Category: Cascadia Daily

Cascadia Daily, May 20, 2019

A quick message from Cascadia Magazine

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Why are whales and orcas starving?

Gray whales are dying at twice the normal rate off the coast of Cascadia, Lynda Mapes at the Seattle Times reports, and researchers are looking for clues as to why the whales– which aren’t endangered but protected by international treaties–aren’t finding enough food. An orca in the endangered southern resident pod is also starving, Crosscut reports, and at the Seattle Times there’s a detailed interactive feature on how boats and shipping vessels interfere with orcas’ ability to use echolocation to feed.

Electric cars selling at a record rate in Vancouver

Vancouver Courier reports that electric vehicles are selling at a brisk pace in Vancouver thanks to a BC government rebate. In related news, Portland is going to start paying out over $50 million in clean energy grants and the city’s residents will get to decide how the funds are spent. And those of you in Seattle frustrated by lack of infrastructure for biking, busing, and walking can head over to the Urbanist and vote for Seattle’s worst intersection.

Oregon reconsiders how to commit mentally ill

OPB has a very nuanced, fascinating report on how Oregon is reconsidering rules for “civil commitment,” in which people with severe mental illness can be committed to receive treatment. “We’ve reached a point where the bar is so high, that really the only way to enter the Oregon State Hospital, for example, is to be arrested,” says one advocate for reform. Meanwhile, there’s the horrific story of Vernon Gray, a man with mental illness in Seattle who lived in deplorable conditions after his mother died–and who was awarded an $8 million settlement for the impact to his life after many failures of the state’s mental health system.

Saving BC caribou will require hard choices

Justina Ray, writing for The Narwhal, looks at the inadequate 16-year effort to protect endangered mountain caribou in British Columbia, the backlash against First Nations involved, and the difficult economic choices saving the herds from extinction will require.
“The benefits we would realize from saving caribou are simply not as concrete as the value of getting more wood to the mill or allowing another heli-skiing operator to open in another area.”
To find out how you can help the effort to protect the South Selkirk herd visit Conservation Northwest’s website.

Fiction by Maya Jewell Zeller

Over at Queenmobs, you can read Ellensburg, WA author Maya Jewell Zeller’s surreal but accurate story “The Surgery” concerning what it feels like to be left in love and have to start over and be sliced open by yet another lover: “Each part he treats with the care it deserves, then places it on the table, in turn. He never takes out more than one part at a time. He filets each quietly and completely, and no sooner does he make the first cut than that part tells a story.”

Dan Kaplan’s poetry

Take a moment with “Whatever an Infinitesimal Dog Tells You,” online at Poetry Northwest,  Portland-based poet Dan Kaplan’s poem that unsettles everything it puts into words:
“I hope you can see that,
a candle in the ribcage of the coyote
living in the graveyard.
A surprise, this new trouble with distance.”
Read the full poem here.

That’s today’s assortment of poetry, fiction, environmental reporting, and political news from all across the Great Northwest. Have a lovely, rainy evening! –Andrew Engelson

Photo credits: gray whale by Merrill Gosho, NOAA (public domain)