In the summer of 1969, the Federal District Court in Denver heard arguments in one of the nation’s first explicitly environmental cases, one trying to halt real estate developers intent on turning land containing an “extraordinary set of ancient fossils” into a housing development.  So starts the book “Saved in Time: the Fight to Establish Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, Colorado“ co-written by University of Washington biology professor emeritus Estella Leopold, who was a key player in the process.  

Some Duwamish Valley residents are sicker and die younger than their neighbors just a scant 10 miles away, a new EPA-funded study has found. Residents of ZIP code 98108, in Seattle’s South Park, Georgetown and parts of Beacon Hill in the Duwamish Valley, are most likely to get sick and be exposed to environmental stresses, from pollution to lack of green space, the study found.  

USA TODAY will explore how climate change is affecting Americans in a series of stories this year.  In their first installment, they cover the threats to our oceans. “Ocean acidification,” the shifting of the ocean’s water toward the acidic side of its chemical balance, has been driven by climate change and has brought increasingly corrosive seawater to the surface along the West Coast and the inlets of Puget Sound, a center of the $111 million shellfish industry in the Pacific Northwest. 

Citizen-scientists around the world are poring through digital versions of 19th century logbooks of mariners who sailed from Pacific Northwest and California ports to explore the Arctic and chart the newly acquired Alaskan territories. Changes in the Arctic climate are bringing new interest in those historic explorers’ observations. A volunteer effort launched last fall, headed by University of Washington climate scientist Kevin Wood with the support of the National Archives, enlists the help of citizen-scientists to examine digitized scans of the log entries and transcribe the information.  

A landslide early Wednesday morning took out a 1,000-foot stretch of hillside on the west side of Whidbey Island. There were no injuries, but several people were displaced.  It is a part of the Puget Sound geology, a legacy of the glacier that formed this area: Massive chunks of shoreline hillsides just slide off.  Read more about this in the Seattle Times.