Pure Imagination: No More Good News Forever

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce ended one of the most brilliant armed struggles in history by promising, "From where the sun now stands, I shall fight no more forever." Sadly, the environmental-ish movement seems to carry on its phony struggle according to the pledge, "No more good news forever."

Right now, we are at the tail end of one of the largest salmon runs we've ever seen. The pre-season Fraser River estimate for pinks was about 8 million fish. The in-season estimate was raised several times and now stands at more than 26 million. Sources say that experts believe the actual number may be closer to 35 million, but officials are reluctant to publicly announce such a huge figure. When you combine the Fraser runs with the 6+ million pre-season estimate for other regional rivers, it's not unreasonable to believe the total return to our waters might amount to more than 40 million pink salmon alone. At an average weight of 4 lbs, that's in excess of 160 million pounds of salmon biomass. By any standard, that's a lot.

And yet, where are the good news stories about this fabulous return? Where are all the people who profess to love nature and salmon habitat? Our County has spent $12 million on salmon habitat over the past decade. Why is no one crowing about the wonderful year we're having?

The good news doesn't end there. Compared to 1972, there are 10 times as many seals in the Puget Sound region now. Even the population of Stellar Sea Lions in our vicinity (the Eastern population) has been steadily increasing. 

There is even some good news about our climate, which is the third-rail of any eco discussion. We seem to have been in an undeniable "pause" in global warming since about 1997, and overall climate warming seems to have proceeded much more slowly than most projections. Also, while the Arctic ice cap is shrinking, the Antarctic ice cap has been steadily growing, and winters in the southern hemisphere have been brutally cold (if you consider that good news). Nevertheless, bad climate news is in demand and some scientists maintain that Antarctica, at least the Peninsula, is really warming ... so that's why Antarctica as a whole is cooling ... or some such nonsense. One paper along those lines received attention for its controversial use of reconstructed past temperatures to declare that, despite the growing ice cap, Antarctica was unambiguously warmer than the reconstructed (i.e., imaginary?) past data. Guess where that paper originated from? ... from our own University of Washington (Eric Steig).

Eric Steig is part of the University of Washington's new College of the Environment, which is chock full to the gills with the usual bad-news insiders. That's where David Dicks, formerly of the Puget Sound Partnership, has his latest sinecure as Director of Strategic Partnerships and Civic Engagement. Through its Advisory Board, which includes Martha Kongsgaard and Bill Ruckelshaus of "Trouble Brewing in the San Juans," the UW College of the Environment also has ties to the Bullitt Foundation. The Bullitt Foundation recently hosted a Seattle Times training session for the press about climate change. Here's how one attendee described that training session:

Journalists don’t normally sit in meetings and plot ways to tell only one side of the story; they simply write from their own personal perspective ... There are, however, exceptions to this rule as I discovered last week when I attended a two-day “Climate Change for Journalists” workshop hosted by the Seattle Times. Held at the Bullitt Center, which bills itself as the “world’s greenest building,” and conducted by the University of Rhode Island’s Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, the event was precisely what we’re told never happens: a conscious, deliberate effort to coach reporters on the finer points of deceiving their readers ...

Good news? We can't have any of that! Let's train the press to report only eco-doom, despite the billions we spend on environmental protection every year ... because that's the 100% environmental-ish world of pure imagination. Doom is music to environmental-ish ears, and they don't want anyone singing a different tune.

 Governor Jay Inslee, right, laughs with Bullitt Foundation board member Harriet Bullitt, left, on her way to the podium at the grand opening of the Bullitt Center on Earth Day Monday, April 22, 2013, on Capitol Hill in Seattle. This six-story, 50,000 square-foot structure is the greenest commercial building in the world and aims to improve long-term environmental performance and efficiency through cutting-edge sustainable technology. (Jordan Stead, seattlepi.com)

  

Pure Imagination: 100% Environmental-ish

Today we start another Trojan Heron series called "Pure Imagination" about the environmental-ish ideas we confront daily in the San Juans. The series title comes from a famous song in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and one of the stanzas could be the motto for the Friends and their friends.

