Washblog

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
Ducks Unlimited
Columbia River Estuary Study Taskforce (CREST)
Lower Columbia River Estuary Partnership
Bonneville Power Administration
US Fish and Wildlife Service
National Fish and Wildlife Foundation
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Pacific Northwest National Laboratories
Charlotte Y. Martin Foundation
USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service
(Wetland Reserve Program)
The Nature Conservancy of Washington
Environmental Protection Agency
Wildlife Forever Fund

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,

By invitation, last Tuesday I attended a stake holder's meeting in Rosburg where local residents met with officials from the Columbia Land Trust (CLT) as well as other government specialists and academics.

The invitation was extended to me after I had apparently gained some word-of-mouth notoriety because of letters to editors and guest articles published in Pacific and Grays Harbor county newspapers. I'm also a front page contributor to the statewide Washblog, /.

After last Tuesday's meeting, I found myself sufficiently intrigued and aroused by the issues as to want to write something other than an editorial rant or letter to the editor. Rather, I'm going to begin a series this week in Washblog as well as submitting the same writings to local and larger newspapers statewide as guest articles.

I'm going to begin this week with a kind of general summary of last week's meeting which had mostly to do with CLT sending folks to talk to property owners angered and frustrated. Their assertion is that they've suffered flood damage as a result of poorly planned breaching of dikes and replacement of tide gates with much larger unrestricted culverts, acts that themselves are contrary to the idea of restoring the river's natural flow pattern.

One of the documents given me that night is a letter to you from Jeff Koenigs, the director the WDFW. The letter is dated 6/1/2000 and contains the following statements:

" ... let me say that the Department understands the tragedy for the people affected by the dike breaching. No one likes to see people lose their homes. However, as you know, the Grays River is also home to several species of salmon. "

" ...  allowing the river to restore itself naturally will affect landowners within the flood plain. The Department is pursing the means to purchase these properties from willing sellers and create a habitat reserve. Informal contacts with several local residents and officials have resulted in mixed reactions, but the general consenses (sp) seems positive."

This is obviously something more than just property owners as victims of state and national environmental policies and it does raise questions about what in truth is the highest good of all concerned.

One the one hand there is anger, frustration and sense of loss on the part of residents, some of whom come from generations going back to the earliest days of community here. On the other, are those governmental, quasi-governmental and private entities that have been given or have voluntarily taken on the tasking of land conservancy, habitat restoration and protection of endangered animal species.

The echoes of the earlier controversies over spotted owls and old-growth forests where the end of economic livelihoods were at stake and were actually lost seem surpassed currently by dangers to small shoreline communities whose actual homes fall in jeopardy to the same formal environmental priorities.

The Grays Bay community's complaints against the Columbia Land Trust base themselves on what is perceived as poorly-planned and plotted actions taken by CLT whose eye was single to a solitary priority at the expense of all others. The sequence of events as acknowledged by representatives of Columbia Land Trust seemed at times to confirm this image of hastiness, jumping on their specific priorities as soon as possible without due attention to probable outcomes when unusual variations to cyclical river flows happen.

The counter arguments of the CLT  - and to a lesser extent the academics and government experts - seemed to involve the idea that such variations and fluctuations in annual water flows are sufficiently unpredictable so as to leave fault and blame outside discernible culpability.

I was impressed with CLT's Ian Sinks' repeated assurances that if it were established that CLT actions were the direct cause of subsequent flood damage, that CLT would address some form of formal redress. However, there were sufficient disclaimers involved in the discussion at that moment as well as subsequent remarks later to give the impression that locals would play hell trying to find CLT at fault in terms of technical/physical proof.

Senator Doumit, this week I'm only publishing a preliminary article based on my own initial perceptions. This morning, using my limited technical Internet skill, I started googling and found myself soon with some 50 or more links related to this issue so I'll have some homework in the weeks to come.

Not wanting to take up much of your time, I'd like simply to get your take or a clarification on the events and official thinking that generated the 06/01/06 letter to you from Dr. Koenings of WDFW. His attitude appeared to be that fish and fowl were of sufficiently higher priority than citizens that an "Oh well!" approach to landowner loss was prevalent.

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.

    Today, after one and a half centuries of agrarian development, Grays Bay is different. Jetties block ocean waves from rolling into the river and saltwater is now a rare occurrence in the bay. Floodplains are disconnected and backwater channels cut off. The amount of sediment moving through the river system has changed; mostly making the river shallower and less predictable. Many of the trees along the hillsides were cut and there are fewer logs enriching the shoreline. And of course, the fish populations are a fraction of what they once were.

    Five years ago Columbia Land Trust began to permanently protect the best remnants of spruce swamp, floodplain, and marsh habitat in and around the bay. The Land Trust also set out with project partners to identify areas where natural processes could be restored allowing the historic habitats to once again return as functional parts of the landscape.

    There are many reasons to do this. Local communities plagued by flooding within the watershed are assisted by additional floodwater storage. Bald eagle nests and potential nesting habitat for marbled murrelet, both federally listed avian species, are permanently protected. The last remnants of relatively untouched spruce swamp and intertidal habitat, and indeed trees that stood sentinel at the passing of the Corps of Discovery, is protected as valued wildlife habitat and a historical reminder of what once was. And perhaps most importantly from a conservation standpoint critical juvenile rearing habitat is saved and restored to benefit all of the species within the Columbia River.

    On the eve of the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark journey, the Land Trust is on the verge of completing a significant phase of this conservation work: 840 acres of land has been purchased, an additional 120 acres of remnant spruce swamp has been protected by The Nature Conservancy and is being transferred to Land Trust ownership, and 544 acres of previously diked land has been re-opened to allow the floodplain to once again interact with the river.

    The work is by no means done. In many respects it has just begun. The Land Trust is committed to being active stewards of the conservation properties, to being good neighbors within the local community, and to monitoring the effectiveness of our efforts in achieving conservation goals. We are monitoring to determine how these restored habitats develop from pasture to intertidal wetland, and how these areas function to benefit salmonids. We are seeking to answer questions such as: Are the fish accessing intertidal areas for feeding, and if so what are they eating? What species of salmonid use restored habitat types? How many are present and when? And what benefits are the fish gaining by being in these areas? We also want to understand how these restored habitats may affect the sediment dynamics of the river and to what extent there is a decline of flooding within the lower watershed.

    In addition to scientific monitoring the Land Trust is working with the community to address local concerns, working to control and eradicate invasive species, manage use of properties for public recreation and perform regular maintenance required of all property owners.

CLT's list of Project Partners include:
Ducks Unlimited
Columbia River Estuary Study Taskforce (CREST)
Lower Columbia River Estuary Partnership
Bonneville Power Administration
US Fish and Wildlife Service
National Fish and Wildlife Foundation
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Pacific Northwest National Laboratories
Charlotte Y. Martin Foundation
USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service
(Wetland Reserve Program)
The Nature Conservancy of Washington
Environmental Protection Agency
Wildlife Forever Fund

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?

< Interview with Ed Crawford, Candidate for 47th LD Senate | Renewable Energy's Promise >
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My sister in Utah calls my wife and me  "tree-hugging, mocha-snarfing Northwest hippies " . . . .

And this comes from someone living in the same State as a bunch of jello-loving, meadows-massacreing, theology-fabricating, bush-worshipping, women-suppressing redneck fools.  Which, I am certain, doesn't describe her.

by bhelverson on Sat Mar 25, 2006 at 02:11:20 PM PST

* 1 none 0 *


  • Naw ....... by Arthur Ruger, 03/25/2006 10:13:48 PM PST (none / 0)
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