• Vladimir Zotov
• Green concept building.

In Oregon we love being green. We love our public transportation, we bike to work in weather that would make over state’s residents cringe, and now we even compost. Last year we were number five on the LEED list, so why the poor rating this year?

The LEED top ten list is based on the per capita number of new energy efficient buildings that have earned LEED certification in one year’s time. This means new buildings and retrofits count, while preexisting LEED-certified buildings don’t. In 2011, the District of Columbia had the largest number of buildings certified by LEED with 22 new LEED buildings totaling 18.9 million square feet. Oregon clocked in with only 6.8 million new officially green square feet.

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Your two favorite woodland creatures who dually prevent enviro-atrocities and make childhood lessons bearable are on the political chopping block. Yes, Smokey the Bear and Woodsy the Owl have been placed on the endangered list thanks to the House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's new "YouCut" program.

YouCut welcomes the public to offer ideas as to where significant budget cuts can be made in federal spending. The Forest Service’s “environmental literacy” and “conservation education” programs — Smokey and Woodsy's home sweet home — made the list. Cantor supported this cut, saying that it’s wrong for taxpayer dollars to go to “generate issue-oriented advocacy.” Additionally, cutting this program would save $50 million over 10 years.

What Cantor forgot to mention, however, was how many children will lose interest in nature and the environment (which, believe it or not, does have a considerable impact on the world) if this sector is nixed.

Give a hoot, America.

After 16 years of neighborhood activism, the neighborhood and ESCO finally came to a happy agreement this week: ESCO is agreeing to cut its pollution by 20 percent over the next five years.

The details of the 80-page Good Neighbor Agreement were first reported in the Oregonian. This is a big deal, both for the neighbors who are worried about the air their kids are breathing at very nearby Chapman Elementary, and for all of Portland, which deals with the complications of industry being amid dense residential areas. While industries usually wait to change until the government forces them to, ESCO will spend $5 million upgrading its filtering system over the next five years, all of which goes beyond what environmental laws say they need to do.

"We couldn't understand why there were so many concerns, because when we looked at the data, we thought we were doing a good job," ESCO manager Ian Bingham told a meeting of over 100 people at Chapman School on Tuesday night. "But when we responded to complaints with an answer like, "We're in compliance," that answer wan't very satisfactory to neighbors... This is simply the most constructive path forward, both now and in the long term."

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• Plastic Bottle: It does a baby bad.

The county commission voted unanimously today to ban the sale of kids' products that include Bisephanol-A (BPA), a common plastic ingredient that has been linked to in infants brain damage and cancer.

While California just this month banned the sale of baby products containing BPA this month and Europe bans the chemical in its baby products, the Oregon legislature has twice failed to pass BPA bans in the past two years. That's thanks in a large part to Oregon's food processing industry, which uses a plastic including BPA to line cans that are stuffed with Oregon fruit.

Portlander Susan Beal rallied over 1,000 people to sign an online petition asking the county to ban BPA baby products.

It seems like Portland's been getting a lot of specific local environmental laws recently—the new compost system, banning the plastic bag, and now banning BPA.

Today is a very exciting day to be a fish, or to be a human who likes to watch shit blow up.

The largest dam removal project in history will burst forward today as engineers cap off a decades-long effort to restore 14 miles of salmon habitat to the White Salmon River. At noon, engineers will blow up the Condit Dam with 700 pounds of TNT.

Woop woop! Watch the live feed here.

This handy trick or treat bucket showed up on my doorstep last week. Sustainable candy sacks! How thoughtful.

J/K, J/K. You guys remember what this is about, right? We begin Portland-wide compost pick up for houses (though not larger apartment complexes—y'all are left out for now) on October 31st. You can check your new trash pick up schedule here. The rules for what you can compost are so hilariously simple that we made a website about it.

Anyway. I'm excited about this! It's a smart switch and I think the city shelling out a bit to deliver a bucket to our doors will boost participation. Up until this point I've been keeping my compost in the freezer, clearing it out every month, which scared guests. I've already heard of a couple people creatively altering their buckets, turning the lid into the mouth of a certain disliked political figure. Anyone have any good ideas for how to bedazzle the shit out of this thing? In the meantime, poll!

