Twenty Years Ago

To celebrate 20 years of publishing Whatcom Watch, we will be publishing excerpts from 20 years ago. David Laws has been generous enough to volunteer to review the Whatcom Watch from 20 years ago to find suitable material to reprint. The below excerpts are from the April 1993 issue of Whatcom Watch.

by Bob Keller

“If you want to understand any ‘social problem,’ track the money flow.” – Rush Limbaugh

Most of us go about our environmental causes willy-nilly, carving time out of work days and weekends, and acting (sometimes) when the spirit moves us. It’s reassuring to believe that local development and environmental changes happen in the same casual way. They don’t.

The idea that growth just happens or is “inevitable,” whether anyone wants it or not, is an illusion. Whereas most environmental advocates are volunteers, many of the movers for rapid change are well-paid public officials or private entrepreneurs. Even the Whatcom County Land Trust, one of the most effective protective organizations, has only one part-time employee whom it pays a pittance. Compare the Land Trust, or neighborhood associations, with the army of realtors, contractors, tourism promoters, port officials, Chamber of Commerce staff, the city’s economic development office, and the Fourth Corner advocates, throwing in The [Bellingham] Herald for good measure, and the point becomes clear: Growth does not happen randomly. Someone has been busy promoting development.

Most of us, most of the time, do not know what these promoters are up to, and we learn about their new projects too late, reinforcing our sense that such things “just happen.”

Item: Port of Bellingham announces “out of the blue” that we will be blessed with local jet passenger service.

Item: The mall was promoted as a service to local consumers, but in Tacoma and Olympia you can watch television ads urging viewers to visit Bellis Fair.

Item: When announcing the capture of the Alaska Ferry, port and city officials said they had no desire to develop a cruise terminal in Fairhaven.

More recently, Tim Douglas and Shirley Van Zanten, on our behalf, have invited 160 business/industrial firms to relocate in Whatcom County. Why?

[…]

Growth evangelism in the face of overcrowded jails, understaffed police departments, water shortages, solid wastes, sewage outflow, and more traffic congestion has been justified as creating a tax base to provide better public services. More tax revenues, no doubt, but is there any evidence that social service ever catch up with, much less surpass, the larger social problems created by rapid growth? A visit to places such as Tucson, Arizona, that double their population every generation will answer that question. Strange enough, the new people flowing into Whatcom, Skagit, and San Juan counties are often fleeing from such fast growth places. They’ve been invited promised, cajoled, openly and privately. Eagerly coming by the thousands to a better place, they quickly transform it into what they left behind.

All of this can be understood by following Limbaugh’s advice: find out who stands to profit.

Finger in the Dike

by Sherilyn Wells

What Price the Status Quo?

If our society has a fatal flaw, it might be (1) our apparent aversion to proactive action. A corollary might be (2) our apparent insistence upon endlessly repeating the mistakes of others rather than learning by example.

(1) When little Riley Detwiler died from E. coli, it forced us to look at the problems involving the meat supply in this country. But those observations did not reveal “new” information: for years I had read industry exposés by people who were trying to alert the public, to prevent such a tragedy from happening. It is the saddest of commentaries on our shortsightedness that it took deaths, particularly those of children, to motivate us to care and to act.

When Dr. Fred Millar recently spoke in Bellingham on the dangers of chemical leaks, of clouds of poisonous gases drifting over schools, homes, and businesses, he wasn’t referring to potential events. He projected image after image of newspaper reports on such incidents, some of them merely close calls, many of them deadly. We have yet to decide on a course of action which will prevent a similar chemical leak in Bellingham, not merely institute triage “after the fact.”

Next to Air, What We Need Most:

Pure water is increasingly less and less abundant in Whatcom County, due to our casual stewardship of this resource. I have been involved in an issue for two-and-a-half years now that is a continuing reminder of that casual attitude and yet has the potential to be a major crisis. We have had “red flags” (such as chemically-induced fish-kills) that should be alerting us to the threats to water quality, but it is simply too easy to be complacent about Lake Whatcom.

The drinking water reservoir for half of Whatcom County is an accident waiting to happen. We face a number of real and potential threats to water quality around the lake and its major tributaries:

• rapid urbanization (county density can easily quadruple) which results in untreated urban/poison runoff entering the lake and its streams:

• a leaching municipal dump with no ongoing monitoring;

• Unrestricted transportation of hazardous materials;

• intensive forest practices, with erosion and pesticide use impacts;

• a pesticide spraying service which inadvertently sterilized a stream in the late 1970s;

• a junkyard (leaking car batteries?) crossed by a perennial stream;

• fueling facilities;

• swimming, motor-boating, and hydroplane landings;

• a chemically-maintained golf course.

It would be wise to remember, too, that we are in a significant earthquake zone, and fuel tanks within the watershed might be subject to rupture during such an event (one gallon of fuel can pollute one million gallons of water).

[…]

What have we been told could never happen around Lake Whatcom? How long will it be, and at what price, before the official assurances are proved wrong? Without a catastrophic event … problems are more likely to surface as chronic health effects of ones that take years to develop, like cancer. Are a certain number of potential future victims considered expendable or cost-ineffective to protect?

Ogre Under the Bridge?

by Jan Adams

On March 18, staff from the Port of Bellingham held a “technical meeting” with city parks staff and others, to review plans for a public area near Little Squalicum Creek.

[…]

The port is having difficulty developing a plan capable of creating a true wetland on this site … it seems obvious that the port will not be able to create a quality wetland on the proposed site …. Nurturing a finicky biological reconstruction project, especially a non-marine one, does not fall within their accustomed functions.

[...]

The port should stop playing the ogre under the bridge; it should stop holding Little Squalicum Beach hostage and using access to it as a bargaining tool. This behavior is clearly contrary to the public interest.