Just Happy To Be Here Today!

It is great to be back in the office and back at work. After time off for surgery/recovery, vacation, Christmas and snow, it feels like a month has gotten by me. I'm excited about all the plans for 2009: we have some incredible restoration projects coming up, more forest health work at the West Hylebos, as well as the East Hylebos if we can put the funds together. We have a habitat purchase that we're working on that will protect a very beautiful area in Spring Valley. And much, much more!

What's That Sound?

As we Puget Sounders contemplate saving our inland sea, a look eastward to the quarter of a century gone Chesapeake Bay Clean-up may prove instructive. Things aren't going well.

Despite 25 years and almost $6 billion, the government campaign to clean up the Chesapeake Bay has failed to meet its deadlines.

A tour of the Chesapeake and its watershed shows what happened: Solutions to the pollution problems were often obvious. But governments struggled to implement them on a large scale, unable to overcome budget shortages, bureaucratic inertia and political opposition from farmers, builders, watermen and other groups.

Money shortages. Bureacracy. Political opposition. Throw into the mix a growing population and you have the big challenges facing Puget Sound.