📢 Cascadia Voices 08/22/26

Glad you asked: A story earlier this summer by CDN’s environmental/science reporting intern Kenedy Sánchez (who has returned to Carnegie Mellon University to complete her master’s) about breakwater work on Vendovi Island that is meant to benefit a colony of pigeon guillemots prompted a Bellingham science teacher and illustrator to expand on (complete with illustration) the importance of the “red-footed seabird.”

Bean Drake, who teaches for The Pearl: Remote Democratic High School, writes in a CDN guest commentary that there could be fewer of the birds than you might think; a state Department of Fish & Wildlife survey of the Puget Sound region in 2020 found 6,430 of the birds — “one of the lowest densities for the species population in 20 years.”

“Pigeon guillemots stay close to the shore, dive no more than 100 feet, and forage for small fish and crustaceans,” Bean writes. “They are near the top of our ecosystem’s food chain, making them a great indicator species for the health of our waterways.”

But that role puts them at risk from oil spills, overfishing and human development, which puts the responsibility on humans to track their health and limit such impacts.

“As a science teacher at a homeschool partnership, I focus my science classes on conservation and understanding our environmental impact. I would like to share with the community some of the ways my students are contributing to citizen science, as I feel members of our Cascadia community may feel inclined to help the pigeon guillemot,” Bean says. “…Citizen science may be one of the best ways to do it.”

Whatcom County, the Port of Bellingham, local cities, sovereign tribes and others are updating the county’s economic development plan, which, along with being a good idea, also opens up a conduit to federal grants that can help attract and retain living-wage jobs and support the regional economy. Among the participants has been RB Tewskbury, a Bellingham resident and entrepreneur who also serves on the county’s Business and Commerce Advisory Committee.

The update’s goals to create “a welcoming, innovative economy with opportunities for everyone,” is positive, but, in a CDN guest commentary, Tewskbury says “are too vague to guide investment, too generic to capture competitive advantages, too weak to support compelling grant narratives, and too detached from known regional vulnerabilities to function as a serious economic development strategy over a 10- to 20-year horizon.”

And the process has not been nearly transparent enough to make a difference in crafting a worthy plan and involving the public in a document intended for its benefit, he writes.

“The locally financed process keeps the formative work outside public view while port staff control how stakeholder input is consolidated and presented to elected officials,” Tewksbury says.

To “citizen scientists” add “citizen economists” — and the willingness to include them — to the county’s needs.

Guess who will belong to WTA’s Two Percent Club? WTA will be throwing under the bus people living below the local income median.

Even with the $60 monthly cap (which means you ride free to the end of the month after you have paid $60) or reduced-fare cap, one living under the income median will find it very difficult to afford the new fare (CDN, Aug. 14, 2026). The further under that median line, the more likely one will be to join the club. Membership will probably rise above 2%, adding that much more to individual car pollution of our air.

Fare increases in the transportation industry, like worker reductions in the rest of industry, are the easiest way to lower the deficit. The 2027 projected fare increase of $1.4 million will have a small impact on WTA’s whopping operating deficit.

The board will say, “Every little bit helps.” Is that “little bit,” though, worth the pain and stunted lives that it causes the vulnerable? Apparently, the majority of the board, living comfortably above the median income line, think so.

It’s like Elon Musk with his chainsaw.

John F. Holstein
Bellingham

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.

Citing the demand for water and electricity and the city’s capacity to accommodate large facilities, Mount Vernon City Council was the latest to institute a temporary moratorium on approval of permit applications for data centers. Numerous cities and counties have made similar moves in the region and state with bipartisan support from residents and officials.

Sample comments:

If you’re looking for an explanation of how we got here — take your pick: stalemated war with Iran, measles outbreak, tariffs, etc. — blame the current administration’s devotion to disregarding and outright firing of experts, almost always for political reasons; or worse. So goes the story of Julia Curlee, a career CIA national intelligence official who started her work during the war in Iraq and later served as an analyst who prepared and gave briefings at the White House during the first Trump term and Biden’s term, notably providing the presidential daily briefing to Vice President Mike Pence. The surprise: Curlee came out as a trans woman prior to her White House work. In an essay in The Atlantic, “The Wrong Kind of American,” as well as an interview with the Radio Atlantic podcast, Curlee recounts how she worked effectively with Pence and then with the Biden White House. Not so when Trump returned. Curlee had vowed to continue her service to her country but was fired when she was outed and threatened in a right-wing social media post, her name on a list of hidden “enemies” handed to the president. When skilled advisers are ignored or lost for any reason, the outcome is debacles like the war in Iran. “This is a direct result of a climate of fear that the administration has instilled on a workforce that it somehow sees as the enemy within,” Curlee says in the podcast interview.

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Paul Simon’s “Graceland” album. The album was greeted with praise for its celebration of Black South African music and musicians, but criticized for breaking a boycott of South Africa’s apartheid government. That moment in music history can be revisited with a new book by American music historian and journalist Ashley Kahn, “Days of Miracle and Wonder,” reviewed in The New York Times. Writes NYT’s Mark Baude: “by bringing both its beauty and its uglier aspects into the light, Kahn, far from ruining its strange magic, has only made me appreciate the album’s intricacies and paradoxes all the more.” Or you can always just find your vinyl, CD or MP3 and listen again, from “Boy in the Bubble” to “The Myth of Fingerprints.”

As long as we’re revisiting the ’80s, my Deadhead wife and I attended the Moore Theatre’s staging this week of Americana artists Gillian Welch’s and David Rawlings’s current tour celebrating the 45th anniversary of the Grateful Dead’s 1981 album, “Reckoning.” When musicians of the caliber of Welch and Rawlings — and bassist Paul Kowert — perform, the music rises above mere covers; this is akin to a symphony orchestra revealing the works of Mozart, Tchaikovsky or Copland, just with the bonus of freeform bluegrass-and-blues interludes between songs that Deadheads knew as “Space.”