Kirk Johnson

Though the Sonics were a storied NBA franchise, with a league championship in 1979, attendance was down at their Seattle arena along with points scored and revenues earned. As the team’s lead owner, Schultz was facing unrest from fans and partners alike. At the same time, Starbucks, the coffee company he had built into a global giant, was about to hit a bad patch, too, as the first ripples of the Great Recession began to rise into a flood tide.

You don’t have to be a basketball fan to know which problem Schultz was able to fix.

The Sonics no longer exist — sold by Schultz’s group that same pivotal year, and later moved to Oklahoma City and renamed, even the memorabilia packed away. Now, as Schultz mulls running for president as an independent candidate, his path through that moment says a lot about him — how he handles adversity and uncertainty, and how he grasped or did not the nettle of local politics as the Sonics were flailing, according to more than 20 people who have observed him, befriended him, or worked with or against him over the years.

His basketball legacy has left many in Seattle outraged to this day, believing Schultz to be either duplicitous or duped by others. Yet his actions at Starbucks — including a raft of innovations introduced before and during the recession, like health insurance for baristas — became the stuff of adoring Harvard Business School case studies. In Fortune magazine’s ranking, Starbucks is the fifth-most admired company in the world.

The common thread — deeply familiar to people in the city Schultz has called home since the early 1980s, and now echoed in his talk of entering politics — is a kind of idealistic righteousness, combined with obvious conviction about his own abilities and insights. All of which worked like a magic wand in Seattle, except when it didn’t.

“There’s no question that he built an amazing business, one that Seattle has benefited from and one that has worldwide reach,” said Greg Nickels, a Democrat who was in his second term as Seattle’s mayor in 2006.

“The Sonics episode, I think, was different,” Nickels added. “I think he got into it and discovered it was not what he thought it was going to be.”

Schultz, 65, a self-made billionaire who grew up in public housing in Brooklyn, said in an interview — conducted, at his request, in a Starbucks — that he had not decided whether to seek the White House and had set no deadline for doing so. A self-described “lifelong Democrat,” Schultz said that he thought the Democrats were veering too far left, President Donald Trump and the Republicans too far right, and that there was a hunger for a more centrist candidacy like the one he might put up.

But he also said, as he had repeatedly in recent speeches around the nation promoting a new memoir, that he would not run if he became convinced his candidacy could aid in Trump’s re-election.

Indeed, his announcement in January that he was “seriously” considering running brought an outcry from many Democrats who feared a split vote. The president chimed in, tweeting that Schultz, who had never sought public office, “doesn’t have the ‘guts,'” and Warren Buffett called a Schultz candidacy “a mistake."

As a rule in U.S. politics, independents fail to get elected. Since the Civil War, only four minor-party candidates for president have mustered at least 10 percent of the vote: Ross Perot, George Wallace, Robert La Follette and Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, a Republican turned Bull Moose candidate in the 1912 election, couldn’t win despite having been a popular president only a few years earlier. But even getting less than 10 percent can make a difference, as Ralph Nader showed in the 2000 election, which put George W. Bush in the White House through an Electoral College victory even though Al Gore, the outgoing vice president, won the popular vote.

For his part, Schultz believes that an independent president could have a powerful mandate in governing, as a refutation by voters of the bitter and divisive “politics of revenge” that have paralyzed Washington. The example that it could be done would, in turn, draw out a surge of like-minded independent candidates who would reshape Congress, he added.

“The current trajectory we’re on demonstrates such evidence of a broken system,” Schultz said. “I’m looking at the situation and realizing that a large majority of Americans agree with me.”

If Schultz does run, his Seattle experience, combined with a back story of self-made success, would be the narrative he tells and sells. Starbucks started here, and is a different company, Schultz said, because of the culture that defines the Pacific Northwest. The Sonics failed here and were a Seattle story, too, for which Schultz has apologized. In his universe, it’s a venti-size place of success and failure.

A Civic Undertaking

When Schultz organized an investor group to buy the SuperSonics in 2001, he took the high road of rhetoric. Sounding like a civic patron out only for the city he loved — with the grubby business of moneymaking very much an afterthought — he promised to treat the team as a kind of sacred civic trust.

“This ownership group did not get involved to make a profit,” he said at one point in testifying before Washington state Legislature. “We wanted passionate people, about not only sports, but passionate people about our community.”

That language and imagery came back to haunt him in the aftermath of the team’s demise.

“Schultz became a pariah,” said Gary Washburn, a former Seattle sportswriter who now covers the NBA for The Boston Globe.

In February 2006, Schultz drove to the state Capitol in Olympia, plunked down in front a microphone in a wood-paneled Senate meeting room and repeated what some considered a threat — that he might have to sell the Sonics if he didn’t get more than $200 million in public money for renovations to their arena.

He said the Sonics were losing money because they had a terrible, uncompetitive arena lacking in the profitable add-ons that other franchises had, like restaurants and stores. Public money had been lavished on other sports in Seattle in past years, he pointed out — with new play spaces for the Mariners, a baseball team, and the Seahawks, a football team. It was time to bestow some love on the NBA, Schultz said.

