighborhood after alcohol binge

This story from The Oregonian gives new meaning to the term "dead drunk":

It's a case fit for wildlife CSI: 55 robins from the Mount Tabor neighborhood -- all dead within a few nearby backyards.

Toxic spill?

Mystery virus?

Maybe not. The leading theory is that the birds were fatally intoxicated, said Bob Sallinger of the Audubon Society of Portland's wildlife care center, where the birds ended up last week.

That's right: The birds drank themselves to death.

Not from a bottle, though. The birds' bellies were chock full of holly berries, skins and seeds. Sallinger isn't dismissing other explanations yet, but the current thinking is that the birds ate aged and fermented berries that killed them.

...

The robins travel in flocks this time of year, so they could have gobbled the berries together last week. They may have died from ethanol poisoning directly or dropped into such a stupor they died of exposure.

"Certainly a drunk bird in the rain is pretty vulnerable," Sallinger said.

Maybe they were just depressed.

Biking communities thrive in San Francisco and Santa Cruz

We moved offices earlier this year, and are now a little off the beaten track. To deal with the increased distance, and because I broke my colleague Gwen's foldable bike, I brought in a couple of bikes for the office: a pink Stumpjumper of '80s vintage at a garage sale in Lee Vining, and a more recently minted Hardrock bequeathed by good friend and noted environmental economist Michael Greenstone.

This is all to say that I've been biking around San Francisco quite a bit recently, and I am struck by how much better things are. The lane striping, for one, makes a big difference. It creates a margin of safety that borders on acceptable. The city, with prodding by the super-effective SF Bike Coalition, has done a fantastic job of laying out lane-striped bike routes through popular corridors. For example: to get from downtown to the Haight, you take the Wiggle. Most people have to wait until they get to the Haight before they start wiggling, but not bike riders. They get their wiggle in early, on the way.