Letterbox

To the Editor:

Something‘s askew on Blanchard Mountain. There’s a celebratory tone among our politicians touting this “wonderful compromise” that has allegedly been reached between the disparate interests of the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), Skagit County, the timber industry and the environmental and recreational communities, which extend into Whatcom County.

One Whatcom County Council member is quoted (Feb. 7, Cascadia Weekly letter) as saying that this compromise of our public trust lands “represents hope for future collaborative efforts across the board.”

Hope for whom? Logging interests? New mill startups from out of state? The health and future of local school children?

What’s missing at this big collaboration party is any ability to deal with the cumulative adverse impacts such “compromises” have on our ability to achieve a sustainable ecology and economy in this geologically unique region of our Evergreen State — the Chuckanut Mountains — where the Cascades meet the sea.

No one at this party is questioning whether it is wise or feasible to exhaust a finite land supply in order to continue to allow the DNR to manage our public “trust” investments as if the value of our forests and watersheds is simply in their “harvestability” rather than the naturally functioning, diverse ecosystems and wildlife/recreation corridors which they are.

Logging two-thirds (2,800 acres) of Blanchard Mountain and leaving a small (1,600-acre) isolated crown of “thinned” trees will only fund one-tenth of 1 percent of the Burlington-Edison School district budget. Yet this “great compromise” agreement will slice essential chunks out of a healthy, functioning second-growth forest ecosystem and drastically reduce its recreational value for the more than 60,000 people who trek here annually to enjoy the unique hiking, hang gliding, wildlife viewing, and other substantial connections to nature, which this mountain provides.

A few visible “buffers” near the scenic highway won’t fool anyone who understands the underlying nature of what Blanchard Mountain and the Chuckanuts represent in this region and to the health of its people and all life around Puget Sound.

The recreation industry benefits and supports more people here than those industries which rely on the extraction, sale and export of our shared natural resources, yet its “management” is ignored in any long-term planning and economic development strategies. The same can be said of our air and water supplies, which can only sustain us healthfully if we prioritize their protection as direct consumers rather than as industrial users.

We would all be better off if we started placing our “trust,” our public investments and our taxpayer subsidies in industries that do not plunder our forests and mineral resources, destabilize our soils, pollute our air and water supplies, and destroy our most valued remaining evergreen corridors. There’s a wealth of responsible businesses out there just waiting for the opportunity to provide us with more sustainable job opportunities and investment alternatives, if we as a society shift our priorities toward those industries and provide the incentives needed for them to operate here profitably.

The time has come for the silent majority to stand up, take off the party hats, and demand our lawmakers stop pretending we can have our cake and eat it too.

To the Editor:

While we can all certainly applaud cooperative agreements that work in everyone’s best interest, I find it questionable that the Blanchard Strategies Group (BSG) agreement discussed in the March issue by Conservation NW staff members Lisa McShane and Rose Oliver falls into that category.

When I was notified by the DNR that an agreement had been reached in January, I contacted the representatives of several conservation organizations in Whatcom and Skagit County to see what it was all about. Surprisingly, I found almost no support for the agreement, and one Skagit County organization whose president had been quoted as supporting the agreement hadn’t actually seen it (I had to send it to them), and their board had never discussed it — not exactly a resounding endorsement.

The BSG agreement, in short, strikes a deal involving “ecological” management of a 1,600 acre core area in exchange for the parties involved pledging to support efforts to replace the lost timber harvest in a variety of ways — including purchase of adjoining properties, and increasing timber harvest on private land in Whatcom and Skagit counties. The agreement has a timeline of five years, after which its goals and their achievement will be reconsidered.

While I do feel that there are some good folks at the DNR who want to help preserve Blanchard Mountain, I list the following concerns:

•The agreed-to core area is much smaller than that which has been fought for over the past 20 years. Those who have fought so hard for this area in the past are nearly uniformly opposed to this agreement.

•The proposed core area is quite fragmented, and new roads will be allowed in areas that are currently road-free. Two areas of marbled murrelet habitat (both occupied and unoccupied) will become even more fragmented if this proposal is adopted.

•This proposal allows intensive management of some areas that I feel the DNR would not dream of currently going into. The fear is that those areas will be harvested well within the five-year timeline of the agreement, thus losing forever our ability to save them for the future.

•And, finally, the agreement refers to an advisory committee (the Blanchard Forest Advisory Committee) that will “assist the DNR by making recommendations for the management of Blanchard Forest.” The membership of this committee is entirely up to the DNR, and I need only look at the composition of the Lake Whatcom Landscape Plan Interjurisdictional Committee (IJC) to see what is likely to happen. In that case, the IJC is stacked with forestry interests and has become a compliant “rubber-stamp” for all proposed forest practices in the Lake Whatcom watershed.

If this agreement is adopted, those who have worked long and hard to preserve as much of the area as possible will obtain only partial protection of the 1,600 acre core area, and will forever relinquish protection of an additional 1,200 acres.

The DNR and trust beneficiaries give up nothing, as they must be compensated or the agreement will surely be nullified after the initial five-year period. Industrial foresters gain a promise of support for increased timber harvest on private and federal land. Is that supposed to be a good deal, or even a fair deal for us? It is difficult for me to see it that way.

It might look like a significant accomplishment to some folks, but, unfortunately, I do not believe the BSG agreement will be much more than a brief jitter in the battle to save Blanchard Mountain.

To the Editor:

Since I had something to do with the submission by Joshua Salwitz of the recent article about electronic voting machines (February and March issues), I felt I should respond to Marian Beddill’s extremely critical response.

I teach writing classes at Whatcom Community College and when students do a good job of researching and summarizing a topic I think Watch readers would enjoy, I encourage them to submit a copy to Whatcom Watch and then the editors decide if the topic is relevant. This was the case with the article about electronic voting machines.

Therefore, Mr. Salwitz did not write the original paper particularly for Whatcom County residents, and his intent was to outline the main controversies surrounding electronic voting machines. This is why he didn’t discuss our mail-in ballot system — an error of omission that seemed to bother Beddill greatly, but might be forgiven considering the original intent of the writing.

And while the discussion might have been “grossly simplified,” Salwitz did an admirable job within the space and time constraints of most readers (and his assignment) and admits in his conclusion that he has “briefly scratched the surface” of the issues. His goal of alerting Whatcom County residents about the general problems surrounding electronic voting machines was accomplished.

Marian Beddill’s additions as a sidebar and other corrections did add to the readers’ understanding, but I think the tone of her criticism was too strident to be constructive. It is one thing to make sure a subject in Whatcom Watch is covered accurately and another to nitpick an article. One thing I’ve learned from teaching for many years is that we need to applaud at least as much as we criticize, or few will take on the work writing requires.