It did not go well. The Sonics bailout bill did not even come up for a final vote. The political appeal of financing athletic venues had faded after the 2000 dot-com economic bust, and a ballot measure aimed at reducing taxpayer money in professional sports was gaining favor even as Schultz testified. Initiative 91, as it was called, was approved that fall by a 74 percent majority.

Several people who were in the Legislature at the time said that Schultz, who had never been very involved in politics or lobbying, was treated like the outsider he was, and never appeared to understand the network of informal alliances that stood in his way.

Calls were coming to legislative offices from people connected to the city’s other sports teams, saying they didn’t much like the idea of financing a lot of expensive new skybox seats.

“The Mariners and Seahawks people were not terribly encouraging — they had several back channels, and sort of front channels of stuff going on,” said James McIntire, a Democratic state representative at the time who later served two terms as state treasurer.

Art Thiel, a longtime columnist and sportswriter who covered the Sonics story, said Schultz simply didn’t understand the state capital. “He thought that he could do as a pro sports owner the same thing sorts of things that he could do as a successful business owner, which is either to charm the opposition or bully them,” he said. “He got neither done.”

Barely five months after hitting a wall at the legislature, Schultz made good on his warning, announcing that he and his co-owners had sold the team to a group based in Oklahoma, which moved it and renamed it the Thunder.

Schultz now calls that decision one of the major regrets of his life.

“My biggest mistake still reverberates,” Schultz wrote in a recent op-ed piece in The Seattle Times. In his book, he elaborates on what happened: “Almost everyone blamed me, and after some initial denial, I realized they were right to do so. I had squandered the very public trust that I had bought into.”

A longtime friend of Schultz’s, Howard Behar, a former vice president at Starbucks, said that while Schultz learned from the experience, he had been warned in advance that straying from the world he knew might be dangerous.

“When he bought that company, I had a quote in the local newspaper in Seattle. I said: ‘No good will come from this — I think he’s nuts,'” Behar recalled. “And I was right. No good came from it.”

Citizen of Seattle

The storied names of the Seattle business world roll off the tongue all over the world: Amazon, Boeing, Eddie Bauer, Microsoft, REI, Starbucks. And just as Microsoft is associated with its co-founders, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and Amazon with its founder, Jeff Bezos, Schultz is Mr. Coffee, father of the Frappuccino and coffee sizes in butchered Italian. (The “venti,” for extra-large, which ust means “20,” in Italian, is a nod to the espresso culture Schultz fell in love with on a trip to Italy in 1983.)

Schultz, who handed off leadership reins at the company last year, came to Seattle with his wife, Sheri, in 1982, to take a job as marketing director of Starbucks, then just a modest local seller of coffee beans. Only five years later he organized an investor group to buy the company, and then built it — with two stints as chief executive — into a retail giant with nearly 30,000 stores around the world and more than 380,000 employees.

But like Seattle itself, with its vast wealth and abundant homelessness, its left-leaning social and environmental policies but no income tax on its considerable allotment of billionaires, the Schultz legacy is mixed.

At his first Seattle appearance after announcing his presidential considerations, protesters gathered outside a downtown theater where he was promoting his new memoir. The protesters waved signs about “venti egos” and failed billionaire politicians, while the audience inside cheered at almost every whispered hint of a presidential run.

In charitable civic work, the Schultz Family Foundation has been a force in homeless advocacy, working with shelter groups and youth-training centers in Seattle, with a data-driven approach to moving homeless families off the street quickly and into stable housing.

“The foundation piloted something and proved that it worked,” said Marty Hartman, the executive director at Mary’s Place, a nonprofit shelter provider that has received more than $4.5 million from Starbucks and the Schultz foundation.

But by other measures of civic engagement, like bothering to vote, Schultz has been less involved. Of 40 elections held since 2003 that he could have participated in as a Seattle resident, he voted only 12 times, according to King County records.

“I’m remiss, of course that I did not vote in those local elections, but you know I travel so much,” Schultz said in the interview — though he quickly added that he had never missed a chance to vote for president.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/us/howard-schultz-starbucks-seattle-supersonics.html" id="f812e3ac-754c-3096-a269-dfc65146c5c1">The New York Times</a>.

For Clues to Howard Schultz's Leadership, Look Beyond Starbucks

SEATTLE — Howard Schultz faced a full-court press of troubles as 2006 began. That the Seattle SuperSonics were lousy, having their worst season in 20 years, was only the beginning.

Compelled by the augustly named federal Uniform Time Act of 1966, most Americans will leap ahead — or stumble blearily — from one configuration of the clock to another this weekend, as daylight saving time clicks in at 2 a.m. Sunday.

But many people are saying it’s time for time to be left alone. State legislatures from New England to the West Coast are considering proposals to end the leaping, clock-shifting confusion of hours lost or gained, and the conundrums it can create.

Could 8 a.m. somehow, somewhere in the universe, really still be 8 a.m., even if now you’re suddenly calling it 9?

“I cannot change the rotation of the earth and sun,” said Kansen Chu, a California lawmaker who is sponsoring a bill to keep the state permanently on daylight time — one of at least 31 states that are addressing some aspect of daylight saving and its discontents. “But I am hoping to get more sunlight to the people of California.”

