Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Environmental Studies

Summer 2004

Gardening on the Palouse

The area known to practically every Washingtonian as “the Palouse” is one of six large grassland communities in North America. The Palouse stretches from just south of Spokane to the Snake River valley, near Moscow and Pullman. Today, it is a fertile farmland, covered in wheat and other grain crops. But prior to the 1870s and the arrival of “new-world” settlers, these rolling hills were blanketed in perennial bunchgrasses and forbs, which had dominated the landscape for five million years. Those native plants are now found only in tiny pockets around old cemeteries, along creeks, and in other unplowable places.

Some gardeners in the area … » More …

Summer 2004

An environmental mystery is solved, but answer points to larger concerns

Vultures in India and Pakistan play a vital environmental role by quickly removing dead livestock, inactivating pathogens, and probably controlling the spread of livestock disease. Vultures are also essential to the “sky burials” practiced by Zoroastrian sects. So the sudden and precipitous decline in vulture population caused great consternation throughout the subcontinent.

Over the past decade, the population of the Oriental white-backed vulture has declined by more than 95 percent. Other vulture species have experienced similar catastrophic declines. When Washington State University veterinary diagnostician Lindsay Oaks arrived in Pakistan in 2000 to investigate the mysterious deaths, he selected for study three colonies of perhaps 1,000 … » More …

Winter 2005

Magpie Forest: Protecting a piece of the past

Magpie Forest is like something out of the Wizard of Oz, a strange green land in the middle of a field.

Nestled in a 33-acre parcel of wheat north of Pullman, the 14-acre tract is a remnant of the original Palouse prairie. Last spring, Washington State University purchased the property from a local landowner to protect it from being developed.

Accessible only through a network of game trails, the spot is covered with hawthorn thickets, quaking aspen, mountain ash, and native shrubs, grasses, and flowering plants. The University hopes to upgrade these trails and encourage people to visit the property. Plans for an access road … » More …

Fall 2009

America’s Nuclear Wastelands: Politics, Accountability, and Cleanup

America's Nuclear Wastelands: Politics, Accountability, and Cleanup book cover

Max S. Power
WSU Press, 2008

When engineers, physicists, and other scientists began making materials for nuclear bombs, the Manhattan Project sites around the country including Hanford, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge were wrapped in World War II and Cold War secrecy. The processes, products, and, most importantly, the waste they produced were hidden from the American public.

Even people who lived near the test facilities were unaware … » More …