Environment
Spokane’s air quality has generally improved since the early 1990’s as a consequence of improved vehicle emission controls, burning controls, and road sanding and sand pickup requirements. Spokane is still subject to occasional wind-borne dust storms from the Palouse, and fine particulate emissions from wood-burning stoves trapped by winter air inversions. Spokane’s position in a river valley with surrounding highlands makes air pollutant trapping inversions an infrequent but recurring problem. Keeping valley air pollutant emissions at low levels helps mitigate the damage these events inflict.
Human manipulation and use of water along with climate change have resulted in lower flows in the Spokane River in summer. Ground water on the West Plains has been dropping with wells going dry. The City has paper rights to pump roughly once again what we currently pump, but this right is under legal challenge and is subject to future adjudication. Water quality both in the Spokane River and in the Spokane Aquifer has generally been improving with implementation of the federal Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act. Never-the-less, significant water quality challenges exist as the City and others strive to further reduce phosphorus inputs to the system and deal with historic PCB contamination exceeding State and Spokane Tribal standards
As with air and water, humans have significantly impacted the land both in the City and regionally through development, industrial & municipal waste handling, farming/ranching, forestry, and mining operations. This region is blessed with very productive soils particularly to the South and East (The Palouse) and to the North (Green Bluff, Five Mile Prairie, Peone Prairie & Wildrose Prairie). These areas and soils are of particular importance in terms of our ability to maintain a sustainable economy. They are also important local sources of food stuffs.
We compete with and exploit the living things around us. In most cases this competition is very one sided with reductions in biodiversity and extinction of species. Invasive plants and animals, and disease causing organisms challenge man’s attempts to control the environment. Biologists view diversity of life as offering potential solutions to human problems and providing some insurance that living things as we know them might remain after serious survival challenges.
A key component of the environment we live in is energy. Topics of concern here include: sources of energy, how efficiently it is delivered and used by man, what results from this use, and what of the energy not harnessed by man.