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Jeanie Orr
From: Jeanie Orr
Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 20094:52 PM
To: Michelle McConnell
Cc: AI Scalf; Stacie Hoskins; Jeanie Orr
Subject: FW: letter from Tom Jay for comment
From: Sara Mall Johani [mailto:housojay@olympus.net]
Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 20092:50 PM
To: #Long-Range Planning
Subject: letter from Tom Jay for comment
June 13, 2009
COMMENT for Shoreline issue.
Before the rise of global corporate capitalism communities around the planet shared a viable,
culturally confirmed, sustainable sense of the commons. They knew firsthand that the life web
we call the commons provided the fundamental necessities of life; water, air, soil, fuel and
food. These cultures learned through trial and error that the commons was the fundament of
any economy; " hunter gatherer", agricultural and mercantile. They knew the truth of Senator
Gaylord Nelson's statement, "the economy is the wholly owned subsidiary of the environment".
(ie. the commons cannot be comprehended by the simplistic profit and loss economics of
modern capitalism.)
That was the wisdom of local economies around the world (with notable imperialistic
exceptions!) until the rise of industrial capitalism and its latest incarnation global corporate
capitalism. In this economy, the subtle local synergy of geology, hydrology and biology we
recognize as the ecologic commons has become a "resource". ie. a mine for homeless
corporations to pillage and move on. It's the frontier mentality; miners and buffalo hunters loom
large in American folklore and in a fundamental sense our economy is still a frontier economy
in which the commons are a commodity reservoir for profit that the rich and powerful have
special rights to foul and exploit while the rest of the "commoners" live beyond their means.
We are reluctant learners, but in the seventies all levels of government prompted by the
"common sense" of the people began to limit privatized pollution, degradation and exploitation
of the commons. It was dawning on us that there were limits. That was the impetus for
regulations like the Shoreline Management Act. Private interests cannot be trusted with
unregulated access to the larger life web that was dying in the grasp of our profit obsessed
frontier "economics".
This was not only a top down change. Local communities around the world formed groups to
restore their local commons. A good example in Jefferson County is salmon restoration. For
more than thirty years Chimacum high school students. Wild Olympic Salmon, NOSC, Trout
Unlimited, Jefferson Land Trust, Nature Conservancy and the Jefferson Conservation District
vested time, money and materials helping local landowners make their property salmon
friendly and dedicated key habitats in public trusts. As a consequence Chum, Coho and
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Cutthroat stocks are healthy. These folks are Salmon People; they do not want their work to go
to waste.
Here's where the revised Shoreline Management Act comes in. Healthy shorelines are critical
to salmon; 1. Eelgrass provides shelter for out-migrating smolt; 2. Shorelines are nurseries for
sandlance, herring, dace and larval stages of other critters that feed salmonids at all stages of
life.
What does it mean that geoduck aquaculture will be permitted on all shorelines in the county?
Modern geoduck aquaculture means implanting pipes in the substrate of the shoreline and
"boiling the beach" so the harvesters don't have to dig. Imagine what that does to eelgrass and
all the larval forms of food fish? What does it mean that netpen aquaculture will be permitted in
jefferson County? Netpens concentrate sea lice. Sea lice kill out-migrating salmon smolt.
Netpen entrepreneurs like to place their netpens near estuaries where tides and river flow
wash away the Atlantic salmon sewage. Ask the Canadian fishermen about netpens and sea
lice. How did these and other changes happen? I know the county professional working on the
plan are diligent, fair-minded people who worked hard to allay land owner fears and protect the
commons. Could it be the threat of a major lawsuit from property-rightists, developers and
aquaculturalists and a county notoriously short on funds made the changes expedient? Could
it be that the aquaculturist Shoreline Commission Chair cast an unrecused shadow on the
whole, hobbled procedure? If so, it's a shame because it means we have turned our shorelines
back over to private interests where it will slowly die beneath a thousand cuts of "best
management practice" and well intentioned but ignorant private owner shoreline changes. I
guess we have a long way to go.
There was one phrase in the shoreline plan that I especially liked; it was "no net loss of
ecosystem functions". What this means is that the shoreline commons is beyond the concepts
of property. It can't be owned in the western European sense of ownership. It is a dynamic,
synergistic system whose import and power are beyond the imagination of traditional profit-
loss economics to "manage", because it is profoundly self managing. I wonder how the county
can honor the no net loss principle in light of the most recent revisions? I wonder if our
grandchildren will welcome salmon home after all?
Tom Jay
Chimacum
6/16/2009