Okay — So we know that they're hip, eco-friendly and on the rise. But what really is a "green job"? Turns out The Economist's E.G. traveled to "eco-smug" Portland (and Austin, Texas) to answer just that.

I've always thought about "green jobs" as the category covering work with explicit and intentional environmental benefits. Working on a wind turbine: yes. Making solar panels: of course. Organic farming: okay. Farming in general: not really. Teaching science in a public high school: an admirable endeavor, but not a green job. But there are lots of jobs that fall in a gray area. Tofu can be swapped for emissions-heavy beef; does growing soybeans count? What if you manufacture bicycles? The more you think about this, the more uncertain you become. Most jobs can be greened or at least greenwashed; in Portland, for example, there is a vegan strip club.

• Steve Matthews
• What makes a green biz "green"?

They have a point. What about a vegan strip club or bicycle manufacturer makes it wholly green? Is it too far detached from the initial purpose to label it as such? The author looks to the Bureau of Labor Statistics for a concrete definition:

"Green jobs are either:
1. Jobs in businesses that produce goods or provide services that benefit the environment or conserve natural resources.
2. Jobs in which workers' duties involve making their establishment's production processes more environmentally friendly or use fewer natural resources."

According to Ecotrope, the largest segments of Portland's "green" economy in 2010 were conservation, public mass transit, organic food and farming, waste management and treatment, and green building materials. Each of these jobs, while generally beneficial to the environment, require dependence on natural resources (and who knows if it's comparably fewer resources than non-green jobs).

The article goes on to conclude, after sizing up varying and somewhat contradicting data, that it all comes down to economy, per usual. E.S. stresses that environmentalists often exaggerate the size of the green economy, making the job sector seem larger and more important to the public than it actually may be.

Could this be another larger-scale form of greenwashing? Greenwashing the greenwashed, perhaps? Where should our "green" economy draw the line?

As curbside recycling (and soon, composting) projects grow across the state, Oregon receives confirmation that its on the right path when it comes to trash. According to a Department of Environmental Quality waste recovery and generation report, Oregonians diverted 46.3 percent of waste from landfills in 2010 — the state's highest rate since the report's 1992 initiation. However, the total waste generated by the state — 4.69 million tons — is slightly higher than 2009's rankings. The report also estimated that recycling and recovery saved Oregon the energy equivalent of 258 million gallons of gasoline over the past year. Woo!

Now for a classy pie chart to further illustrate the point.

• Department of Environmental Quality

And Portland tips the scale. The Portland metro area alone had a 51 percent recovery rate (tied with Lane County) which will undoubtedly rise after the upcoming curbside composting plan is underway. At the other end of the rankings: Wheeler County came in with the lowest recovery rate at 8 percent (but hey, at least they have a recycling page).

Surprise, surprise, Oregonians are split on climate change beliefs.

According to an Oregon Global Warming Commission survey taken earlier this year, 80 percent of self-described liberals said they "care deeply" about global warming while 75 percent of conservatives said they were skeptical of the phenomenon. Predictable.

Here's a somewhat depressing graph depicting a facet of the findings:

When asked about energy efficiency, many of those who believed no action of climate change was necessary said they'd be willing to improve energy efficiency at home if it would warrant lower utility costs. That's a start. But, they "quickly lost interest if financial incentives were removed," according to the report.

Looks like Oregonians are sticking to their stereotypical guns — for now.

• The enemy.

Many cities have taken the step of staging mass goose killings. NYC, for example, is planning to gas 170,000 geese over the next few years and animal lovers in Bend, Oregon, staged a mourning ceremony for 60 geese who were killed after causing nearly $22,000 worth of environmental damage to local parks.

But in Portland, the city has decided it shall not answer the fowl menace with death. Instead, Portland Parks employees and the Audubon Society are boxing up 100 geese and ducks from Westmoreland Park and shipping them to new homes around the area.

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