Eric Scigliano

Eric Scigliano has written on varied environmental, cultural and political subjects for many local and national publications. His books include Puget Sound: Sea Between the Mountains, Love War and Circuses (Seeing the Elephant), Michelangelo’s Mountain, Flotsametrics and the Floating World (with Curtis Ebbesmeyer), The Wild Edge, and, newly published, The Big Thaw: Ancient Carbon and a Race to Save the Planet.

Tangled Up in the Middle of Seattle’s Policing Debate

A transformation to a new model of policiing, much to be desired, will entail a costly, generation-long transition. Otherwise it’s like disbanding the fire department while waiting for new building codes to produce fire-safe buildings.

CHOP Devolves, And Defunding Loses Lustre

Those in Fox News and kindred media who saw the worst from the start—a totalitarian micro-dystopia ruled by a shadowy gun-toting rapper “warlord”—are doubtless rolling in “I told you so” bliss. But their dark pronouncements have from the start exaggerated the zone’s dangers, excesses, and even extent.

CHOP Street Party Gets Serious: ‘Patriots’ Threaten to Retake The Zone

For those spending very long hours manning and womanning the diminished barricades at the CHOP entrances, “establishing” means protecting, an increasingly anxious business. Their prime fear is not a phalanx of police spraying tear gas and Mace but a carload of militants driving into the crowd and spraying bullets.

Wild Side: The Animal World Revealed when we Sheltered in Place.

Everything from house finches and hydrangea to cavorting rabbits is putting on a show—flashing colors and trilling arpeggios. Our lockdown is their liberation.

Seattle’s Riot Geography: 11th and Pine and a History of Protest

I thought I was done with this sort of thing after a decade as the Seattle Weekly’s riot guy, spending day and night chasing the upheavals provoked by the first Bush vs. Iraq war, in 1991, the acquittal of the Los Angeles cops who beat Rodney King in 1992, and the disastrous World Trade Organization meeting here in 1999. But the feeling of déjà vu all over again is too strong to turn away.

Out of Range: Could Lockdown finally help solve Rural Broadband Access?

“Drive in WiFi” is the stopgap solution of the day: using the powerful fiber connections at shuttered schools, libraries, and other agencies and business to provide the WiFi equivalent to the old drive-in movies, with signals directed out to open parking areas. The state is scrambling to provide WiFi service to the 200,000 Washington residents who live beyond connectivity.

As Virus Invades Rural America, the Politics are Beginning to Scramble

It's one thing to close restaurants, bars, and concerts; we pampered urbanites can switch to take-out, Zoom happy hours, and endless cultural and entertainment online. It's another to ban a rural community's essential rituals. “Our funerals are not one or two days,” Tulalip Tribes chairwoman Teri Gobin told me two weeks ago.

COVID Field Notes: Cherry Blossoms and Checkout Dramas

Are we just bidding farewell to the old normal before entering the new? What’s remarkable is how long-ago that old normal seems now.

Field Notes in the Time of Corona: Touchy Retail Businesses

Businesses are falling over themselves to tout their prevention measures, but it can take awhile for new rules to trickle down to the checkout counter.

Field notes in a time of corona: Liberal Hype or Democratic Hoax?

You might imagine Trump’s jaw-droppingly fumbling, unfocused response to the pandemic and the stock market’s subsequent crash would convince even diehards that this emperor has no clue. Not in Trump country.

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