Open Spaces Views from the Northwest
  • Home
  • Articles
  • About
  • Showcase

Public Lands, Air, Water, Wildlife

Clean Energy and the Inflation Reduction Act

April 18, 2023
When the U.S. Senate passed my Clean Energy for America Act last year as the centerpiece of the Inflation Reduction Act, I had to pinch myself after the floor vote. After all, Big Oil and other powerful special interests zealously guarding their precious and outmoded privileges don’t get defeated so resoundingly and deservedly every day back in Washington, […]
Read More »

The Whys and Wherefores: Failures of Governance and Imagination [1]

April 07, 2023
How did progressive Oregon, and the country, get to stasis on climate change? Other countries have not locked up on the issue. Even the Brexit-inflected and flustered United Kingdom has a coherent and determined if stumbling-toward-solutions policy approach. Even China, as dependent as it is on coal, acknowledges its obligation to exit that fuel and […]
Read More »

Fingerprints on the Landscape

January 13, 2023
The Law that Enabled the Print Makers A remarkable thing happened in Oregon in 1973. At the urging of then-Governor Tom McCall and state Senator Hector Macpherson, both Republicans, the Oregon Legislature enacted the bi-partisan Senate Bill 100, establishing the nation’s first statewide land use planning program (1973). Governments and professional planning organizations were wonder-struck. […]
Read More »

SCOTUS Should Allow EPA to Address Climate Pollution

March 24, 2022
Recently, the Supreme Court heard arguments in West Virginia v. EPA, a case challenging Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) long-standing authority to address climate pollution from power plants. Two decades ago, in the Whitman v. American Trucking Association case, Justice Scalia wrote for a unanimous Court affirming EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act (1970) to […]
Read More »

Returning Sea Otters to Oregon: Repairing a Torn Fabric

June 06, 2021
The ocean along the Pacific Coast is exhibiting unmistakable signs of stress as the result of a changing climate and pressures from other human activities. Increasingly acidic ocean water, caused by an over-abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and in ocean waters, is affecting calcium-based marine life such as very young crab and oysters. […]
Read More »

An Impromptu on Owning Land

April 16, 2017
I own some land, in the western foothills of the Ochoco Mountains in Central Oregon. Somewhere or other I have a packet of papers indicating that I have title to it. I pay yearly County taxes on this property; if I stop paying them, the County will claim the property, and eventually auction it off […]
Read More »

Salmon and the Northwest

There is not much of it left. Of untouched salmon habitat there is almost none. Although salmon once occupied almost every ocean-seeking stream in the Pacific Northwest, the map where salmon go has been shrinking for over a hundred years, sometimes gradually as human forces slowly worsened the habitat, sometimes suddenly when millions of acres […]
Read More »

Recent Comments

    Archives

    Categories

    • Uncategorized

    Meta

    • Log in
    • Entries feed
    • Comments feed
    • WordPress.org
    • Reading & Writing
    • The Arts
    • Public Policy
    • Law
    • Science
    • Physical & Mental Wellbeing
    • Adventure
    • Sports
    • People
    • Anthology
    Sign up for our newsletter   
    Copyright © 2025  Open Spaces Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

    Don’t miss out!
    Join the Open Spaces
    mailing list for
    occasional updates on
    newly-posted articles!