Speak Up For The Lake Whatcom Forest Preserve

The Reconveyance is still not a done deal.

There is some serious and well-focused push back to dissuade the County Council from going forward with the Reconveyance, an action that would lead to the establishment of an 8,700 acre Lake Whatcom Forest Preserve.

Check out the Whatcom Excavator to see the playbook of the Reconveyance opposition. (Advisory: There is a full plate of crazy at that link, so be sure and don all protective head gear and sanity protection before clicking.)

The County Council will be holding a hearing on the Reconveyance on Tuesday, September 11th, 2012.

Here is a list of reasons to support the Reconveyance.

Protecting the water quality of Lake Whatcom

Game attempts have been made to conclude that the Reconveyance doesn't have anything to do with protecting the water in Lake Whatcom. Water that is the source of drinking water for about 90,000 water customers in Whatcom County.

I call Bravo Sierra.

I attended a Council meeting where I heard Carl Weimer concede that the benefit that the Reconveyance would have in terms of water quality were being oversold and overstated.

The attempts to spin this concession into an argument that the Reconveyance somehow isn't about water quality at all are far from surprising. The opponents of the Reconveyance are desperate and are throwing every strand of spaghetti against the rhetorical wall, hoping some of those strands stick.

The problem with this point isn't that the water quality benefits from the Reconveyance are oversold... it's that the relatively modest benefits from the Reconveyance would also be the most substantial action that Whatcom County government has taken to restore the Lake Whatcom watershed in a long, long time.

This is not a circumstance where "do no harm" means "do no... thing". The Whatcom County Council is several hundred days late, and several millions of dollars short, in terms of doing anything about Lake Whatcom's phosphorus loading issue. It bears note here that the phosphorus loading issue with Lake Whatcom has been known since at least the Fall of 2008, when the TMDL Water Quality Study was released by the Department of Ecology.

The Reconveyance would be the first substantial preventative "do no harm" measure that the Whatcom County Council will have taken at all since that study was released four bloody years ago.

We need more park land in Whatcom County

One of the most baffling arguments against the Reconveyance, and the formation of the Lake Whatcom Forest Preserve, is that we have either enough park land... or too much park land.

Bravo to the entire Sierra.

This argument is particularly ironic because it is coming from the same people who are so staunchly pro-development and pro-growth.

If we are going to experience the growth necessary to accommodate any of the development hoped for by the Upzone With People advocates, then there has to be adequate infrastructure in place when that growth gets here.

Parks are an element of that infrastructure.

As a person who uses parks all over this County, I can tell you we do not have an excess or an abundance of park land. It is a rare treat when I can walk my dog more than 40 paces in any park in this County without having a close encounter with a squadron of joggers, a conga line of power walkers or... best of all... a convoy of mountain bikers flying past us at Warp Speed to get to what I am forced to assume is one of the countless emergencies that apparently flare up constantly around our park land... emergencies that can only be remedied by the presence of a critical mass of bicycle pants.

The population we have now in Whatcom County is, to put it mildly, fully exploiting the existing park infrastructure we have today. From Chuckanut to Peace Arch Park. Our park trails are crowded, and getting more crowded.

I take exception to the notion that the County should wait until our trails and parks become as congested as Guide Meridian before the County takes action to secure more open space.

The Lake Whatcom Forest Preserve will contribute to combating climate change.

Old Growth forest is now believed to have carbon sequestering benefits far in excess of managed and commercially harvested young forest land. Old Growth Forest is not possible in commercially forested land. By establishing the Lake Whatcom Forest Preserve, Whatcom County will be doing as much as, if not more than, any other County in this state... including King County... to address climate change.


And then, of course, there is...

Eco-tourism

I heard a citizen who opposed the Reconveyance, and the Forest Preserve, stand before the County Council and claim that commercial forest land has recreational value that is comparable to that of a park or forest preserve.

Bravo to the ecologically sustainable Sierra.

I am unaware of any burgeoning market for vacations planned around visiting a bunch of commercially forested land. There is, however, a well established market for vacations to visit protected open spaces. Particularly if it is a really good, big open space with lots of cool stuff living in it.

The Lake Whatcom Forest Preserve has the potential to have a park that compares favorably to most State Parks, in any state. It could be the 21st Century equivalent of Zion National Park.

Establishing a Forest Preserve in the Lake Whatcom Watershed will also deliver the added benefit of providing robust protection of existing habitat corridors which will serve to protect all manner of regional species, endangered and otherwise, in a manner that can't be duplicated by even the most responsibly harvested commercial forest land. This, too, carries the promise of economic benefits that attach to a robust eco-tourism industry.

The notion that you can only reap an economic benefit from land if you build something on it, or yank something out of it, is a 20th Century economic model. We are now living in a time when, due directly to development of resource lands, open space has been rendered in short enough supply to actually have viable economic value by leaving it be. The economics of benign neglect, if you will.

If you want more park land...

if you want to protect Lake Whatcom...

If you want one of the coolest, and best, parks in the Western Hemisphere to be in your back yard...

...then I urge you to apply pressure to the County Council on September 11, 2012 to support the Reconveyance and the Lake Whatcom Forest Preserve.