Eastsound Swale, our beloved wetland, is dying. The trees are drowning. We need the trees! They are our filters, our lungs.
The realtors, developers, planners, and county officials are probably relieved to have gotten away with the tree genocide and land grab glut, and have almost completed the destruction. How do they feel, selling the dream while in reality, trampling the land and its inhabitants, fouling our waters?
Spin doctors are spinning lies and fear tactics - tripe such as this> " you won't be able to have a garden or even dig a hole with the new CAO regulations." Lies are being propogated in epidemic fashion, a cancer polluting the minds of the gullible and uneducated. The liars are saying that Eastsound Swale is man made. Hogwash! Don't believe them. They're all about the money and profit. They'll do anything to sell us down the river including poison us all and cut all of our trees. After all, who can afford to live in Eastsound? Just us poor and middle class folk. We're in the way anyway. Eastsound Village Proper used to be a community - now it is a Business District. Nobody but a few people actually LIVE there.
The County and Planning Dept. have thrown Eastsound and its inhabitants (human and non human) under the bus. Our own Eastsound Planning and Review Committee (EPRC) has thrown us under the bus. What a selfish short-sighted lot are these few filthy rich and greedy spin doctors! Gangsters one and all. **
**a clarification: i'm not saying that EPRC or the County or CD&P are gangsters - or filthy rich and greedy. I am saying that there are a few who are, and they generate lies and spin, sometimes through a few individuals in well positioned places. What I'm also saying is that excessive wealth and greed are a bad combination which produce gangster mentality and control, since the bottom line is profit at all cost. What I do notice about the EPRC is that there is not even ONE conservationist or environmentalist on the EPRC - not for a long time. Those who have tried to join have either not been appointed, or have given up early when they realized what was going on within the EPRC. But I sort of digress.
Even the citizens of Orcas have thrown us under the bus. Any and all of them could have come to bat for the Critical Areas in Eastsound. Where are they when we need them? Do any of them put themselves in our shoes? Try to imagine how it'd feel if it were them in our predicament?
In the Growth Management Act, because Eastound was designated an "urban growth area," over 50% of the total population must live in Eastsound, by mandate. Our commissioners of the past sold us down the river and made us into an Urban Growth Area. Up all the way through 2011, we had a chance to get out of this - something our bureaucrats wanted us not to know - and we didn't. So we lost the chance for any flexibility in that.
Now there is a plan afoot to incorporate the Eastsound SubArea Plan (the one thing that supposedly protects Eastsound Swale, which the County continues to ignore anyway!) into the County Unified Development Codes. This effectively, once and for all, removes any power of protection from the citizenry. The most rapacious and greedy developers have the most holdings here in our UGA, and have built so many illegal and exploitative developments in the past 20+ years it's sickening.
Not ONCE did the County recognize or honor our SubArea Plan or the Conservancy Overlay District (16.55.250) when it really would have counted to protect the Swale, nor did they use the Conservancy Overlay District to safeguard trees in Eastsound Swale slated for demolition - wetland trees. Instead, they passed every single permit - legal or not!
The first offenders to radically change Eastsound Swale for the worse were the Outlook Inn owners. The Inn sits at the South end of the Swale creek. The inn expansion diverted the natural (NOT man made) creek, cut many trees to make parking lots and roads. Water was piped, diverted. What was built to supposedly handle their stormwater were two ugly scummy algae-covered, mosquito-infested eyesore "ponds." The "treated" stormwater then dumps into non-flushing Fishing Bay, likely poisoning it and any fish left in there. The airport destroyed the North end of the Swale (along with the Ditch). That took out a category 1 peat bog swamp; irreplaceable.
