Oregon Field Guide producer Katrina Sarson talks with Outdoor School creator Warren "Gil" Gilfillan.
Oregon Field Guide is doing a story about the history of Outdoor School – the Portland metro area’s six-day science program that gets sixth graders outside to learn about the natural world.
The program started in 1966 and now offers a unique environmental learning experience to 16,000 students a year. But it has been in jeopardy lately because of school budget cuts.
With that news fresh as of Monday night, I joined Oregon Field Guide producer Katrina Sarson yesterday for her first interview with Outdoor School founder Warren “Gil” Gilfillan, who is 89 years old.
“That’s good to hear,” he said when I told him Portland’s fall program has likely been preserved.
“If ever the world needed Outdoor School, it is now. The economic problems are overshadowing everything, but we’re headed down the road to destruction if we can’t get together and educate ourselves.” Continue reading →
Carolyn Matthews and Bruce Nelson built themselves a 670-square-foot “granny flat” alongside their home in Northeast Portland. They’re renting it out to another couple now, but eventually plan to move into it and rent out the larger house.
Building small allowed Nelson and Matthews to preserve green space on their nearly half-acre lot – including a 25-year-old Japanese pagoda tree. "We definitely didn't want to see the property subdivided," said Nelson.
This 160-square-foot tiny house is mobile and super cheap. The average cost of a tiny house, according to Eli Spevak of Orange Splot LLC, is around $35,000. More than a trailer, but much less than a full-size home.
Mike Svoboda has a front porch that looks out at a central courtyard and shared garden space at the cohousing development Sabin Green in Northeast Portland. Three other small homes on the property are technically condos that share common space.
A bike shed is another one of the shared spaces at Sabin Green. “There’s lots of informal sharing,” said homeowner Rosemary Sweet. “It’s an inexpensive way to live. I don’t feel any disadvantage from living close to people.”
I went on a small home tour in Portland last week and met Jordan Palmeri, a Oregon Department of Environmental Quality waste prevention specialist who oversaw this study about the environmental benefits of smaller homes.
On the tour, we met people in Portland who are shrinking their environmental footprints by shrinking the physical footprint of their homes. I saw examples of people building a 160-square foot tiny house on a friend’s driveway, people building a 670-foot retirement home in their own backyard, and people sharing acreage to fit four 530- to 1,600-square-foot homes on one valuable lot.
Small homes have a smaller environmental impact right from the start because they use fewer building materials, Palmeri said. But the benefits keep accruing as the years of less energy use add up. That quickly puts small homes built to code on par with bigger homes that have all the green building bells and whistles.
“People know smaller homes use less materials and energy,” Palmeri said. “The real ‘Aha!’ moment for people was when you compare the benefits of all the other green building practices we incentivize – insulation or PV solar, for example – building smaller is the biggest bang for your buck.” Continue reading →
Standing in front of a 1-ton bag of Crystal Green fertilizer pellets made from sewage are, left to right, Clean Water Services Operator Brett Laney, Oregon Treasurer Ted Wheeler, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies CEO Phillip Abrary.
A sewage treatment facility in Hillsboro will soon be making money off of nutrients people flush down the toilet.
The wastewater utility Clean Water Services teamed up with Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, Inc. of Vancouver, B.C., to build the world’s largest nutrient recovery operation at Hillsboro’s Rock Creek Advanced Wastewater Treatment Facility.
Ostara has created technology that can extract 90 percent of the phosphorous and 20 percent of the nitrogen from municipal wastewater and turn it into slow-release fertilizer pellets the company calls Crystal Green.
The system reclaims nutrients that Clean Water Services would have to remove from wastewater anyway to protect water quality in the Tualatin River. And it uses them to make fertilizer with a fraction of the energy inputs normally required.
The energy savings in fertilizer production are so substantial – roughly 85 percent – that Clean Water Services got a Business Energy Tax Credit of $1.12 million from the Oregon Department of Energy to help build the $4.5 million facility.
“A lot of the carbon footprint savings comes from the fact that you don’t have to go out and mine this resource. You can conveniently recover it from our waste stream,” said Ostara President and CEO Phillip Abrary. “This method is between seven and 10 times less energy intensive – it’s a tremendously smaller carbon footprint. So you can recover phosphorus in Oregon now and you’re producing it locally and consuming it locally. ” Continue reading →
Designers and builders of Facebook's Prineville Data Center discussed the sustainability strengths and weaknesses of the 150,000 square-foot facility on Wednesday.
