HyleBlog - Friends of the Hylebos

Pearl Jam Rocks the Forests

Board President Margery Godfrey popped in today to bring me this article about one of my favorite bands Pearl Jam, who is working with Cascade Land Conservancy to make their current world tour carbon neutral through offsetting emissions with planting trees in four of the Green Cities under the CLC partnership.

Sitting Down with the Public Official of the Year

I had the pleasure of starting the day with a meeting (at Marlene's Market - great Americano!) with Federal Way City Councilwoman Jeanne Burbidge. In addition to being an incredible community advocate and activist, and a generally all-around great person, Jeanne was recently named the Municipal League's Public Official of the Year.

This is a great recognition for a hard-working person who has served the Federal Way community in a number of ways over the last forty years, and ably represented the citizens of Federal Way as a city councilmember for the past 18 years.

In addition, it's also worth noting that Jeanne and her husband Jim have been longtime and strong supporters of the west Hylebos Wetlands and Hylebos Creek. Jim recently finished a five-year term on our board of directors.

Also, I am catching up with my newspaper articles. I see the Mirror noted the Hylebos conservation efforts as one of the top 20 achievements of Federal Way's 20-year history. Very nice, indeed. While the conservation work spans an entire watershed, there is definitely a strong link between the citizens of Federal Way, as well as the 20-year-old city, which has done quite a bit to help protect and restore Hylebos Creek, and steward the West Hylebos Wetlands.

I was just mentioning to someone last week that we were approaching the Ides of March. They didn't know what that meant, which kind of surprised me. Who hasn't heard, "Beware the Ides of March."? So, in case there are others out there who aren't down with the Ides, I repost this from my Visual Thesaurus Word of the Day e-mail:

You can probably credit Shakespeare ("Beware the ides of March") for the survival of this word from Old English (and originally from Latin). All months in the Roman calendar had ides, or middle days, but only the March ones have a grip on the popular imagination. Ones? Why the plural if it's only one day? The word (idus in Latin) is of obscure origin but it can also refer to the middle section of the month, thus giving it good plural credentials.

Here, locally, who has to beware the Ides of March? Given that Lili is running an ivy assault program this Saturday at Dumas Bay Park (contact her to sign up), I'd say it's that invasive English ivy that'd better watch out!

A Little of Everything This Monday...

Wow, fairly fascinating day from a weather perspective. Really, really cold temps. Snow flurries. Several flavors of drizzle and then...sunshine! After a balmy and sunny weekend, the strange weather was a fine way for Mother Nature to let us know we still live in the Pacific Northwest !

The Times ran an interesting article this morning about the new FEMA flood maps expected for much of lowland Puget Sound in months to come. In Green River Valley cities, the new mapping could cost cities and businesses big money. Major businesses like IKEA are expected to be within the 100-year floodplain and would face higher flood insurance costs and more stringent land use rules.

While the anti-map/pro-map debate will rage during coming months, doesn't this beg a larger question. That is, how do we deal with developed areas that we now know are in flood hazard areas, while respecting a) environmental values of floodplains and b) economic needs of communities.

Obviously, we're not going to move IKEA up the hill. And I doubt we want to create severe economic dislocation in our floodplain cities. At the same time, we can't ignore the needs of our rivers and wetlands (and Puget Sound), nor can we erase the image of a flooded New Orleans from our minds or ignore the financial realities of the public holding the bag for insuring floodplain development.

Answers aren't going to come from the either/or camp.