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Claudia Castro Luna named Washington’s next poet laureate
Seattle’s first Civic Poet, Claudio Castro Luna, has been named by Humanities Washington as the state’s next poet laureate. Following in the footsteps of Spokane’s Tod Marshall, who’s done a fantastic job criss-crossing the state to promote poetry, Castro Luna has solid credentials as an advocate for diverse voices. Her Seattle Poetic Grid is a fascinating project to map poetry by professional poets and everyday people. She’s just published a new book of verse, Killing Marias (about the murders of women in northern Mexico), and you can read Castro Luna’s “Seattle’s Poem” on her website. It gives you an inkling of her inclusive approach:
“…we are all immigrants here
waiter, teacher,
artist, worker nurse
we belong
all of us belong
Seattle is a house
we all need to afford.”
Scientist on a mission to reshape how we perceive forest fires
This past summer was the costliest forest fire season in U.S. history, at over $2 billion, 42 lives lost in Northern California, tens of thousands of acres in the Columbia Gorge torched, and many days in Cascadia filled with a chokey haze. What’s the solution? In a detailed report at Investigate West, forest ecologist Paul Hessburg talks of an “epidemic of trees” and how we’ll need to learn to live with fire instead of fighting it — while climate change continues to increase mega-fire risk in the Northwest.
Dao Strom’s art re-examines Vietnamese immigrant experience
Portland multi-media artist Dao Strom has made it her mission to “complicate” the narrative of being the child of Vietnamese refugees. In a video profile at Oregon Public Broadcasting, Strom talks about how she combines music, poetry, photography and film to create a fragmented portrait of her experience–as the daughter of division (her mother fled Vietnam while her father stayed behind) as well as adapting Vietnamese folklore into her own deeply personal mythology.
Seattle income tax on wealth gets its day in court
This summer, the city of Seattle passed an income tax on individuals earning over $250,000 a year, and last week the tax faced its first legal test in King County Court (it will eventually head to the state supreme court where it’s likely to be ruled unconstitutional). At the Stranger, the Transit Riders Union argues that the tax is necessary to fix one of the most regressive tax systems in North America.
Despite rising opioid fatalities, Spokane hesitates on treatment
In a long feature for The Inlander, Daniel Walters reports on how fatalities from opioids are skyrocketing in Washington’s Spokane County — and how officials are balking at funding proven methods of harm reduction. Budget cuts, resistance by local insurers, and a reliance on questionable abstinence-based addiction programs over methadone and Suboxone is leading to a spike in preventable deaths.
The quiet ecological crisis: loss of biodiversity
Climate change is a massive challenge, but it’s obscuring an equally important environmental disaster: species extinction. In an essay for The Tyee, UBC professor emeritus William Rees writes that loss of biodiversity may prove to be even more troubling than climate change. Insect populations in Europe are plummeting, orca whales and other charismatic fauna are facing extinction, while greater Vancouver’s barn and bank swallows have plummeted by 98 per cent since 1970. Globally, species are disappearing at 1,000 times the normal rate. “The world seems in denial of looming disaster,” Rees writes.
That’s all for today. –Andrew Engelson
Photo credits: Dao Strom by Kyle Macdonald.