Proponents of setting the clock once and being done with it, like Chu, a Democrat from the San Jose area, said that shifting back and forth in the spring and fall, if it ever really made sense, no longer does.

California voters agreed last fall, approving a ballot proposition for year-round daylight time by a wide margin.

Lifestyles and patterns of work are different now than they were when daylight saving first became entrenched nationally during and after World War II. Research, Chu and others said, has shown that human beings just aren’t as flexible about their daily rhythms as they once seemed; accidents, heart attacks and strokes tend to occur in greater numbers around the time shift.

The 1966 law allows states to opt out of daylight saving, and Hawaii and Arizona do so, staying on standard time all year; so does Puerto Rico. But for reasons that historians say remain murky, the law does not allow states to opt in all the way, and choose daylight time year-round. So the California proposal, and a similar bill passed by the Florida Legislature last year, would require an act of Congress to take effect.

Josh Yokela, a Republican state legislator in New Hampshire, is working on a way around that problem. He is the lead sponsor of a bill, passed by the state House last month, to request that New Hampshire be shifted into the Atlantic time zone, which by fine coincidence would do exactly what daylight saving does now: put the state an hour ahead of Eastern Standard Time. Then the state would opt out of seasonal clock changes, as the 1966 law allows.

The key is that moving to a different time zone does not require an act of Congress — all it takes is an order from the Transportation Department, the federal agency that oversees time (a legacy of its duties regulating railroad schedules).

“We would be on the same time as the rest of the Eastern time zone for eight months of the year, because they accept daylight saving time — and when they fall back in the winter, we wouldn’t,” Yokela said.

Of course, it matters what your neighbors’ clocks say, and not just your own. Regional considerations played a role both in how daylight time first appeared a century ago, and in the debate over what to do about it now.

New Hampshire’s bill, for example, says that because the state is so closely tied economically with the other New England states, especially Maine and Massachusetts, it would only try the jump to Atlantic time if the others did as well.

Proximity also had ripple effects in the 1920s, when New York City, having tasted daylight saving as a temporary measure during World War I, decided to keep it in peacetime. Retailers found that people shopped and spent more on their way home from work when there was more evening light, and Wall Street investors liked gaining an hour of overlap with trading on the London financial markets.

Supporters also argued that nudging the clock forward to have more of a summer’s daylight fall in the evening would save energy by reducing the need for artificial light.

Once New York was doing it, places like Boston that needed to stay in sync economically decided to follow suit. A similar domino effect led Detroit to petition in 1922 to move to Eastern time from Central, followed by most of the rest of Michigan. And now, with California inching toward a change, time bills are being considered in Washington, Oregon and Nevada.

The early days of experiments with time changes brought on a lot of head-scratching, said Michael Downing, a novelist and lecturer in creative writing at Tufts University who has written a social history, called “Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time.”Some people worried that an extra hour of light in the evening would dry up and brown their lawns, or that cows would become confused and not give as much milk.

“The idea of losing or gaining an hour is itself such a fantastically bad philosophical proposition that nobody knows what they’re talking about,” Downing said. “Most people don’t even understand whether moving the clocks forward gives them more sunlight or less sunlight in the morning. They just can’t remember what it does, because it so defies logic.”

Scott Yates, a technology entrepreneur in Colorado who runs a website dedicated to staying on daylight saving time year-round, predicted that most of the state bills would go nowhere. Though he believes the idea has gained some legitimacy, with lawmakers thinking especially about the health effects of time changes, it is hardly a top legislative priority for anyone. At the same time, it is not a bitterly partisan issue, which in these days of divided politics feels pretty rare.

“It’s sort of odd, in that it doesn’t have any natural political division to it, but it doesn’t have a natural constituency, either,” Yates said. “It’s actually kind of refreshing in that way.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/us/daylight-savings-time.html" id="657da5f1-613f-3903-a7cb-5607f39edcd5">The New York Times</a>.

A day is a day, with so many hours of darkness and so many of light. It’s a hard reality that no powerful king or brilliant philosopher has ever found a way around. And yet, every year, bless our hearts, we try.

As Daylight Saving Looms, Suppose We Spring Forward, and Never Fall Back?

Compelled by the federal Uniform Time Act of 1966, most Americans will leap ahead from one configuration of the clock to another this weekend, as daylight saving time clicks in at 2 a.m. Sunday.

But many people are saying it’s time for time to be left alone. State legislatures from New England to the West Coast are considering proposals to end the confusion of hours lost or gained.

The 1966 law allows states to opt out of daylight saving, and Hawaii and Arizona do so, staying on standard time all year; so does Puerto Rico. But the law does not allow states to opt in all the way, and choose daylight time year-round. So the California proposal, and a similar bill passed by the Florida Legislature last year, would require an act of Congress to take effect.

A day is a day, with so many hours of darkness and so many of light. It’s a hard reality that no powerful king or brilliant philosopher has ever found a way around. And yet, every year we try.

Inslee, 68, has led the state during a powerful economic expansion since taking office as governor in 2013, especially in the Seattle area. Amazon and other tech companies have hired tens of thousands of workers, and export-driven manufacturers like Boeing have boomed.

