oregon

In June of 2021, a record-breaking heat wave scorched western North America, killing more than 500 people in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Canada. Now, Oregon lawmakers are taking steps to lower the death toll next time around. The state Senate passed a bill Tuesday that would help provide air conditioners on an emergency basis for […]

A recent report contends that reintroducing sea otters to the Oregon coast is feasible and beneficial to the state’s marine ecosystem if certain best reintroduction policies are followed. However, sea otter’s voracious appetites for certain invertebrates may have “consequential” impacts on area fisheries. Sea otters have an outsized impact on the ecosystems they inhabit, making […]

The Bootleg Fire has now burned more than 300,000 acres in southern Oregon and continues to grow as more than 80 large wildfires in the West forced evacuations across the region. The Bootleg Fire, currently the nation’s largest fire, is fueled by extremely dry vegetation and low humidity and grew at an average rate of […]

At the opening of the 2020 wildfire season, 3% of California was in extreme or exceptional drought and more than 4% burned. This year, more than 73% of the state faces similar drought conditions. In other parts of the Southwest, juniper trees are dying off at increased rates because of the intensification of a climate […]

By Stuart Braun “These are not just wildfires, they are climate fires,” Jay Inslee, Governor of Washington State, said as he stood amid the charred remains of the town of Malden west of Seattle earlier this month. “This is not an act of God,” he added. “This has happened because we have changed the climate […]

By Timothy Rooks The many wildfires roaring through America’s West Coast don’t just look scary, they are bad for people’s health, bad for public and private lands, and bad for the economy. The plumes of smoke have pushed air quality to hazardous levels forcing residents to stay indoors. Now some of the dirtiest air on […]

The wildfires raging across the West Coast have made the air quality so bad in several U.S. cities that they rank among the worst in the world. In fact, the air quality in Portland, Oregon was so bad on Sunday that it went off the charts when it passed 500 on an air quality index. […]

What does the climate crisis look like? As wildfires continue to rage up and down the U.S. West Coast, we have some terrifying answers: orange skies; burnt-out buildings; a horse, seemingly abandoned, running past a stall as the hill above erupts in flames. These images help to ground an unfathomable reality. More than 100 major […]