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Join us for the debut Writing Cascadia Workshops on Nov 17, held in cooperation with Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum. Choose from one of three classes: The Art of the Interview with Paul Nelson, Autobiography and Autofiction with Corinne Manning, and Writing Silence with Washington poet laureate Claudia Castro Luna.
Register now, class sizes are limited!
Trudeau wins (sorta) in Canada, WA voters begin turning in ballots
Returns from Canada indicate Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau will get to form a minority government, but will need to include perhaps the left-leaning New Democrats and possibly the Greens, meaning it’s possible that expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline across BC could be be in jeopardy. David Beers at the Tyee looks at Trudeau’s steady decline. Meanwhile, it was a good night for Green Party leader Elizabeth May, who represents a riding on Vancouver Island as her party gained another seat. In addition, Indigenous lawmaker Jody Wilson-Raybould, who left the Liberal Party to run as independent, won her Vancouver-area riding and may cause problems for Trudeau’s coalition.
In other political news, Washington’s vote-by-mail has begun, and voters will decide on two measures, one expanding affirmative action policies in the state (Naomi Ishikawa looks at some Orwellian language used against the initiative), and a measure that would slash car taxes and decimate funding for transit in the Puget Sound region. In the Seattle city council races, Amazon has now pumped in a record $1.4 million supporting its slate of candidates (including Egan Orion, who faced criticism over a post on Facebook looking for “partially white or black” egg donors for his adoption plans last year). In Spokane, the mayor’s race is close, and policy on the homeless is a central dividing line. Tacoma, WA is having an election for mayor and city council, and the podcast Citizen Tacoma interviews all the candidates. Yakima, WA is considering switching to a more powerful mayoral system, and Oregon has a host of local school levies and local bonds on the ballot. And finally, in political news, Terra Simmons, a Bremerton attorney, hopes to become the first formerly incarcerated person to serve in the WA state legislature in 2020 and draw attention to “second chances,” KNKX reports.
Are Washington’s dams built to stand up to megaquakes?
KUOW looks at whether big dams on the Columbia River can withstand a Cascadia subduction zone megaquake— the US Bureau of Reclamation says they’re fine, and managers are mostly focusing on temporary power failures after a quake. In related news, Crosscut looks at new maps from the state of Washington that analyze “walk times” to high ground in the state’s coastal areas in the wake of a tsunami.
Northern California city returns land taken in massacre
The Guardian reports that the city of Eureka, in northern California, has returned land critical to the Wiyot people, which was taken after one of the worst massacres in Cascadia history, when scores of women, children and elders were killed in 1860. The land was heavily polluted in the 20th century, but has now been remediated.
US Forest Service pushing to log Alaska’s Tongass forest
The Trump administration is pushing to end protections for the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska, which could open 165,000 acres of old-growth forest to logging, KTOO Public Media reports. In related news, the Narwhal looks at how timber companies have used spruce beetle infestation as an excuse for clear cut logging thousands of hectares of old-growth forest in north-central BC–even though forest ecologists say logging is the worst thing one can do to stop beetles. More on clear cut logging in BC’s inland rainforest in this recent feature at Cascadia Magazine.
Vancouver Book Award presented to Robert Watt & Susan Point
The 2019 Vancouver Book award presented by Vancouver Public Library was bestowed on People Among the People, in which Robert Watt chronicles the work of Musqueam artist Susan Point, whose contemporary revival of Coast Salish art in carving and mixed media sculpture has produced astonishing work. The book is from Vancouver-based press Figure.1, and you can read a profile of Point at North Shore News.
Visual poetry by Katrina Roberts
Do take a moment to check out some amazing visual poems by Katrina Roberts, who lives and teaches in Walla Walla, WA. You’ll find whimsically philosophical scenarios about our relationship with the natural world, and and text such as An ISLAND of TRASH THREE TIMES the SIZE of FRANCE.
That’s today’s edition of Cascadia Daily. If you like this newsletter and the original journalism, fiction, essays, and poetry you find at Cascadia Magazine, please make a contribution during our Fall Fund Drive. Thanks! –Andrew Engelson
Photo credit: Justin Trudeau courtesy 2017 Canada Summer Games, CC BY-SA 2.0