Remember the Greenpeace “unfriend coal” campaign against Facebook using coal-fired power at its Prineville Data Center? The company gets its electricity from PacifiCorp, which means its energy mix is about 60 percent coal-fired power.
So, the data center is using quite a bit of coal-fired power to store the photos and personal musings of 9 million Facebook users. For a while, it was a secret how much total power the Prineville data center was using. But this piece from Data Center Knowledge suggests the company has pegged it at 28 megawatts – nearly as much as all of the surrounding Crook County.
“There does not exist such a thing in the world today as a sustainable data center.” — Josh Hatch, Sustainability Advisor
With all that in mind, I stopped into a discussion about sustainable data centers at the Living Future Conference in Portland yesterday. Several reps from Portland firms that helped build the Prineville data center were there, as well as Marco Magarelli, Facebook’s data center design manager.
Josh Hatch of the Portland sustainability consulting firm Brightworks helped Facebook assess the environmental impacts of its data center operations. And he didn’t mince words at the session. The Prineville data center is certified as a LEED Gold green building, he said. And it was painstakingly designed for energy efficiency so it uses 52 percent less energy than a comparable data center.
“But there is one thing this project is not,” said Hatch. “This project is not sustainable. It has taken several important steps toward sustainability, but there does not exist such a thing in the world today as a sustainable data center.” Continue reading →
A view of Port Westward on the Columbia River, where Portland General Electric is worried coal dust from a proposed coal export terminal will interfere with its natural gas-fired power plants.
The South County Spotlight broke a big story today on the coal export front. Apparently Portland General Electric is worried about the impact of coal dust on its natural gas power plants at Port Westward.
PGE leases 850 acres of land at the site from the Port of St. Helens, and Kinder Morgan wants to use some or all of that land for a coal export terminal that could handle up to 30 million tons of coal a year at full build-out.
But PGE spokesman Steve Corson said today his company has refused to release the property for the export terminal – at least as it’s currently proposed – because of concerns about coal dust near its natural gas-fired power plants:
“The concern is that the coal dust could interfere with our equipment at the plant, and with operations of that equipment, which involves various kinds of air intake and so forth,” Corson told OPB. “Our plants there represent an investment of literally hundreds of millions of dollars and are an important component of service to our customers.”
The acknowledgement of a coal dust reality – by a utility that runs a coal-fired power plant upriver in Boardman – is something new. Continue reading →
The killing part has been confirmed, the agencies reported today, but not the wolf part.
They’re still working on genetic tests to confirm whether the dead animal found in mid-March is really a wolf – and therefore protected by the state Endangered Species Act.
However, a necropsy confirmed the animal/wolf died as a result of a criminal act, according to today’s news release. The agencies are not releasing the actual cause of death.
Michelle Dennehy of ODFW said the reason the agencies aren’t saying for sure it was a wolf because they’re still testing to make sure it wasn’t a genetic one-off from the protected wild wolf species.
“The appearance and size makes us believe it is a wolf,” she said. “But we do want to rule out that it’s not a hybrid wolf or a tame pet wolf.”
Hero? Salmon activist? Judge James Redden is a self-proclaimed hell-raiser who left his mark on one of the Northwest's most contentious natural resource cases before stepping down in November at age 82.
Judge James Redden has been a mighty force in the long-running court battle over managing dams in the Columbia River Basin to protect salmon.
Now 83, Redden stepped down from the iconic dams vs. salmon case in November – three months after rejecting a third federal dam management plan.
EarthFix reporter Aaron Kunz and I met with Redden last week to discuss the case and his departure from it. You might have seen some of the highlights of the interview already; the judge told us he thinks the four lower Snake River dams should be breached – a pretty big reveal for people who have been following the case.
But that’s not nearly all he said.
Redden reflected on his frustration with federal agencies, the power of the Endangered Species Act, his role in protecting fish and the limits of what he could do as a federal judge in the case.
