Kyle Loring
Friends of the San Juans
Kyle Loring, Sandy Wyllie-Echeverria
117
Abstract:
Compensatory mitigation is often economically, socially, and politically more attractive than
protecting shoreline resources upfront and can, therefore, receive a disproportionate amount of
the effort focused on the health of important marine resources. The immediately visible economic
benefits of compensation outweigh those for protection, which are often more attenuated. For
example, approval of shoreline development likely to cause impacts will create jobs for both the
initial construction of the project and its subsequent mitigation. Socially, there is the pressure to
allow newcomers the opportunity to develop just as earlier landowners had. Applicants state that
it would be inequitable to prevent them the same opportunity as that enjoyed by similarly situated
precursors, and the use of mitigation to compensate for new impacts offers the appearance of
responding to those concerns while at the same time permitting impacts. Lastly, the political
climate strongly encourages selection of compensation over protection. Regulators may find it difficult to deny an application submitted by a “client,” when the natural resource clients themselves (i.e., the resource impacted) have no voice. In addition, decades of permitting inertia and a permissive system may lead regulators to believe that they do not have the authority to deny an application, regardless of its potential impact on public resources. Thus, compensatory mitigation offers the ostensible misconception that we can have our cake and eat it too. Given the seductive call of compensation, how do we implement real resource protection in Washington, and throughout the Salish Sea?
Is this real? An abstract for an academic article in a peer reviewed journal? The expression "Having one's cake and eating it to" is more rhetorical than objectively descriptive of anything which raises some questions of just where the authors are going on this.
ReplyDeleteI think Kyle wants to let the Wetlands and Shorelines file suits against their owners.
ReplyDelete"How say you Madame Foreman?"
"Your Honor, in the matter of Gaia vs Smith, the jury finds on favor of the plaintiff"
So let me get this straight. If I am driving along a road minding my own business and a huge boulder comes crashing down from the cliffs above and kills me, my family can bring legal action for compensation against the boulder?
ReplyDeleteMore and more I'am beginning to believe we have multiple alternate Universes we are living in and just share the same space and time continuum.
Mister!", he said with a sawdusty sneeze,
ReplyDelete"I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees.
I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues,
And I'm asking you, sir, at the top of my lungs" –
He was very upset as he shouted and puffed –
"What's that THING you've made out of my Truffula tuft?"
Looks like Mr. Loring skipped the day when the Constitutional Law Professor taught the Fifth Amendment. Hhhmm. "The Fifth Amendment's guarantee 'that private property shall not be taken for a public use without just compensation was designed to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole." Armstrong v. United States, 364 U.S. 40, 49 (1960). "The political ethics reflected in the Fifth Amendment reject confiscation as a measure of justice." United States v. Cors, 337 U.S. 325, 332 (1949).
ReplyDeleteNo wonder we're having trouble. This is who the "Friends" pay to give the County "free" legal advice? You get what you pay for.
ReplyDeleteGive me a break--the Friends are ALWAYS "speaking" for the trees. They intervene in many permits, opposing any kind of development, most often docks. At this point, the question is, who speaks for the individual homeowner if he's not a wealthy guy. The wealthy GET their permits eventually; they can afford lawyers and "qualified" professionals.
ReplyDeleteGive me a break--the Friends are ALWAYS "speaking" for the trees. They intervene in many permits, opposing any kind of development, most often docks. At this point, the question is, who speaks for the individual homeowner if he's not a wealthy guy. The wealthy GET their permits eventually; they can afford lawyers and "qualified" professionals.
ReplyDeleteGive me a break--the Friends are ALWAYS "speaking" for the trees. They intervene in many permits, opposing any kind of development, most often docks. At this point, the question is, who speaks for the individual homeowner if he's not a wealthy guy. The wealthy GET their permits eventually; they can afford lawyers and "qualified" professionals.
ReplyDelete