When Becky* unlocked the door to her room at the SafePlace Emergency Shelter, she described it as the first time she could remember having a place she could relax enough to rest. Her home life had become so dangerous that she’d taken to sleeping in a car to avoid her…
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I have been an immigration lawyer for more than 30 years. My work has always been mainly to help people inside the US to secure permanent legal status. Most of my clients have been or are currently part of an undocumented class. Some have been in deportation proceedings—the government actively…
BOOK REVIEW: Somebody Else’s Dream: Dakota, The Buoys, & “Timothy” by rock journalist Maxim W. Furek celebrates the 50th anniversary of the 1971 song “Timothy” and the legendary Satsop River Fair & Tin Cup Races Festival....
For over six years farmers, development interests and conservation advocates eagerly waited for a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP). This 30-year plan will cover the entireThurston County outside the cities’ urban growth area. It targets four endangered animals—the Mazama pocket gopher, Oregon vesper sparrow, Oregon spotted frog, and Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly.…
A small section of the Chehalis River is easily viewed from I-5 between Centralia and Chehalis, but this river is much more. To start with, it is the largest watershed completely within the boundaries of Washington State. It’s a watershed of immense reach, 2,700 square miles in area, with over…
We are moving from a world in which individual choice and competition made sense to one in which collective choice and cooperation are necessary, not because ideologies have changed but because both the problems we face and the nature of the resources required to solve them have changed...
This is the story of how the Thurston Housing Land Trust (THLT) was able to offer its first affordable home to a low-income family on Olympia’s westside. Community Land Trusts provide a model for our community to assure people in low-or-moderate income households that they can own a home.
Despite these blue sky promises, a proposal to revise the code governing deployment of wireless towers alarmed residents of rural Thurston County this fall...
In Thinking Like a Terrorist, published in 2008, Mike German proposes a Government Accountability Scale ranging from “fascism” to a “free government”...
Early in the pandemic, state and federal governments enacted moratoriums to prevent eviction of tenants for nonpayment of rent. People losing jobs, losing wage-earners, and losing childcare were falling behind on rent. The moratoriums meant that at least they wouldn’t lose their homes. The moratorium ended in Thurston County on…
BOOK REVIEW: "No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes" explains everything about the US occupation and how it avidly pursued its own failure.
Governor Inslee’s vaccine mandates are widely credited with increasing the overall vaccination rate for our state. According to the WA Department of Health, as of November 8, 2021, 79.6% of our state population aged 12 and up have received at least one dose and 73.5% are fully vaccinated. Inslee is…
Three years ago, 47 states (all but California, West Virginia, and Mississippi) allowed either philosophical or religious exemptions to school vaccine requirements – including New York. New York didn’t allow philosophical exemptions but did allow parents to avoid vaccinating their kids for school by declaring that they held a “genuine and…
Download as PDF Harlequin Theater performances Until the Flood, through Sat., Dec 4. . This riveting play uses a series of staged interviews to explore the uprising in Ferguson, Mo. following the shooting of Michael Brown. A Christmas Carol, through Dec. 31. Lots of special effects make this holiday classic…
E.J. Zita was elected as a Commissioner of the Port of Olympia in 2015 on a promise to work for greater accountability, transparency and environmental responsibility at the Port. She has chosen not to run again in 2021. Matt Crichton interviewed E.J. Zita for Works in Progress. The interview is edited and condensed here.
The idea that we reap what we sow was probably embedded in the collective consciousness long before it became a Bible verse, but whether it was meant as a warning or a promise is a little less clear. The articles in this issue suggest the verse is just another way…
...but not to us....Northwest Carpenters called a strike ...we are shocked, shocked ...we are surprised, surprised
People sleeping in tents and on park benches are only the most visible of those who suffer from being houseless in Thurston County. For Olympia alone, the 2021 “point in time” count of people experiencing homelessness—notoriously an undercount—found “1,145 people experiencing homelessness in 2021...
The “Appearance of Fairness Doctrine” is crucial to preserving trust in decisions made by judicial officers. Dan Leahy recently filed a complaint showing that Olympia’s Hearing Examiner had violated the fairness requirement by failing to disclose his relationship with businesses near a proposed development. The letter below addresses Council members considering whether to act on the complaint.
Dear WIP, On the eve of a planned extremist action to “demand justice” for right-wing thug Tusitala Toese, I am writing to provide a brief account of what happened the day he was shot. I heard the shooting, but did not witness it. What I did witness were numerous and…
WIP still has funds from our “Readers Review” grant. Each month we publish a list of books. If you’d like to be considered to review one of them, email us and put BOOK REVIEW in the subject line.
The Port of Olympia has a fairly small annual budget but capital assets in the tens of millions. The Port’s five most recent major capital investments totaled over $27 million—obtained largely using public funds. These investments are: the mobile harbor crane, new log loaders, the marine terminal stormwater system, the marina fuel dock, and the Commerce Business Center in Lacey. Every one of the recent commercial investments has failed to support itself.
People on Olympia’s Westside know Grocery Outlet and the Westside Lanes near the intersection of Harrison and Division. Residents know there’s a piece of vacant land next to Westside Lanes where a pedestrian path leads from Jackson Avenue NW to the shopping center. In December 2020, Kyle Schrader and Taylor Wood (dba Crosswater Construction) bought that two-plus acres for a mere $75,000....
Is there a need to designate more rural lands for warehouses? That’s what would happen if Thurston County were to approve the latest request to rezone rural residential land to rural industrial. According to the 2021 Buildable Lands Report, Thurston County already has plenty of industrially zoned land, more than…
What if we lived in a culture where all living beings, human and otherwise had a voice, and where our laws were based on our interdependence with nature? That is the premise of the ever-growing movement for the Rights of Nature which is gaining traction around the world and in Olympia.
The predominant conventional and chemical mode is steadily destroying and degrading soils all around the world. We need a revamped agronomic system that can restore biodiversity, halt soil carbon loss, sequester carbon and ban the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. But bold new approaches are almost never named, much less vigorously advocated.
The mural was an outgrowth of TCAT’s Chrysalis Project in which a series of online meetings held in 2020 engaged over 200 area participants who shared writing, painting and other creative responses to the climate crisis using the lifecycle of a butterfly as thematic inspiration.