But he has had mixed success in getting some of his ideas put into practice, especially those on renewable, low-carbon energy. He failed twice with voters, and once in the Legislature, to enact the nation’s first carbon tax, aimed at reducing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. Many residents, elected officials and business leaders balked, concerned that energy costs would rise.

In a video released by his campaign titled “Our Moment,” Inslee spares no time getting to his core environmental message, with the word “climate,” mentioned at least 10 times in just over 80 seconds.

Shown chatting up farmers and factory workers and surveying fire disasters, Inslee says he is the only candidate for president who would make the issue the nation’s No. 1 priority, but he combines that thought with an economic development message — that a moonshot like focus on climate and a push toward “100 percent clean energy,” would also create millions of jobs. But he says the clock is ticking.

“We’re the first generation to feel the sting of climate change, and we’re the last that can do something about it,” Inslee says.

In speeches around the nation leading up to his announcement, Inslee has framed his candidacy around themes that are deeply familiar to residents of his home state. Biting attacks on President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress — popular in the strongly Democratic counties in and around Seattle — are combined with sometimes lofty, sometimes dire, rhetoric that the nation and the world are at a pivot point, where delay on energy and climate will be disastrous for future generations.

“This is the 11th hour, but it is Washington’s hour to shine. It’s a time of great peril, but also of great promise,” Inslee said in his State of the State speech earlier this year. “I don’t know of any other issue that touches the heart of things so many of us care about: our jobs, our health, our safety and our children’s future,” he added, referring to climate change.

Inslee has said in recent speeches that he would push the nation to global leadership in research and development of lower-carbon energy policies, likening the effort to the mass mobilizations and deployment of resources during World War II. But his base of support in his home state is also narrow.

In his election to the governor’s office in 2012, he carried only eight of the state’s 39 counties, all of them along the heavily populated liberal western slope of the Cascade Range. He trailed his Republican challenger in more rural and conservative agricultural communities. In his second campaign four years later, he carried nine counties.

Many Washington residents, even those who admire Inslee and have voted for him, are prone to sometimes mock him for his sunny, boyish enthusiasm in talking about passions like ocean acidification and carbon.

“He’s a true believer,” said Travis N. Ridout, a professor of government and public policy at Washington State University and longtime observer of Inslee. “He’s identified with climate change. Other than that, it’s hard to — at least in my mind — come up with signature policy focuses. The positive of that is that it’s hard to think of the big scandals he’s been involved in either. He’s fairly low drama. He’s not a firebrand.”

Inslee, a lawyer and former prosecutor, is a fifth-generation Washingtonian who grew up in the Seattle area and has credited part of his appreciation for the natural world to his father, Frank Inslee, a high school science teacher who often led the family on volunteer expeditions to replant alpine meadows on the slopes of Mount Rainier, the glacier-clad volcano south of Seattle.

One Democratic political consultant, Rebecca Katz, said that climate has risen in importance in the 2020 race with the introduction of the Green New Deal, a congressional resolution calling for an aggressive mobilization to move the United States to renewable energy and eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. Inslee has praised the Green New Deal, as have a number of senators who are also running for president — Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

“The benefit of Inslee is that he actually has a record here,” Katz said. “There’s a lot of candidates who have kind of seen the light and are now for a Green New Deal, but Inslee has been talking about this issue for a long time.”

In a 23-minute speech on Friday to supporters who had crowded into a solar energy company warehouse south of downtown Seattle, Inslee spoke almost as much about optimism and hope as climate.

The belief that the nation can rise to the challenge of climate threats and push toward a zero-carbon energy system, he said — and do it with social justice and fairness — is crucial to the effort.

“We are an optimistic America that can do great things,” he said. “We know we can do hard things.” And under his presidency, he added, one of the first hard things would be ending special treatment for the fossil fuel industry.

“I have a message for the oil, coal and gas special interests — that gravy train is over,” he said.

Inslee is the first major-party politician from Washington state to run for president since Sen. Henry M. Jackson, who was also a Democrat. Jackson was briefly a contender in 1976 before ultimately losing the nomination to Jimmy Carter, who won the general election that fall.

In a statement to the crowd about climate — though it seemed to be about Inslee’s candidacy as well — he said that timing was everything.

“We have one chance to defeat climate change and it is right now,” he said. “And it is my belief that if you have one chance in life, you take it.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/us/jay-inslee-washington-2020-.html" id="f5ce8a48-b7ba-31c8-ab33-8f3e3a253dec">The New York Times</a>.

Washington Governor With Climate Message Enters Presidential Race

SEATTLE — Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington and former member of Congress who has made climate change and the environment his signature issues, jumped into the crowded field of 2020 Democratic contenders for president on Friday.

Jay Inslee, Washington Governor and Climate Advocate, Enters 2020 Race

Inslee has framed his candidacy around themes that are deeply familiar to residents of his home state. Biting attacks on President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress — popular in the strongly Democratic counties in and around Seattle — are combined with sometimes lofty, sometimes dire, rhetoric that the nation and the world are at a pivot point, where delay on energy and climate will be disastrous for future generations.

Inslee has said that he would push the nation to global leadership in research and development of lower-carbon energy policies, likening the effort to the mass mobilizations and deployment of resources during World War II.

