Welcome to Footprint Volume 2

Footprint: A Pacific Northwest Extra

If you're just joining us, welcome to Footprint, The Seattle Times' quarterly magazine about the environment. If we met when we debuted in April, nice to see you again.

We'd asked for feedback on our first issue and whatever else environmental was on readers' minds. Thanks for getting back to us, and — one hesitates to sound immodest, but — thanks for the many compliments. Just as we thought, you have lots of ideas about the endeavor of doing better by the planet.

Here in Ecotopia the mixing-it-up over how to do that just keeps on — whether we're debating banning plastic bags or plastic water bottles, embracing trolleys or toll roads, requiring green jobs or Clean Green.

Northwesterners are always on the prowl for new ideas, and in this summer issue we do the same — taking a look at the power of creative thinking to face the global-warming fix we're in.

On a smaller scale of treading lightly, we also pay a visit to a Magnolia garden as virtuous as it is beautiful, try outstanding organic regional wines and learn the best place to wipe our hands. Who said sustainable can't be fun?

Please keep the conversation going; add your comments at: www.seattletimes.com/pacificnw

— The editors

STAFF

Pacific Northwest magazine editor:

Kathy Andrisevic

Footprint editor:

Carey Quan Gelernter

footprint@seattletimes.com

Art director:

Carol Nakagawa

Photographers:

Benjamin Benschneider, Alan Berner, Jacqueline Koch, Steve Ringman, Barry Wong

Writers:

Valerie Easton, Colleen McBrinn, Braiden Rex-Johnson, Mary Rothschild, John. B. Saul, Eric Sorensen, Tom Watson

Artists:

Gabi Campanario, Susan Jouflas

Desk editor:

Marilyn Bailey

Online producer:

Matt Ironside

The magazine version of Footprint contains 100 percent certified wood fiber from sustainably managed forests and is produced at Catalyst's Elk Falls mill in accordance with PricewaterhouseCoopers' independent chain of custody-certification standard (certificate #C2005-204A).