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Photo: Seoul, South Korea. Credit: cskkkk/Pixabay If there’s one thing that’s defined global efforts to limit climate change over the last few decades, it’s the seeming inability of world leaders to treat the problem like the crisis it is. As warnings from climate scientists grow ever more dire, most national governments have responded with plans…
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Photo credit: No Kings Day 3 protest in Atlanta, GA. Credit: Bluesky/50501 Just over a week ago, we witnessed what many people are calling the largest single-day protest in US history. At least eight million people — more by some counts — swarmed into the streets to protest the Trump administration’s attacks on democracy, common…
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Photo: the Chehalis River near Pe Ell Washington State doesn’t have many undammed rivers left–but the Chehalis River is one of them. Now, though, this river home to salmon that are important the Quinault and Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis in danger of being dammed for the first time, not to generate electricity but as…
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Donald Trump’s war in Iran has sparked a global energy crisis. Iran, whose geography gives it immense power over the worldwide oil trade, has leveraged its position by effectively shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, a conduit for approximately one fifth of the world’s oil. This, along with war-related damage to oil infrastructure in Gulf…
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I’ve spent a lot of time in Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. This vast expanse of public lands encompasses most of Washington’s North Cascades, and as such includes some of the wildest places in the Lower 48 states. Now, though, the Forest Service is planning a massive thinning project that involves a vaguely defined plan to…
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My senior year of college, I traveled to Washington, DC with three other students from the small liberal arts university in Oregon where I went to school. It was 2009, and we were in the nation’s capital for Power Shift, a gathering of over ten thousand students from across the country who converged for a…
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Photo: Montana’s Colstrip power plant in 2015 From about 2009 to 2016, I expended an exorbitant amount of energy in grassroots movements to challenge the coal industry. This was when efforts like the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign were getting off the ground–and from retiring existing coal plants, to stopping coal export projects on the…
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The Salish Sea’s Southern Resident orcas, one of whom is shown above, are among the creatures impacted by tanker traffic from fossil fuel export projects in Washington. Photo credit: Kevin Nichols I well remember back in 2021, when Washington’s Whatcom County made history by enacting one of the country’s strongest policy’s restricting new fossil fuel…
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Photo: the Elwha River flows free after the removal of two dams last decade. The Trump administration’s gutting of the federal government has affected so many facets of life in the U.S., from weather you can get help with health care to food assistance programs. However, some of the most worrying long-term impacts of mass…
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The recent historic floods in western Washington and Oregon–just a few years after similar flooding events hit the region in 2021–are a reminder that climate change is no longer a distant threat. It is here now, and it’s altering our relationship with the natural world in unprecedented ways. For my most recent piece published by…
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Nick Engelfried 