Even today, dirty deals are being made by the same few players; LLC's are trading land back and forth, probably to avoid taxes and capital gains taxes. Then they develop the hell out of them and nobody is watching or if they are, they're too confused by the shell game. All of these exploited lands WERE the Swale, ARE still the Swale, no matter how unrecognizable or degraded. Local wetland "delineations" - hired out by charlatans who can pay enough to have anyone to say what they want them to say - never take into account the whole big picture of connectivity and interconnected wetlands How can something be declared "part of Eastsound Swale" in a wetland report and at the same time be downgraded and considered "not a part?" You tell me! So... the Swale gets chopped into little bitty pieces, then downgraded to "low value" wetlands and razed, raped, gutted, drained, filled, graded, plugged.
The Planners and Council are planning a whopping 6 years out - as if that is "long range planning" - while certain realtors and permittors who have conflicts- of-interest while "serving" on the planning commission and EPRC, continue to "sell the dream" and serve the town folks the Nightmare - and allow decimation of what few trees are left in town. They murder our songbirds, bats, frogs, salamanders, etc and destroy all their habitat. How many ways can you say "corrupt?"
Meanwhile, Eastsound gets colder and even more intensely windy, because there are no windbreak trees left. More get cut every day it seems. Stormwater rushes into the Swale at an alarming rate. Roads cut across it, damming the seasonal creek the First Nations used to use as a navigable waterway, and choking off its flow.
Eastsound Swale used to be a dark, dank, creepy, wild, mysterious, thick wooded area; it was huge, and wide and thick, and choked with willows, crabapples, alders, and old fruit trees from earlier farming days in the 1800s. The Swale was full of songbirds, muskrats, bats, and amphibians galore, including salamanders and newts. It was an oozing, croaking, stinking, singing place. It was cool and sheltering in summer, warm and protecting in winter. The creek was full in winter and then dried up a bit in summer. It always flowed. The trees filtered the water and allowed it to meander, not gush or pond. Now it is all a dead flood zone with a few trees here and there, all of them drowning. Invasives and noxious weeds have been introduced by chopping trees and degrading the buffer edges over and over and over again.
Stormwater from all the hills surrounding our Critical Aquifer basin rushes down in eroding rivulets, and dumps into the Swale, which was never meant to hold it all. Roads cut across it like handcuffs, like straitjackets, damming (damning) seasonal creek into permanent dead zone pools. Natural wetlands are never meant to be "stormwater treatment facilities." Stormwater is killing our Swale. Tree cutting is killing our Swale. Development is killing our Swale. Enchanted Forest Road is killing our Swale. Short sighted greed, stupidity, and corruption are killing our Swale. Apathy is killing our Swale.
Who will speak up for it before it is too late? Who will help plant trees to reforest it? Does anyone care anymore enough to get up off their behinds and DO something? If so, please get in touch - Let's do something! Let's put our heads and hearts together and stop the exploitative carnage. I have some ideas; I'll bet you have some, too. I've been gathering information for a long time. Some of it can help us legally. We have standing. I've also gathered some information on reforestation and restoration of wetlands. If the county won't do something, then it's up to the citizenry to take matters into its own hands. We need citizen watchdogs. I have a whole outline in place for a citizen watchdog group. I can't do this alone. Please come forward and help the trees. Help the beings who can't speak for themselves. Please.
Sincerely,
the Lorax
Who Will Speak
Who will speak on behalf of trees
to stay saw’s bite, blade’s slash and sting?
Can the heart hold what the eye sees?
Home to eagles, quetzals, chickadees
chattering to down-fuzzed nestlings –
Who will speak on behalf of trees?
Gifts of plums and almonds, reddened leaves
melting into soil with winter’s wetting –
Can the heart hold what the eye sees?
Sheltering under lush green canopies –
do we thank the Amazon for rain it brings?
Who will speak on behalf of trees?
Frost-kissed leaf skeleton filagrees,
arboreal trilling, squawking, croaking, singing-
Can the heart hold what the eye sees?
Bare-boned stark windswept effigies,
spring blossomed crowns, bee- beckoning;
who will speak on behalf of trees?
Can the heart hold what the eye sees? 2011