“I’m sure they’re very happy I decided to step down,” he said of federal dam managers. “And it was the right thing for me to do. I’d been ill and in the hospital with heart surgery and I’m getting old. But I’m happy about what I’ve done, although I know I haven’t done enough. There’s not much a judge can do, but you can raise hell. And I did.” Continue reading →
Gov. John Kitzhaber sent a letter to federal agencies today asking them to do a new environmental impact statement for coal leases in the Powder River Basin that looks at the impacts of shipping coal through the Northwest for export to Asia.
Gov. John Kitzhaber shared his “grave concerns” about coal export projects on the West Coast at the Future Energy Conference in Portland today. And he asked the federal government to conduct a full environmental impact study of the coal mined on public land in the Powder River Basin – including the impacts of exporting it to Asia – before any more coal leases are granted.
There are six coal export terminals proposed in the Northwest, at Oregon ports in Coos Bay, Boardman and St. Helens and at Washington ports in Bellingham, Longview, and Grays Harbor. Many of the projects would involve taking coal from the Powder River Basin and shipping by rail to ports for exports to Asia.
Kitzhaber said there are “many unanswered questions” about coal exports on the West Coast, and that he’s concerned about the environmental, economic and health impacts of shipping coal along rail lines and waterways in Oregon and Washington.
Kitzhaber said the federal government has assessed some of the environmental impacts of mining coal on public lands in Wyoming and Montana. But the existing Environmental Impact Statement for coal leases on Bureau of Land Management sites in the Powder River Basin only assesses shipping coal to the Midwest and Eastern states for power production in the U.S.
The BLM has not analyzed the impacts of shipping that coal to Asia through terminals on the West Coast.
Here are all of his comments from today’s speech:
“As you know, negotiations are currently underway at many locations in Oregon and Washington to secure the necessary approvals for coal export facilities to ship coal from The Powder River basin to Asia. I have grave concerns about proceeding in this direction in the absence of a full national discussion about the ramifications inherent in this course of action. Continue reading →
Prices for U.S. coal can go for $20 a ton overseas, but the highest bid the Bureau of Land Management has gotten for a coal lease in the Powder River Basin is $1.10 a ton. U.S. Rep. Edward Markey asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether the BLM should be charging more.
U.S. Rep. Edward Markey is wondering whether the federal government should be charging coal companies higher prices for leases of publicly owned coal tracts in the Powder River Basin.
The BLM is in charge of coal leasing on 570 million acres of land and is supposed to award leases only if an offer meets “fair market value,” Markey explained in his letter.
As a ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, Markey asked the GAO to examine national trends in coal production, and the number of bids BLM has gotten on publicly owned coal tracts, the process BLM uses to determine fair market value for coal leases, and whether the value BLM is using reflect prices in export markets.
“Coal exports are rising as U.S. electricity producers move away from coal in favor of natural gas and renewable energy,” he wrote. “With such rapid market changes taking place, American taxpayers must be assured they are receiving the full value for energy resources held in the public trust, especially when mining companies are seeking to export hundreds of millions of tons of coal for premium prices.
… Companies mining federal leases in Wyoming and Montana are increasing coal exports not only because of declining U.S. demand but also because they can sell coal for higher prices in foreign markets. Continue reading →
The Lewis & Clark National Historical Park holds an annual nature-writing contest for high school students. This year organizer Will George asked me to judge the contest, and I said yes.
The contestants were asked to write a 500-word nonfiction essay under the theme “Tales From The Trail.” My job was to rank the top 10 essays and pick a winner.
I remember reading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden as a junior in high school and being absolutely enthralled. The next great nature writing I remember reading was Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Then there was Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire … Picking favorites can be hard.
But here is the essay that won me over, and a picture of the ninth-grader who wrote it.
Gabrielle Hendrickson is a freshman at Neah-Kah-Nie High School. She lives in Wheeler, Oregon.
The Forest
By Gabrielle Hendrickson
An intricate archway of branches frames the entryway to my forest, a place of comfort and familiarity. It is Wonderland, and I am Alice. No rays of light were able to penetrate the tightly interlocked branches, offering no warmth, no light. The silent wood was cast into eternal night.
Hush. The carpet of orange needles and twigs hardly made a sound as my quiet feet cast down upon it. The cool soil chilled my feet that were bare but did not deter me from reaching the sacred place. I remembered the way involuntarily: forty paces, turn right. Breathe. Thirty-six paces. Open your eyes, and there it was. Continue reading →