We'll begin

With a spin

Traveling in

The world of my creation

What we'll see

Will defy

Explanation

Books like Fast Food Nation exposed the dark side of the All-American Meal, and there is a dark side to environmental-ish ideas too ... and oddly the two dark sides are linked. Like McDonalds, environmental-ish organizations spew images of wholesome goodness ... but there is an underlying profit motive distorting the truth. The truth about environmental-ish organizations is that their "wilderness loving" policies and actions actually promote urbanism ... by being against rural living. They even support and promote factory farming ... by demanding Conditional Use Permits (CUPs) for new family farming and suing to shut down family-run aquaculture.

If the environmental-ish proponents of the Growth Management Act (GMA) were to get their way, there would be über-planned cities and nothing else. The illogical conclusion would be that we'd all have to live in one crammed city bounded by uninhabited nature. There would be no country lanes ... no farm cottages ... no one-lane bridges ... no bucolic pastures. To feed people in the über city on the smallest possible land footprint, we would need planned factory farms, too ... there'd be no free-range chickens in that world.

At the density of Seattle, the entire population of Washington State would fit into Mason County ... with 50 square miles to spare. At the population density of Friday Harbor, the entire population of San Juan County would fit onto just two-thirds of Lopez. Do we really have a population and development problem, or do we have environmental-ish profit motives at work trying to separate people from nature and the land?

Watch the following entertaining video by (believe it or not) Chipotle, the Mexican natural (fast) food company. The images you'll see about mass produced food also apply to our centrally-planned, mass-produced environmentalism.  We're not getting real environmentalism anymore ... we're getting "environmental-ish" ideas that people (especially city people) consume without thinking.  And Crow Foods might as well be Friends Incorporated because both are only interested in money and image ... most certainly they are not interested in you, local food, rural character, or the environment.

These days, as with food, we have to ask ourselves, where does our "environmentalism" come from? We'll try to provide some answers in this series.

At the population density of Seattle, our State's entire population could fit into Mason County with room to spare.

Depiction of mass produced community ...  or what  "growth management" looks like in its ultimate stages (from Behind the Green Mask)

Shooting Elephants

Even more than fossil fuel use, it is our misguided land use policies that are causing changes in atmospheric carbon.  More importantly, our land use policies are causing hunger, poverty, violence, social breakdown, and war ... or so says Allan Savory in the TED talk below.

Our CAOs assume that everything that Man does is destructive to the environment. The recent Growth Management Hearings Board (GMHB) ruling even says that our buffers have to be protected from agriculture. The GMHB ruling will require that our buffers be larger, and our buffers have to be no-go, no-touch zones.

It kind of makes you feel like an elephant, and for that explanation, listen to the video below. At one time, Allan Savory's "best available science" led him to recommend and implement the needless slaughter of 40,000 elephants ... 40,000 ... almost three times as many elephants as there are people in San Juan County.

This earnest biologist thought he was saving the ecosystem. Instead, he was killing it.





Press release from the Common Sense Alliance regarding the GMHB ruling -

Dear San Juan County Neighbors and Friends,

Three days of hearings in Friday Harbor before the Growth Management Hearings Board (“Hearings Board”) on the San Juan County’s Critical Areas Ordinance (“CAO”) culminated in a decision received by the parties on Monday, September 9, 2013. The determination remanded the CAO back to the County for changes consistent with Order of the Hearings Board that is found at the end of the 109 page document. The decision addressed only some of the issues raised by the 5 petitioners in the case, the Friends of the San Juans, the San Juan Builders Association, William H. Wright, P.J. Tagarres Company and Common Sense Alliance.

A core position that the Common Sense Alliance (“CSA”) took at the hearing is that an essential underpinning of the CAO, the proper designation of critical areas, has not been done by San Juan County. The Hearings Board dodged this issue by effectively saying that determining the legality of the County’s CAO is beyond its authority. By ducking the “legality” question the Hearings Board did not deal with the fundamental issue of whether the Ordinance, due to faulty construction, unlawfully interferes with the use of private property.

It is CSA’s contention that this flawed and incomplete decision leaves San Juan County with an unenforceable ordinance and the specter of an unknown number of future lawsuits brought by individuals who are denied the use their property. An unenforceable ordinance protects nothing and furthers the uncertainty in the real estate market that has been plaguing our County for so long.

CSA’s goal is an enforceable ordinance that complies with all aspects of the Growth Management Act, which is practical, reliable and good for our community, does not harm our fragile economy and makes a positive difference to our environment. CSA will be consulting with the public and weighing its alternatives for future action.