Topic: Environment
On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted and drastically changed the surrounding environment. Despite the devastation to plant, animal, and human communities, ecological recovery developed over ...
When Mud Mountain Dam was completed in 1948, it was the highest rock- and earth-filled dam in the world. The dam was built to prevent massive flooding in South King County and North Pierce County, whi...
The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) is a sweeping federal law often called the Magna Carta of the nation's environmental laws. The act was the brainchild of Senator Henry M. "Scoop" J...
In 1863, coal was discovered in the Newcastle, Washington area, located 10 miles southeast of Seattle between Bellevue and Renton. The Newcastle Cemetery was founded there to meet the needs of the min...
The Nisqually Delta Association, founded in 1970, is a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and protection of the Nisqually River Delta, located 10 miles northeast of Olympia on Puget...
The Northwest Fisheries Science Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has been a landmark in Seattle's Montlake neighborhood since its original building was compl...
The North Cascades Conservation Council has, since 1957, been an unchanging agent of change. Turning out members for hearings, going to court, deploying hiking guides and picture books, it has helped ...
The North Cascades Smokejumper Base, at its present location outside Winthrop in Okanogan County's Methow Valley, dates officially to 1945, when it became the fifth smokejumping base officially establ...
The Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, an intertribal organization representing 20 Western Washington treaty tribes, formed in 1974 in response to circumstances created by the first ruling in the ...
This essay contains Seattle historian and photographer Paul Dorpat's Now & Then photographs and reflections on the November 1911 flood on the Cedar River and the damage it caused downstream in Ren...
The majority of Seattle's parks were designed by the Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm. John Charles Olmsted (1852-1920), the stepson of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), who designed Cent...
Nearly all Spokane's beautiful parks and parkways were first conceived by a legendary firm: the Olmsted Brothers, Landscape Architects, of Brookline, Massachusetts, of New York's Central Park fame. In...
Established under President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 29, 1938, Olympic National Park has obtained global renown as a natural reserve. The park, encompassing 922,650 acres on the Olympic Peninsula...
The Spokane husband-wife environmentalist team of John Osborn and Rachael Paschal Osborn have been in the lead of Eastern Washington's conservation movement for decades. Osborn is an internist and chi...
In this People's History account, Issaquah High School graduate and "Native Washingtonian" Mike Atkins relates how he and some pals took advantage of the destruction of Pete Rippe's barn during the Co...
Washington is the No. 1 oyster-growing state in the country, and among the most celebrated and valued sources of oysters in the world. One city on Willapa Bay, South Bend, proclaims itself t...
The P-Patch Program is Seattle's community-gardening program. It was launched in the early 1970s during a national back-to-the-earth movement. In 1970, when the first Earth Day was held, University of...
Puget Consumers Co-op (PCC), now called PCC Community Markets, started in 1953 as a food club in a Seattle basement. Since its early days, its primary focus has been on supplying consumers with natura...
Thomas Minor Pelly was a Seattle civic leader and a 10-term Congressional Representative for the 1st District (King and Kitsap counties). He fought to protect Puget Sound fishing interests. He was a s...
Seattle City Light's Boundary Dam on the Pend Orielle River, in Northeastern Washington near the Idaho border, today (2003) supplies half the hydroelectric power for Seattle (a quarter of Seattle's po...
During the first decades of the twentieth century, Pine Lake in Sammamish was a featured attraction for early settlers of the Sammamish Plateau. Until suburban sprawl reached the area in the 1970s, th...
This essay presents a description of a trip to Point Roberts (Whatcom County) on a summer day near the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. Point Roberts is a five-square-mile peninsula t...
The Port of Seattle is a public municipal corporation that owns and manages Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the region's largest; a leading container port (since 2015 operated jointly with the P...
Washington's public ports tend to be associated more with cranes and loading docks than with parks and promenades, but providing public access to the waterfront has been a part of the ports' mission f...