Habitat restoration, unlimited ducks and flood-damaged homeowners.
"David" in Grays Bay (Wahkiakum County), standing knee-deep in water, confronts a Governmental and Environmentalist Goliath. The slingshot is aimed at accountability.
In this corner: Wahkiakum County residents in and around Grays Bay in South West Washington State. In the opposing corner:
Columbia Land Trust We may not be involved in issues around gridlock, stadiums and basketball arena funding but we're still Washington residents. We still have representatives in Olympia and we still have our battles that should not go un-noticed. This morning, I sent the following letter to my State Senator, Mark Doumit, requesting a legislator's take on the collision between generations of residents and what they perceive as government and private environmental do-gooders with more regard for fish and fowl than people.
Good morning Senator, Columbia Land Trust is a private, non-profit organization founded in 1990. We're dedicated to conserving signature landscapes and vital habitat together with the communities of the Columbia River region. Questions, comments, or concerns may be directed to info@columbialandtrust.org Ian Sinks, Stewardship Director at CLT had the following to say about Grays Bay in the groups Fall, 2005, edition of the groups TRUST TALK publication:
Located within the Columbia River estuary, Grays Bay and the tidal portions of its tributaries provide habitat critical to all salmonids of the Columbia River. Adult fish migrate through the area, but perhaps more importantly, the juveniles travel these waters on their way to the ocean. Along the way they need to avoid predators, eat, grow and adapt to a radically different saltwater environment.
CLT's list of Project Partners include: My googling this morning led me to several sites around the country proclaiming how local residents in affected areas seemed to be pre-disposed to habitat restoration regardless of its personal impact on their lives and property. Perhaps so, but normally when such touting does not include contrary viewpoints, I tend to believe I'm reading nothing more than PR. My own pre-disposition is ... oh heck, I'm not sure. Nobody wants to see views of nature that look like a hill or a stream was run over by a corporate steamroller. Even in logging country, there is acknowledgement that denuded mountainsides are certainly not where we see the Northwest at its most sublime natural beauty. The river and habitat problems seem very much to be a consequence of genuine ignorance 50-100 years ago with no real way to forecast future impacts on human activities taken individually and spontaneously according to who lived where and who needed what. One could take a more caustic attitude about indiscriminate corporate exploitation of the land and resources going back to a time when nobody really cared and very few were talking about it. My sister in Utah calls my wife and me "tree-hugging, mocha-snarfing Northwest hippies " and that because of how we have approached living here, especially after we moved to Pacific County. And despite having established to my own satisfaction my environmentalist leanings, I still have to declare that my own pre-disposition is probably on the side of the landowners. That because they themselves are as much victims of human and corporate ignorance as are wildlife. Habitat restoration certainly is not about redressing the abuse of wildlife specimens at the expense of human welfare - particularly in small rural communities. For that reason, organizations like Columbia Land Trust owe locals and the rest of us accountability big time when they take ecological actions that are on a scale with logging off forests and damming up rivers and streams. When those actions generate consequences to local residents who do not have environmentmal retribution coming to them for someone else's foolishness, the environmental actors must be accountable to those local residents if they themselves don't get it right and make things equally bad or worse. I also have to raise a question as to what constitutes the highest good of all concerned when literally thousands of residents are impacted by a priority of avoidance of species extinction that appears to have no limit to its extent whatsoever. Though I might not agree with one resident the other night who said that "if it comes down to humans or salmon, to hell with the salmon," I still wonder how far we go and how many oxes we gore before we're sufficiently guilt free from having sacrificed out of our human resource to make it all fair? When will enough be enough?
Habitat restoration, unlimited ducks and flood-damaged homeowners. | 2 comments (2 topical)
Habitat restoration, unlimited ducks and flood-damaged homeowners. | 2 comments (2 topical)
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