The Walrus, The Carpenter, And Initiative 933

I've thanked God for fragrant flowers, hot showers and the womb-like embrace of my hot tub; for my life, my wife, and (after a brief nightly grace) for a long series of truly wonderful meals. Last Thursday night I thanked God for Häagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream. But on a more fundamental level, I've thanked God for the beautiful world in which we live.

"Be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it," God told Noah after the Flood. Genesis 9. And certainly for the entire history of the world (well, until now) it has been easy to think of the Earth as an unlimited space meant to nurture and to serve us. And we have gone forth and multiplied. We've multiplied to such an extent that the Earth is now full up with humankind.

But our emotions – and our myths – take a good long while to catch up with fact. After all, in his 1865 editorial Horace Greeley said "Go West, Young Man." In the 141 years since, Americans in our myths, our dreams, our movies, have pictured the West as the land of wide open spaces – John Wayne riding across the limitless prairie. And in our hearts and myths, that is the way it still is.

But the land of wide open spaces is gone. The United States' population grows by a net gain of one person every eleven seconds. Year by year, the quality of the environment gets worse. We all recognize these words from Lewis Carroll's "The Walrus and the Carpenter":

The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead—
There were no birds to fly…

This is a scene not of beauty, but of desolation. ("No birds were flying overhead; there were no birds to fly.") And as I look out on our Puget Sound waters day after day, we are edging closer to that scene.

Only ten percent of the seabirds survive on Puget Sound now, than did when I moved here in 1990. The ninety percent which are gone fed on herring and sand lance, the populations of which have also plummeted. Development in the Puget Sound area (along with other factors) has destroyed nursery habitat, and polluted the water so that many of the fingerlings which do hatch are deformed. It isn't just sea birds that feed on herring and sand lance; so do salmon. And while we saw shoals of salmon fifteen years ago, the populations now are only at ten percent of their historical numbers. Dead zones in the Sound are spreading. Hood Canal saw its biggest fish kill in history last month.

But what can we do about it? Something simple, and yet critical. Understand that if we want to live in an environment shared by herring and birds, salmon and whales, we can't just take what we want from the environment, wherever we want it, whenever we want it. It is easy for even the greediest of us to talk the talk of preservation:

"I weep for you," the Walrus said:
"I deeply sympathize."
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

"O Oysters," said the Carpenter,
"You had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?"
But answer came there none—
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.

The key is doing something about it, not talking about it. A genial, twinkly-eyed conservative friend of ours thinks that Orca whales will be extinct in 100 years because of development. And the Seattle Post-Intelligence on October 18 page B1, stated that three of the 90 orca whales that call Puget Sound home are missing, and that "experts believe [the] missing adult whales have died of starvation."

Our friend thinks extinction of the whales is unavoidable because of property rights – that nothing can be done to stop the inevitable development. We're headed in that direction: "A landmark study in 1992 titled "Pacific Salmon at the Crossroads: Stocks at Risk from CA, OR, ID and WA," identified 214 wild spawning salmon stocks that were at risk of extinction or of special concern, including 17 stocks that were already extinct." Since then, a variety of salmon stocks in Washington State have been listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. It all sounds very depressing, but my twinkly-eyed friend to the contrary, we can do something. We can start by voting against Initiative 933.

Initiative 933 puts government (the State, the Town, the County) to a choice: waive environmental protections, or else pay the property owner for not being able to develop as he wishes. We can't afford to waive good laws for bad development. And it isn't just a question of current law – with whales in Puget Sound apparently beginning to starve to death, we need more protection, not less.

Initiative 933 is called by its founders the "Property Fairness Initiative," but it might as easily have been named the "Hurt the Environment Initiative" or the "Kill the Whales Initiative." The environment needs our protection. And as the population of the State continues to increase, it is likely to need more protection, not less.

I know it is tempting to fight back against what appears to be increasing governmental power to regulate and even take private property. But I believe this initiative is horribly wrong.

Waiving environmental regulation (or making governments pay for it) might make sense, perhaps, in a limited way, if we had turned the corner on Puget Sound, if we had done all we needed to do, and the Sound was getting healthier each year. Turning back the clock on environmental enforcement is not the answer, when Puget Sound is in crisis.

Still thinking of voting for Initiative 933? Then consider the dramatic financial burden on the State, the Town and the County that will be imposed by Initiative 933 if it passes. Note from the Voter's Pamphlet the estimated cost over six years: $2 billion to $2.1 billion for State agencies; plus $3.8 billion to $5.3 billion for cities, plus $1.49 billion to $1.51 billion for counties. But consider this additional issue which isn't raised by the Voters Pamphlet. Initiative 933 states that anyone "seeking to enforce" the Act will be entitled to their attorneys fees. This appears to mean that even those with bogus grounds under the Act, who file suit but lose, would still be entitled to attorneys fees! This will do nothing but encourage litigation, and enrich attorneys at the cost of the County, its taxpayers, and the other County programs that will lose funding in order to pay the costs of Initiative 933.

Getting back to Noah and the Flood for a moment, after the Flood was over, Noah lowered the ramp of the ark for all the animals to leave. He said to the animals: "Go forth and multiply!" All the animals left except two snakes who lay quietly in the corner of the ark.

"Why don't you go forth and multiply?" demanded Noah. "We can't," answered the snakes. "We're adders."

If you're an "adder" too, start adding those billions up, and you'll see another reason to vote against I-933. That is what (according to the October 9th edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) all six of the living ex-governors of Washington State – including two Republicans – will be doing.

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