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.  

The heat released when water condenses is an important driver of weather phenomena. And as a simple experiment shows, it also makes it tough to enjoy a frosty one in the summertime. Learn more; read this informative story by ATMO’s Dale Durran and Dargan Frierson in Physics Today. 

The College of the Environment and the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences are excited to present the annual Sustaining Our World Lecture on April 4, 2013, from 6-7 p.m. This year’s lecture, Built Ecologies: Regionalism and Resource Integration in the Built World, features Thomas Knittel, vice president and a leading voice and innovator in sustainable design and biomimicry with HOK, a global design, architecture, engineering and planning firm.