“That said,” she added, “a lot of folks don’t know much about Inslee.”

In a video announcing his campaign Friday, Inslee made climate change central to his message as a candidate.

“Our country’s next mission must be to rise up to the most urgent challenge of our time — defeating climate change,” he said.

“This crisis isn’t just a chart or graph anymore. The impacts are being felt everywhere.”

Did you say turn left? No can do. It’s an icy hill, and the prospect of a downward skid, foot mashing the brake pedal, is very real. Left at the next intersection instead? Another vertigo inducer, of which the glacier-carved city has many.

People with tickets for “Uncle Vanya” at the ACT Theatre were out of luck, too, as Seattle got its biggest snowfall in a decade this week, and performance venues up and down the Pacific Northwest coast went dark. Justin Timberlake bailed out on his scheduled Tacoma Dome show Sunday, and Michelle Obama rescheduled an appearance in support of her new book. Hundreds of flights were delayed or canceled Saturday at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and the problems continued into Sunday.

Snow isn’t unheard-of here in the nation’s upper northwest corner. This isn’t Atlanta or Tallahassee, Florida, where the rare falling flake can send people flocking into the street to shiver and stare up in wonder with their tongues extended. But neither is it Denver or Chicago, where anything short of an all-out blizzard merits little more than a shrug.

In Seattle, the muscle memory just isn’t there for big snow — whether in deploying salt spreaders and plows or in getting a snow-day reprieve from an algebra test — so the responses, for better or worse, are sharpened by the novelty.

Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington declared a state of emergency, and Seattle’s Emergency Management office urged people to be prepared to lose power if lines go down. Interstate 90 was closed Sunday morning in both directions east of Seattle because of blowing and drifting snow. Kids and their parents commandeered city streets for sledding, sometimes blocking traffic with homemade signs.

Then there’s frozen pizza. Or perhaps more accurately, there isn’t frozen pizza. The gene for nesting indoors in extreme weather appears to be connected to the gene for pepperoni, so the shelves in the freezer aisle were stripped bare in many stores. Tofu was still widely available.

The National Weather Service said that Seattle, less than halfway into the month, has already had its snowiest February since 1949, after 7.9 inches were recorded at the airport Friday and Saturday. And three more storms, backed up one behind the other on a slippery slope from Canada, are heading toward the region starting on Monday, said Jacob DeFlitch, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

“Right now, we have two systems coming in later Sunday to early Monday,” DeFlitch said. “Then we have a system right on the heels of that system that will be late mainly Monday afternoon through early Tuesday morning. It looks like there could then be another system Thursday-Friday.”

Pacific Northwest winters are famous for their persistent but temperate gloom, with storm tracks and prevailing winds that usually bring Pacific Ocean clouds and moisture directly east into the Puget Sound region. That familiar pattern — days of rain and drizzle that are short and dark but rarely all that cold — also produces big snows, but farther inland in the Cascade Range, where those storm systems smack into the colder, higher mountain elevations east of Seattle.

This year, though, the Pacific storms have veered inland much farther north, in British Columbia, and then have stayed colder over land as they moved down the coast.

That has produced a grab-bag of unusual weather. Some areas northwest of Seattle, for example, on the usually rainy Olympic Peninsula, got more than 2 feet of snow in Friday’s storm. But the Cascade Range, from Washington south into Oregon, has so far seen much less snow than average, with possible repercussions later this year for water supplies and fire danger.

Seattle, with high housing prices and a big homeless population, also worries about keeping people warm and safe when frigid weather hits. The city said it would keep a Severe Weather Shelter open near the Space Needle through Feb. 17, and the Human Services Department had partnered with a private operator to open a shelter for families downtown. A 24-hour warming shelter for families with children will be open at least through Monday morning, the city said; about 270 people took overnight refuge at four other locations Friday night, including City Hall and the King County Administration Building.

DeFlitch, the meteorologist, said that with more than 10 inches measured so far, it won’t take much more for this February to break the month’s current record of 13.1 inches.

That was set in February 1949, before frozen pizza was available for a supermarket raid. And in those days, hearing a disembodied voice in your car telling you to turn left was something few people would admit to in any weather.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/10/us/snow-weather-seattle-washington.html" id="87755a13-827a-3e8d-adc3-f329d6423a91">The New York Times</a>.

SEATTLE — Sorry, Siri. Turn-by-turn driving directions just won’t suffice in a big Seattle snowstorm.

Snows Smack Seattle, Where Winter Is Supposed to Be About Rain

Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington declared a state of emergency, and Seattle’s Emergency Management office urged people to be prepared to lose power if lines go down. Interstate 90 was closed Sunday morning in both directions east of Seattle because of blowing and drifting snow.

The National Weather Service said that Seattle, less than halfway into the month, has already had its snowiest February since 1949, after 7.9 inches were recorded at the airport Friday and Saturday. And three more storms, backed up one behind the other on a slippery slope from Canada, are heading toward the region starting Monday, said Jacob DeFlitch, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Seattle said it would keep a Severe Weather Shelter open near the Space Needle through Feb. 17, and the Human Services Department had partnered with a private operator to open a shelter for families downtown.

