Northwest (OR WA)

"The central California coast, with its rugged beaches and kelp forests, draws a lot of visitors for its scenic beauty. For the Chumash people, the coastline means a lot more.

"Almost all the places people like to go to are our sacred sites," says Violet Sage Walker, chairwoman of the Northern Chumash Tribal Council. "We've been going there and praying and doing ceremony there for 20,000 years."

"The water temperatures off the coasts of Oregon and Washington reached “extreme” levels in late July and August of 2023 – an event that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ranks a Category 4 on a scale of 5."

"A timber sale looms over hiking trails, a nearby city’s water supply, and already-vulnerable salmon and orca populations."

"An evacuation order for the Canadian town of Osoyoos and its surrounding district in the province of British Columbia had been issued late Saturday night due to an out-of-control wildfire that has crossed the border from the U.S. state of Washington."

"A fast-growing wildfire forced residents to evacuate a rural stretch of southern Washington state's Klickitat County on Saturday after it burned more than 30,000 acres in less than 24 hours."

"The Guardian finds children in Portland, Oregon, could have lower test scores due to lead emissions from nearby racetrack, one of dozens across the US to use toxic leaded gasoline".

"The Oregon county that includes Portland on Thursday filed a lawsuit against several fossil fuel companies and their business partners in an effort to hold them responsible for a deadly heat wave in 2021."

"Three federally recognized tribes have devoted decades to restoring the condition of their ancestral lands in southeastern Washington state to what they were before those lands became the most radioactively contaminated site in the nation’s nuclear weapons complex, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation."

"A jury on Wednesday ordered the electric utility PacifiCorp to pay punitive damages for causing devastating wildfires in Oregon in 2020 — on top of an earlier verdict already expected to amount to billions of dollars."