The Whatcom Excavator
  • Home
    • About Us
    • Who's Planning Our Lives?
    • Diminishing Property Rights
    • NGO's & Public-Private Partners
    • Agenda 21
    • Buzzwords
    • Deep Thought
    • Best Available Science
    • Best Available Humor >
      • Humor Archive
  • The DREDGE
    • Gotta See This
    • How To Dredge
  • Bulldozed
    • Eco-Activism and County Policy
    • CELDF - "Democracy"
    • ALERT: Community Energy Challenge
  • Pig Trough
    • ReSources
    • Sustainable Connections
    • BALLE
    • ICLEI
    • Whatcom County Community Network
    • Big Wheels Award
  • Contact Us

WE Share Your Pain - CAOmageddon in the San Juans

8/12/2012

1 Comment

 
WE care about truth, and most readers know there's far too little clarity or application of the scientific method in government work.   Honest science demands that hypothesis (theory) must be tested and confirmed to correctly identify cause and effect, to respond reasonably when necessary.   What we face nowadays is a tsunami of regulations based more on zealous beliefs than fact-checked science.

San Juan County is a near neighbor with islands in the same chain as ours.   With a small population, they're only now facing the adoption of their first CAO, which means "critical areas ordinance."

Whatcom County has had a CAO since 2005,  revised in 2007.   Ours - WCC 16.16 "Critical Areas" (WCC means Whatcom County Code) - has always been plagued by lack of definition, and it's loaded with obtuse terminology and descriptions of "values" that are impossible to measure.   Of course, those weaknesses didn't stop its being adopted.

We share the pain of our San Juan neighbors who find themselves caught in the same web of pseudo-science and fog, often spun deliberately to achieve undefined ends for "reasons" that make no scientific sense at all.   The following post (one of a series) offers more than a little insight into a situation we face together in the constant struggle against the eco-activist spin machine. 

Countdown to CAOmageddon
 Flaw #9 – Gamesmanship
 from The Trojan Heron

August 11, 2011

Will you please tie my shoes? That was the question posed to several people during a research experiment on the "art" of persuasion. Here's what they found:

You start by asking for something outrageous; when that's turned down, you then ask for something reasonable. A boss may ask an employee to work weekends for a whole year, for example, and when that request gets turned down, the manager might ask for a report to be turned in by Friday. The outrageous request reframes the real request to make it sound reasonable.

And so it goes with buffers in the San Juan County CAO. During various forums, there has been talk of buffers as large as 800 feet. Then, the Planning Commission draft of the CAOs had buffers up to 260 feet. These "outrageous" requests were tweaked to something more "reasonable"... 230 feet. Nevertheless, we still hear the Friends wanting more from buffers. Janet Alderton ended her most recent CAO paean with the un-paean-like punchline:

But the numerous activities permitted in buffers by the proposed Critical Area Ordinance update interfere with buffer function and fail to protect our valuable Critical Areas.

In other words, consider yourselves lucky, peasants, that you're getting any use of your land at all. You should feel grateful! Never mind that no one can seem to adequately quantity or explain what "buffer function" actually means anyway.

The difficulty with all this reasonableness is that the purpose of buffers has been completely lost amidst the bazaar haggling over their size. We don't even know what we're haggling over anymore. What are buffers for? To reduce pollution? What pollution? Paraphrasing Jerry Maguire, show me the pollution. Show me the pollution!

Without de manifestis levels of pollution, there is no need for a remedy. Without a need for a remedy, there is no need for pollution-removing buffers, assuming buffers work as a primary pollutant remedy at all, and it's not clear that they do. It turns out that our own consultant, Dr. Adamus, wasn't even able to describe how buffers work exactly. He declined to explain, for example, the statistics in the Mayer paper, which formed the pollutant-removal basis for the buffer calculator he developed.

We can land a plutonium-powered rover on Mars using a crazy sky-crane contraption and nail the landing within a couple of miles of the target, but we can't get our highly-compensated wetland consultant to explain buffer statistics in the paper he used for our buffer design.

Does that sound reasonable?

1 Comment
childofww2
8/12/2012 05:32:49 pm

Trusting public officials has proved to be a much mistaken notion.

Reply

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    WE Dredge!
    Picture
    Posting Rules:
    This forum is moderated.  Please make an effort to substantiate claims that support opinion.  Gratuitous profanity and ad-hominem attacks will not be accepted.  You can create a "nickname" if you'd like, and you don't have to reveal your e-mail address.   Feel free to share information and your honest thoughts.

    Categories

    All
    Agenda 21
    Best Available Science
    Big Government
    Eco Activism
    Ethics
    Freedom
    Planning
    Property Rights
    Science
    Small Business
    Social Engineering
    Taxes
    Welcome

    Archives

    January 2022
    September 2020
    August 2020
    April 2020
    November 2019
    August 2019
    September 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    September 2017
    July 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011


    Automatic Updates

    Do you want to be notified when new content is added to this newsfeed? Most browsers allow you to subscribe to our Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed. Click on the RSS link below, and follow the instructions.

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.