DeFlitch said with more than 10 inches measured so far, it won’t take much more for this February to break the month’s record of 13.1 inches.

Seventy-nine cases of measles have been reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since the start of this year. Fifty cases of the highly contagious disease were in Washington state.

An outbreak of measles has also occurred in the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York, where 64 confirmed cases of measles were reported, mostly late last year. That outbreak began, the CDC said, when a child who had not had a measles vaccination caught the virus on a visit to Israel, where a large outbreak of the disease was occurring.

But no place has been hit harder since January than Clark County, Washington, a metropolitan area near Portland, Oregon. Clark County health officials declared a medical emergency last month, and say they have seen 49 cases — most of them in children under the age of 10.

Clark County has one of the lowest vaccination rates in Washington state. About 78 percent of the kindergarten through high school population is vaccinated, according to state figures. Along with other cities mainly in the West — including Seattle, Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Houston — Portland is considered a hot spot for families that opt not to vaccinate for medical, philosophical or religious reasons.

For measles, epidemiologists generally consider the threshold for preventing public measles outbreaks to be a vaccination rate of 93 percent or higher.

“If you have a population that is unvaccinated, it’s like throwing a match into a can of gasoline,” said Dr. Alan Melnick, Clark County’s public health director.

Measles can cause permanent neurological damage, deafness and in relatively rare cases, death. All states allow parents to exempt children from vaccination for medical reasons, and most also allow for a religious exemption, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

But 17 states, including Washington, Oregon, Colorado and Texas, allow parents to keep their children from being vaccinated for unspecified personal or philosophical reasons. Some may be connected to a broader anti-vaccination movement, including concerns that vaccines lead to autism, an idea that has been widely debunked.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/us/measles-outbreak.html" id="71ba1a19-ece9-3e68-a7cb-a0073884c747">The New York Times</a>.

SEATTLE — Measles, declared eliminated as a major public health threat in the United States almost 20 years ago, has re-emerged this winter in the Pacific Northwest and other states where parents have relatively broad leeway over whether to vaccinate their children.

Measles, Mostly Eliminated as Threat, Is Now an Emergency in the Northwest

But no place has been hit harder since January than Clark County, Washington, a fast-growing corner of the metropolitan area near Portland, Oregon. Clark County health officials declared a medical emergency last month, and say they have seen 49 cases — most of them in children under the age of 10.

“If you have a population that is unvaccinated, it’s like throwing a match into a can of gasoline,” said Dr. Alan Melnick, Clark County’s public health director. “Measles is exquisitely contagious and immunization rates have been dropping.”

But 17 states, including Washington, Oregon, Colorado and Texas, have gone further, allowing parents to keep their children from being vaccinated for unspecified personal or philosophical reasons. Some may be connected to a broader anti-vaccination movement, including concerns that vaccines lead to autism, an idea that has been widely debunked.

“I’m very worried that these measles epidemics are becoming a new normal,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, a co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He said that misinformation had been spread about vaccines, and that state lawmakers in some cases have allowed those claims to drive their decisions about legislation.

“The enablers are state legislators in those states, that have allowed themselves to be played,” he said.

Melnick, the Clark County official, said he had heard recently from doctors that parents have been showing up in greater numbers seeking vaccinations since the outbreak emerged. A plan is also underway, he said, for a mass clinic to give free shots.

“We’ve already had a child hospitalized; I hope it doesn’t take a death or a real serious complication like encephalitis for people to change their minds,” about vaccination, he said.

In 2018, 17 measles outbreaks were reported, mostly in pockets around the nation. In 2017, 75 cases were reported in Minnesota, in a Somali-American community with low vaccination coverage. In 2015, 147 cases across multiple states were tied to an amusement park in California, which an infected person was said to have visited, according to the CDC.

In Washington state’s legislature, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing to reverse the state’s rule allowing philosophical or personal exemptions to vaccination. A bill, filed in the midst of the measles outbreak, has yet to be voted on.

Measles Outbreak Now an Emergency in Washington State

Seventy-nine cases of measles have been reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since the start of this year. Fifty cases of the highly contagious disease were in Washington State.

An outbreak of measles has also occurred in the Orthodox Jewish community in New York, where 64 confirmed cases of measles were reported, mostly late last year. That outbreak began, the CDC said, when a child who had not had a measles vaccination caught the virus on a visit to Israel, where a large outbreak of the disease was occurring.

. Melnick, the Clark County official, said he had heard recently from doctors that parents have been showing up in greater numbers seeking vaccinations since the outbreak emerged. A plan is also underway, he said, for a mass clinic to give free shots.

“We’ve already a child hospitalized; I hope it doesn’t take a death or a real serious complication like encephalitis for people to change their minds,” about vaccination, he said.

'A Match Into a Can of Gasoline': Measles Outbreak Now an Emergency in Washington State

“It seems really gentle,” said Christian, 71, a financial adviser. “Comforting and natural.”

A bill before the Washington state Legislature would make this state the first in the nation — and probably the world, legal experts said — to explicitly allow human remains to be disposed of and reduced to soil through composting, or what the bill calls recomposition.

