📢 Cascadia Voices 08/08/26

Red sky at night might still be a sailor’s delight, but lately it’s just a reminder that wildfire season is burning acreage somewhere in the Northwest, including Canada, leaving us with smoky skies and air-quality alerts. And increasingly for Cascadia, it also means some of those fires are burning closer to nearby forests, wildlands and even our homes. It’s why CDN is sponsoring a community event, “Our New Fire Landscape & How to Prepare,” at 3 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 15 at Heiner Theater at Whatcom Community College. A few tickets (free, but donations accepted) remain and are available here.

CDN Investigative Reporter Isaac Stone Simonelli will moderate a discussion with Dr. Susan Prichard, principal research scientist for the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences and its Fire, Landscapes, Adaptive Management, Ecology (FLAME) lab.

In tandem with the forum, Prichard, who lives in the Methow Valley, east of North Cascades National Park, wrote a guest commentary for CDN this week that advises residents of Western Washington to start thinking more like an Eastern Washingtonian as our summers run warmer and drier.

“I have also lived through major changes in how communities in Eastern Washington prepare for wildfire seasons. My friends and neighbors have changed from talking about wildfires as a distant possibility to an ongoing reality.” She continues: “I’d absolutely love to go back to the days of cool, drizzly weather in July and green tomatoes in September. However, climate change has something different in store for us.”

The City of Bellingham is in the process of reviewing its wastewater treatment systems, specifically what to do with the sewage sludge that remains after treatment. For now, the city has decided to continue as it has, with incinerating the waste at the Post Point facility. But some, including Larry McCarter, who has worked in solid waste permitting and operates the Recycling and Disposal Services transfer station in Whatcom County, says that course endangers the health and finances of the city and its residents.

McCarter notes that the presence of PFAS — forever chemicals — in sewage complicates treatment because those chemicals aren’t fully destroyed by burning; they end up in the air and in water runoff. Instead, the city should send the waste to a landfill where those contaminants would be contained.

“In 2019, (the city’s) consultants measured incineration against the city’s own ‘must-have’ criteria, disqualified it and recommended replacing the aging furnaces with a cleaner process. The public works department spent the better part of a decade planning that change. Then the city shelved it. It is now committing an estimated $64 million in utility funds over the next 20 years to rebuild and upgrade the very furnaces its own experts told it to abandon (CDN, June 17, 2026).”

Safer, and more fiscally responsible, he says, would be to landfill the solids until a better option for treatment is available.

“A plan that decides nothing about technology, while the furnaces keep running and the upgrade dollars keep flowing, is not neutral. It is a decision to keep burning, made without anyone having to stand up and call it that,” he writes.

The Y says it will maintain “a wellness center” downtown. According to the Y’s website, that wellness center is one room: cardio equipment, weights and stretching mats. That phrase should make every member ask whether downtown keeps the pool, childcare, the gymnasium, the racquet courts and the 65-foot climbing wall.

As to location, adding a Y at Barkley Village would be amazing. But becoming the primary location while downtown shrinks? Downtown is where the bus lines converge, walkable from the city’s densest housing, reachable from Western, Cordata, Fairhaven, the Lettered Streets and, yes, Barkley. The Sunset, Hannegan and Woburn corner sits at the very edge of town, accessible mainly if you drive and not central to most of Bellingham.

The Y is a beating heart of downtown, and public money for this project should be held in reserve until there is serious scrutiny of what it could do to the city’s core.

The Y says plans are not final, but they don’t sound preliminary either. The Y says community engagement is coming. Here are two reasons for people to show up. I certainly intend to.

Nick Greif
Agate Bay

Read more letters to the editor here.

Submit a letter to the editor (250 words max) or guest commentary (500–800 words) online at cascadiadaily.com/submissions.

A recent report by CDN healthcare and public health reporter Owen Racer outlined the easy availability and risks inherent in kratom — a naturally derived but addictive stimulant — and 7-OH, kratom’s synthetic and more powerful cousin. Local physicians and clinicians have raised concerns about both, including their lack of local, state and federal regulation.

Considering low voter turnout rates, especially for primary elections, how might we change voting to increase participation? (74 votes):

Sample comments:

Some advice from New York Times columnist Bret Stephens: Don’t use AI for so much as a brief email. “Don’t let it organize your notes. Don’t let it suggest an opening sentence, a segue or a closing paragraph. Don’t ask it to write a first draft and pretend that editing that draft somehow makes it your own. It doesn’t.” Why not? “The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs.” Novelist and essayist Joan Didion would likely agree: “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

One is either a fan of the “Ted Lasso” franchise or has no poetry in one’s soul. More than a few of us who do were there Wednesday, screens tuned to Apple TV, to watch the season four premiere, following what was thought to be the series’ finale in 2023 until a reboot was announced. Following an American football coach played by Jason Sudekis, lured to England to manage the other football, the series built a following with its upbeat, positive and smart tone and writing. Based on the first episode, all those players remain on the field. One scene in the first episode in particular scores: Higgins, a team official, during a visit to Kansas City’s women’s soccer club, tours the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, and after a crash course in baseball history from a docent, takes to heart the words of famed pitcher Satchel Paige: “Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.”

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat has some thoughts about Tuesday’s primary election and the likelihood of a significant blue wave, at least in Washington state. Westneat notes the lack of blacklash being felt by legislative Democrats for their support of the income tax for those making more than $1 million, which he attributes either to support for the idea of increasing taxes on the wealthy or a huge repudiation of President Trump. Of course, it could both. “As a result, at the federal level, all eight Democratic members of Congress seemed to be well-positioned heading into November — even Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, considered one of the nation’s more endangered Democratic incumbents,” he writes. The relevant quote, courtesy of A.A. Milne and Winnie the Pooh: “How sweet to be a Cloud Floating in the Blue!”