Topic: Environment
In this People's History, Dorothea Nordstrand (1916-2011) tells the story of the beautiful climbing rose that her grandmother brought from Austria more than 100 years ago. To this day (2003) the rose ...
In this People's History, Dorothea Nordstrand (1916-2011) recalls an early morning encounter between two Green Lake neighbors taking an early morning walk during the mid-1970s, a Vietnam Vet, and his ...
This excerpted account of man-made and natural disasters at Cedar Falls (east King County) was originally recorded on June 15, 1993, as a part of the Cedar River Watershed Oral History Project. Doroth...
William O. Douglas, who grew up in Yakima, was appointed to the United States Supreme Court at the age of 40 and served for more than 36 years, longer than any other justice in the Court's history. Bo...
Dunn Gardens, in Seattle's Broadview neighborhood, is a largely intact example of the many summer estates created by the famed Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm for wealthy clients in the P...
Gene Duvernoy headed the land-conservation nonprofit Forterra (previously known as the Cascade Land Conservancy) from its start in 1991 through 2018. Trained as an environmental engineer and a lawyer,...
Duwamish Gardens, a park in the south King County city of Tukwila, was previously a farmstead and truck farm on the Duwamish River. The land was settled and farmed by the Thomas Ray (1852-1940) family...
This is a map that shows the straight and deep Duwamish Waterway superimposed on the formerly meandering Duwamish River. The Duwamish River flowed through south Seattle into Elliott Bay. The straighte...
The Duwamish-Green Watershed in King County comprises 492 square miles of forests, meadows, hills, and valleys that have been shaped by environmental forces and generations of human activities. The wa...
Polly Dyer was a Seattle conservationist and environmentalist. Her dedication to safeguarding Washington's Olympic coastline and forests and to protecting wilderness areas across the state had a profo...
Land formations in Washington and the Pacific Northwest were a result of millions of years of changes in weather conditions and the environment. Glaciers and other geological forces created islands, m...
The culture and lifestyle of the Makah Indians is based on the sea. Their homeland is on the Olympic Peninsula in northwestern Washington, along the shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the coastli...
Mount St. Helens once was the fifth-highest mountain in Washington. Now, because of a huge eruption on May 18, 1980, it is only the 30th highest peak in the state. There were many signs that the mount...
By 1903, Seattle had five major public parks but city officials wanted more. They hired the Olmsted Brothers, a landscape architecture company from Massachusetts, to help create more parks. John C. Ol...
Over the past thousands of years, many varieties of mammals lived in what is now Washington. Several important fossils of prehistoric mammals have been discovered in different parts of the state. (Thi...
A retired municipal bond lawyer, James R. Ellis never held public office, never headed a major corporation, and was never rich. Yet, as a citizen activist for more than half a century, he left a bigge...
A lawyer by trade, Jim Ellis (1921-2019) was a civic activist who helped transform Seattle into one of America's great cities. One of his contemporaries was Emmett Watson (1918-2001), a Seattle newspa...
Helen Engle is an environmental activist with a formidable resume of involvement, especially in issues involving South Puget Sound. Early on she joined the Seattle Audubon Society and in 1969 co-found...
In his more than three decades as the head gardener at the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, Carl S. English Jr. created and nurtured the gardens that now bear his name. Sar...
This eulogy for Jim Ellis (1921-2019) was given by fomer Washington Governor Gary Locke (b. 1950) on December 8, 2019 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. Ellis was a giant in the cre...
Seattle's original Washelli Cemetery was Seattle's second municipal cemetery, established on the site of Capitol Hill's present Volunteer Park in 1885. The present Evergreen Washelli Cemetery straddle...
Homer Venishnick, born in Renton, Washington in 1926, comes from a long line of fishermen whose livelihoods have hinged on the ebb and flow of local rivers. Today he lives in a house he built 50 years...
A Harvard-educated biologist, Kathy Fletcher worked for the Carter White House and spent five years as a staff scientist in various environmental organizations. Since the early 1980s, she has devoted ...
Despite the rainy reputation of the Pacific Northwest, fire has figured prominently in the natural and economic history of the region. Fire was once a natural part of the environment, and Native Ameri...