The prospect has drawn no public opponents in the state capital as yet, but it is a concept that sometimes raises eyebrows. Funeral directors say a common reaction to the idea, which has been explored and tested in recent scientific studies, is to cringe.

“There’s almost a revulsion at times, when you talk about human composting,” said Brian Flowers, managing funeral director at Moles Farewell Tributes, a company north of Seattle that supports the bill.

In truth, composting is an ancient and basic method of body disposal. A corpse in the ground without embalming chemicals or a coffin, or in a quickly biodegradable coffin, becomes soil over time.

But death certificates in many states include a box that must be checked for burial or cremation, with no other options. Aboveground composting, through a mortuary process that requires no burial or burning of remains, is a new category without regulation about how it should be done or what can be done with the compost. What that means is that hardly any funeral director — even in states where laws about human remains are loosely worded — would risk offering it without state permission.

Pete Seeger, the folk singer, crooned about the idea: “If I should die before I wake, all my bone and sinew take. Put them in the compost pile to decompose a little while,” goes the song “In Dead Earnest.”

“When radishes and corn you munch you may be having me for lunch.”

In America, there are regional patterns to what comes of bodies after death. In the South and Midwest, where religious or cultural traditions run deep, more families opt for caskets and concretes vaults, and fewer choose cremation, experts say. In the Northeast, where family roots sometimes extend back centuries, people often favor burial in local cemeteries alongside ancestors.

In the Pacific Northwest, by contrast, death is treated somewhat differently, for reasons that sociologists and religious experts have long pondered. It’s a region where transient newcomers have defined the culture since pioneer days. Church attendance is among the lowest in the nation. Preservation of the environment is a central concern.

In Washington state, a larger percentage of residents are cremated than in any other state. Washington has more “green cemeteries,” which encourage a return to nature without manicured lawns and chemicals, than most states; only California and New York have more. And laws allowing physicians to help terminally ill patients hasten their deaths, known as “death with dignity,” were pioneered in the Pacific Northwest.

“It’s this interesting combination of environmental sensibility and individual choice,” David Sloane, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, said of the Northwest region. Now the prospect of legalized human composting, he said, puts many of those regional impulses in a spotlight. “It’s a test case for seeing how people think,” he said.

Jamie Pedersen, a Democratic state senator from Seattle, is leading efforts to pass the legislation to permit a composting process after death.

Democrats control both chambers of the Legislature, and Pedersen, the bill’s sponsor, said he had enlisted support from Republicans as well. Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, has taken no position, a spokeswoman said.

At a hearing this month, no one spoke in opposition, though a state association of funeral directors said that it hoped clearer information could be added to the bill about where composted remains could be distributed. It was uncertain, too, whether such a measure would be seen as a priority during a legislative session crowded with issues that may be easier for politicians to talk about and win points on.

The bill would also legalize a separate process sometimes known as water cremation or alkaline hydrolysis. Under that process, already legal in 16 states, bodies are dissolved using a mixture of heated water and lye, leaving behind bone fragments and a sterile liquid.

People are drawn to the idea of aboveground decomposition mainly for environmental reasons, Pedersen said. There’s no coffin, no chemicals, none of the fossil fuels that would be needed for cremation, and no expensive cemetery plot required. Some religious traditions also favor ideas of simplicity and of earth returning to earth.

Though the process sounds simple, it would not be cheap. Preliminary estimates suggest it could cost at least $5,000 — less, perhaps, than an elaborate burial service, but more than the most basic cremation.

In a study last year at Washington State University, six bodies donated for the research were placed in a closed container, wrapped in organic materials like alfalfa, then bathed in a stream of air warmed by microbes, and periodically turned. Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, a professor of soil science and sustainable agriculture and the lead researcher in the study, said that after about 30 days, the bodies essentially became soil.

Fears that composted remains might smell bad or contain toxic elements — from dental fillings, for example, or pharmaceutical residues — were allayed, Carpenter-Boggs said. She said the heat generated by microorganisms broke down organic matter and pathogens, and levels of pollutants like cadmium and mercury were within federal limits.

“It certainly is feasible that families would take home a small portion that they could keep for a long time,” Carpenter-Boggs said. “Or families could bring home a small amount that would be interred into their landscape, placed under a loved one’s favorite tree, similar to what people do with cremains.”

Katrina Spade, the founder and chief executive of Recompose, a Seattle company that hopes to build the first facility to use the new method and conduct funeral services based around it, said the movement toward cremation — now used in more than half of deaths in the nation — has led to an erosion of essential rituals. Remains are often just picked up from a crematory, she said, and that’s that.

“This is not simply a process to convert bodies to soil; it’s also about bringing ritual and some of that ceremony back,” Spade said.

Christian, the woman who is hoping recomposition will be an option after she dies, says she has long been uncomfortable with the other choices. She has ruled out burial. And she does not like the idea of cremation because of environmental costs — emissions and climate impacts of fossil fuels used in the burning process. But her friends remain divided on the issue.

“The vast majority are like, ‘That is so cool,'” she said. “And then the other response is, ‘Oh, gross.'”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/26/us/death-human-compost.html" id="01012161-0be9-3580-a619-6830ca6e3eb2">The New York Times</a>.

