Reading the Washington Landscape

The western portion of the Orcas Island has stands of Rocky Mountain juniper (rarest-forest-in-western-washington) and the species is scattered about other parts of the San Juan Islands and the islands of Skagit County (lopez-island-rocky-mountain-junipers). The species is also present on the east slopes of the Cascades near Chelan. On a recent trip to Orcas Island I spotted a particularly tall specimen growing out of a bedrock bluff along the shoreline. I estimated it to be 45 feet […]

Back in January the Growth Management Hearings Board ruled parts of Whatcom County's Rural Element Plan were invalid. The board also found other parts were just fine digesting-rural-element-ii-local-wonky.  This ruling was a follow up after a previous ruling against the County Rural Plan digesting-lamirds-wonky-long-and-local. Since the January ruling, the County has been working on some fixes and has appealed one of the issues in question to Superior Court. The issues […]

Anne Deacon provides an overview of mental health services in Whatcom County in the Bellingham Herald (Whatcom County Mental Health). Federal support, and certainly in recent years state support, for mental illness has slipped. Talk to the folks that run our jails and what you'll hear is that the largest mental health facilities are the jails. The back up plan for dealing with the mentally ill has become the local county jail. The jail costs are just one cost aspect of not dealing […]

Wonk Blog's Brad Plumer calls attention to a NBER paper (nber.org/papers/w19027) on corruption in state government that draws a correlation between distance from the capital and the main population center and corruption.I am not particularly convinced of the correlation and the trend line plot, but by the measure used the graph does show that Washington State is the second least corrupt state. Regardless of distance from the population centers, the state appears to have developed a […]

This post really has nothing about Washington State. But while doing some reading on coastal erosion in southwest Washington a while back I was looking at some video of waves at the Columbia Bar when I came across this video of huge waves with music by Lisa Gerrard. The first scenes are off the northwest coast of France and are - well just amazing. The second video is a bit more music by Lisa with Earth images of our amazing planet.