Bandaged Ears Recovering

Ok. My ears are recovering from my Joe Strummer celebration last night (you know how hard it is to bandage bleeding ears?!).

Actually, I'm halfway through The Future Is Unwritten; I'll watch the rest tonight. It's a fascinating documentary that is very effective at fleshing out the person who was Joe Strummer (AKA John Mellor).

We often hear a lot about how it isn't wise to spend scarce habitat monies in the urban areas like, oh, I don't know, say Hylebos Creek. Already, the Puget Sound restoration initiative is producing rumbles of forget the urban areas and focus on the remaining "good" habitat.

I could go for some time about what's wrong with this argument, but I don't have to, thanks to People for Puget Sound's Kathy Fletcher (who earns a big Hylebos Shout Out) for her opinion piece in Wednesday's Pee-Eye.

This is the kind of thinking that gets us beautiful places to visit but unhealthy places to live. This is the kind of thinking that gets us places for salmon to spawn but nothing for the salmon to eat when they leave the rivers. This is the kind of thinking that gets us lovely areas to observe orca whales as they die out because of contamination in our urban bays, and not enough salmon to eat.

This is the kind of thinking that encourages us to believe that it doesn't matter what poisons we pour on our lawn or how much pavement we spread around in urban areas.

If we "triage" and write off our urban areas, we write off the lowlands and we write off a healthy Puget Sound. That's because a healthy Puget Sound ecosystem is tied together by clean water, clean air, shorelines, wetlands, currents and plants and animals that move from place to place. Simplistic thinking about "triage" might sound practical, sensible, efficient, business-like and even effective, but it's not.

Couldn't have put that better myself...

Have a great weekend. Don't forget to get out to see the Hylebos!