For twelve years residents of Clatsop County (in the NW corner of Oregon)
battled proposals to build massive Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) terminals near
the mouth of the Columbia River. On April 15, 2016, the last of these
proposals was defeated, when Oregon LNG withdrew the...
Read more
With its uncanny night howls, unrivaled ingenuity, and amazing resilience,
the coyote is the stuff of legends. In Indian folktales it often appears as a
deceptive trickster or a sly genius. But legends don't come close to
capturing the incredible survival story of the coyot...
Read more
A four-story mixed use building is going up in the Sellwood neighborhood of
Portland, on a stretch of SE 13th Avenue where the average building is two
stories high. Over the past few months of construction someone keeps spray
painting on plywood front of the building: "Four...
Read more
On June 3 an oil train derailed in the Columbia Gorge town of Mosier, 70
miles east of Portland. It could have been much worse. The typical
Gorge wind could have been blowing but amazingly the air was still that
afternoon. If there had been wind there would be no more Mosie...
Read more
In May, the U.S. District Court in Portland OR issued its long-awaited
ruling on the federal government's Columbia/Snake River Salmon Plan. U.S.
District Judge Michael Simon blasted the 2014 biological opinion issued by
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as...
Read more
This week on Locus Focus we delve into two seemingly unrelated topics that
actually have a lot in common: the mass killing of cormorants on East Sand
Island in the Columbia River Estuary - in the name of protecting salmon - and
the slow and painful (lack of) progress in dev...
Read more
THIS PROGRAM WAS ORIGINALLY BROADCAST ON APRIL 14, 2016
Beavers, those icons of industriousness, have been gnawing down trees,
building dams, shaping the land, and creating critical habitat in North
America for at least a million years. Once one of the continent’s most
ubi...
Read more
On May 24 over a thousand people attended the first of three public hearings
to discuss the draft environmental impact statement for a proposed coal
export terminal at Longview, WA. If built, the project, sited right next to
the Columbia River, would be the largest coal ter...
Read more