Washington State Considers Human Composting

SEATTLE — Leslie Christian recently added unusual language to her living will: After death, she hoped her remains would be reduced to soil and spread around to help out some flowers, or a tree. In essence, compost.

A bill before the Washington state Legislature would make this state the first in the nation to explicitly allow human remains to be disposed of and reduced to soil through composting, or what the bill calls recomposition. The prospect has drawn no public opponents in the state capital as yet, but it is a concept that sometimes raises eyebrows.

“There’s almost a revulsion at times, when you talk about human composting,” said Brian Flowers, the managing funeral director at Moles Farewell Tributes, a company north of Seattle that supports the bill.

But death certificates in many states include a box that must be checked for burial or cremation, with no other options. Aboveground composting, through a mortuary process that requires no burial or burning of remains, is a new category without regulation about how it should be done or what can be done with the compost.

In Washington state, a larger percentage of residents are cremated than in any other state. Washington has more “green cemeteries,” which encourage a return to nature without manicured lawns and chemicals, than most states; only California and New York have more.

“It’s this interesting combination of environmental sensibility and individual choice,” David Sloane, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, said of the Northwest region and the prospect of legalized human composting.

Jamie Pedersen, a Democratic state senator from Seattle, is leading efforts to pass the legislation to permit a composting process after death. Democrats control both chambers of the Legislature, and Pedersen said he had enlisted support from Republicans as well. Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, has taken no position.

Though the process sounds simple, it would not be cheap. Preliminary estimates suggest that it could cost at least $5,000 — less, perhaps, than an elaborate burial service, but more than the most basic cremation.

Now, the Alaskan Way Viaduct is going away.

The viaduct, the last remaining 1.4-mile stretch of this city’s elevated highway through downtown, has been a sublimely ugly and stoutly utilitarian force of engineering since 1953. After years of planning for an alternative, the viaduct will be demolished and hauled away early next year.

Seattle has been made and remade in transformational moments — the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush, the 1962 World’s Fair, the explosive rise of Amazon — and the demise of the viaduct will open up an entirely new waterfront. Where there was hulking concrete, there will be a view of Puget Sound. Where there was a roar of traffic, there will be relative quiet.

“It will transform the city in ways people don’t even anticipate,” said Jenny A. Durkan, the mayor of Seattle. “When the viaduct is removed, there will be a collective gasp.”

In truth, the end of the viaduct is less a moment of change for the city than a recognition that it already has changed. Seattle’s gritty, freight-hauling waterfront of another era has long since moved to the city’s margins, leaving this downtown section with a growing number of tourists, apartments and cruise ships.

No one wanted to be anywhere near the working waterfront of the 1920s when planning for the viaduct, four stories above ground, began as a way to move cars quickly through the area. But this part of Seattle is now the focal point of growth in one of the nation’s fastest-growing big cities.

Once the viaduct is gone, there are plans for a 20-acre waterfront park, borrowing from New York’s High Line along the Hudson River, Chicago’s Millennium Park on Lake Michigan and the Harbor Promenade in Oslo. Seattle has never had a central park. The viaduct will be replaced with a tunnel under downtown for cars, as part of a $3.3 billion overhaul.

“The viaduct coming down gives us arguably our only opportunity to really create breathing room for the heart of the city again,” said Marshall Foster, the director of the city’s office of the waterfront and civic projects. “Fundamentally it’s about reclaiming that waterfront, where the city started, as the front porch.”

There were plenty of reasons to tear down the structure, including safety concerns revealed in 2001 after an earthquake. The new two-mile tunnel is expected to remove the street noise from vehicles and encourage the city’s growing public transit system.

Seattle has long been ambivalent about change and growth, especially its own, and so nostalgia for the viaduct is already flowing. A husband-and-wife team of composers who call themselves “The Argument” and record in their Seattle basement have even released a song about it.

“O, Viaduct, you’re outta luck, we put you up and we let you down,” the song goes. “They said you’d fall and kill us all, but you were tried and true.”

Tony de Lapp, 35, a car enthusiast who works in a salmon processing plant, has organized a memorial drive along the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and underneath it, past its 400 concrete columns.

“This was our road, our way of getting around,” de Lapp said.

Besides, he added, “I don’t like tunnels.”

Trevor Boone, who co-owns a guitar store a block from the viaduct in Seattle’s oldest neighborhood, Pioneer Square, wonders what the place will sound like when the roar of the traffic overhead — 90,000 vehicles a day — suddenly vanishes Jan. 11.

“When it’s silent, I might miss it a little bit — it’s like that friendly white noise,” said Boone, 29. “You hear it all the time, and it’s like a totally subliminal thing now.”

Some corners of the city, including the Pioneer Square neighborhood, have wrestled with rising crime and homelessness lately, and the prospect of more upheaval seemed daunting. A sparkling new waterfront would mean more change, but no one seemed certain how far the economic growth would spread and what it might mean for their block.

SEATTLE — Kurt Cobain performed in a grubby club underneath it. Drivers called it a road of kings, four wide open lanes far above the pedestrian horde. And generations of Seattle residents felt a shiver of romance in the moody shadows it cast over a waterfront already famous for gray skies and gloom.

Kirk Johnson

Articles written by the author

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