Land Use & Open Space Conservation

Margaret Torn, a senior scientist in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)’s Earth & Environmental Sciences Area (EESA), has been named by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) as a 2017 AGU Fellow. Every year, the AGU Fellows program recognizes members who have made exceptional contributions to the Earth and space sciences. Vetted by a committee of AGU Fellows, honorees represent no more than 0.1 percent of AGU’s 60,000 members.

“There will be more butts on bikes — and that’s a good thing.” That’s probably the most memorable line from the speaker’s podium during last week’s Ford GoBike launch in downtown Oakland, marking the first-ever arrival of bike sharing in the East Bay. But some supporters of the system say they’re thinking not just about how many butts, but whose butts, will be on the 1,500 or so shared bicycles expected to be rolling in Oakland, Berkeley and Emeryville by Labor Day.

Here are 20 ideas that could fix L.A. ... 12. Exhume our creeks.

Last November, Portland Metro voted for the first time not to expand its boundary. It wasn’t much of a surprise; people want to live near downtown, not on the fringes, and the Metro area has plenty of developable land. But you could also say it was a vote to preserve the essence of Portland by protecting what it was not willing to risk: the pristine Willamette Valley land that surrounded it.

Following a 10-hour hearing Thursday at the North Tahoe Event Center, the Placer County Planning Commission voted 4-2 to recommend the Village at Squaw Valley Specific Plan for approval, to move ahead with the 94-acre proposed redevelopment project for the resort and to certify the plan’s final environmental impact report. ... Sierra Watch Attorney Isaac Silverman, who was in attendance for the meeting’s duration, said he was surprised by the outcome because he’d met with Roccucci and Johnson prior to the meeting.

Switzer Fellow and Colorado State University Professor Maria Fernández-Giménez has received the Order of the Polar Star from the government of Mongolia, the highest civilian honor the country presents to foreign nationals. Fernández-Giménez was selected due to her long-standing commitment to researching Mongolia’s extensive rangelands and how natural and human communities are adapting to ecological and economic change.