Think Globally, Ruin Lives Locally

From the last few posts, I hope readers are seeing how the Network conducts business. The Network follows a particular formula:

1. General, and often legitimate, global fears about the environment are played up to justify passage of restrictive land use laws on the local level. Sometimes hysteria about minuscule de minimis local issues (e.g., pyrethrins) is mixed in, using extremely questionable local data. The "solution" proposed is always a planning/land use restriction, not another kind of solution.
2. The advocated local planning laws fail to quantify site-specific contributions to the purported problem but nevertheless impose site-specific property restrictions that address alleged "environmental impacts."
3. The site-specific property restrictions trap innocent people in non-conforming and related convoluted circumstances, regardless whether there is any actual harm to the environment.
4. The Friends/Network legally intervene on individual cases to insist on enforcement of the law, relying on judicial policy and bullying tactics to crush people's lives even when there is no environmental impact.
5. Despite stopping activities with no impact, the Friends/Network take credit for fighting big issues (e.g., ecosystem health), and they parlay their work into more grants, more awards, more connections, more power and influence, and more participation in multiple areas of government. Their actual role in pointlessly crushing people's lives never gets any air time. They never stop fighting for more restrictions and "protections."
6. Anyone who objects to the Friends/Network's tactics is subject to cruel retaliation and backlash for being some sort of anti-environmental demon.

Needless to say, our system is broken. It is environmentally pointless, and toxic for our community. It often prevents good environmental outcomes. The CAOs, for example, effectively ban permaculture and probably make everyone practicing permaculture here an outlaw.

You can see which candidates are part of the Network. All you have to do is look at their donor lists. Look at their campaign committees and their endorsements. All you have to do is listen to their statements. All you have to do is observe which of their supporters talk about "the world around us" issues like global warming or emphasize connections to Olympia and elsewhere. Whether they cop to it or not, those candidates are participants in a system that advocates "thinking globally and ruining lives locally."

We referred to the Network in earlier posts as "Iceberg Government." We could just as easily think of it in other terms. Did we just see a fin above the water? Was that? ... no ... I must be seeing things. Let me just sit beside this rock and gather my wits.
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Most of the Network and its self-serving motives are hidden, but who you choose for elected office may determine whether we get finished off.

Just one little push -- just one more election.