HyleBlog - Friends of the Hylebos

National Volunteer Week

Today marks the beginning of National Volunteer Week. I can't thank enough the thousands of individuals - people from all walks of life across and around the Hylebos Watershed - who have helped make this incredible story of conservation success.

Just this year alone, volunteers have helped us reclaim more than 3 acres of Dumas Bay forest from English ivy and save 747 individual trees.

I've heard it said that volunteers are unpaid, not because their work is not worth anything, but rather because their work is priceless. The work of the Hylebos is more than just pulling ivy from trees, or planting trees in the ground. It's building a community of shared value and purpose for conservation, an identity for our cities as keeping natural areas as critical parts of the community.

Volunteers keep conservation rocking in the community and keeps clean water and green trees an essential element of where we live.

Landmark Landscape Preservation on the Hoh

No otters or beavers today - the topic is habitat preservation. Lynda Mapes reports on a remarkable preservation victory on the Olympic Peninsula where 7,000 acres of the Hoh River have been purchased, and set aside for permanent protection in a blockbuster $11 million project.

Sure, it's a ways away from the Hylebos, but this may be a site you visit one day; I know that I will. This is the type of project approach we take in preservation; finding ways to achieve conservation values while meeting other important community values. The Hoh deal will not only protect the landscape, but also preserves local community access.

As I write this, several preservation projects are underway in the Hylebos that will hopefully lead to win-win conservation victories in the future. Like the Hoh, most habitat acquisition projects take several years of discussion with landowners, developing partnerships and sewing together patches of funding.

It's Water News!

The New York Times has focused this past year on an issue that most mainstream media ignores: our water infrastructure. The latest sums up the costs invovled in repairing and updating water infrastructure in the US (I'll give you a hint think big, then think biggerer).

There is a cost in the broken system, though:

“We’re relying on water systems built by our great-grandparents, and no one wants to pay for the decades we’ve spent ignoring them,” said Jeffrey K. Griffiths, a professor at Tufts University and a member of the E.P.A.’s National Drinking Water Advisory Council.

“There’s a lot of evidence that people are getting sick,” he added. “But because everything is out of sight, no one really understands how bad things have become.”

...but if you think we've got a challenge, the water situation is an out-and-out crisis in the world's poor nations, as outlined in the latest World Bank report on water infrastructure projects. More than 700 million people living in 43 countries under severe water stress, according to the World Bank. The report focuses on myriad ways to improve its investment in water projects and to make water infrastructure projects more cost-effective.

In a related move, The Carbon Disclosure Project will begin asking some 300 global companies to disclose their water use, in addition to their carbon emissions.

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.

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.

Getting Edge-y and Rain Gardens

Just as I entered into a brief "The Edge" phase this weekend (looking a bit like the Irish U2 guitarist, known for his scruffy face and black beanie), the bloke goes and gets embroiled in an environmental controversy in California.

On one side are conservationists and the state agencies charged with preserving public spaces, views and access. On the other, Mr. Evans with his green building plans and U2 environmental credibility, enhanced with the blessing of Mark Massara, an environmental lawyer and former Sierra Club official.

“Rather than fighting every project,” Mr. Massara said, “it’s a much more prudent exercise to try and inspire other landowners to do things that are not only in the best interest of the environment, but also to protect the homes and enhance the values here.”

This is not an unsual dilemma, when it comes to the environment. We often find ourselves contemplating whether it's better in the long run to oppose something, or to work with it to lessen its impact on the environment and support a long-range vision of sustainability.

I don't know enough about The Edge's project (nor is it in our area, of course), but being that we live in an urban growth zone, we typically can't choose between development and no-development. We focus instead on working with the development community, with landowners, and nudge, gently nudge, our communities to sustainability.

One interesting area we're beginning to work with is promoting practical Low Impact Development techniques. One such effort is the construction of rain gardens for homes and for businesses. Our friends at Stewardship Partners have developed a fantastic rain garden program, which we hope to be able to bring to the Hylebos soon. Stay tuned!

Happy Friday!

Ok, I'm cooped up inside the office, working on a couple of proposals. Hillary and I are finishing a really cool proposal for a project I cant' talk about yet (just trust me, it'd be oustanding!) and then I'm finishing up a grant proposal for building rain gardens. So, it's pretty much office work all day long, but this is the way conservation gets done. You gotta get the funds first!

Last Friday was freaky. This one has had its share of weirdness. Earlier today, Hillary's computer got hijacked and infected with a worm. It's beyond our powers to repair, so the computer is going off to the shop to be de-wormed. Then, when I went to get lunch today i was passing Celebration Park and darned if there weren't two young men - shirtless in the rain - beating the bejesus out of each other while a small crowd watched and another young man videotaped them. I called 911, but they were all gone when I returned so I assume they split before the police could catch them. But, really, that was just weird...and stupid.

It'll probably be on YouTube within hours...

Anyways, it's Friday. The weekend is almost here. We are closed Monday for Presidents' Day. Hopefully, you have a three-day weekend (or longer), too. Have a great weekend and keep it Green!

Bravo for Floyd Little

Not a Hylebos blog, but for those of you in the community who know Floyd Little, or have had the pleasure of watching him blast past defensive linemen on the way downfield during his days as a Denver Bronco, there is nice, though bittersweet profile of the Federal Way resident and his hope to enter the NFL Hall of Fame. Since that article, the Hall has rightly voted Floyd in!

Some Water Quality News

The primary source of pollutants to the sound come from our freeways and roads. The State of Washington has recently settled a lawsuit over roadway pollutants in which WSDOT will be setting up to 20% of a project's funds to upgrade existing roadway's stormwater facilities. Given how many roads were built with little or no stormwater facilities (reflecting the standards or lack thereof, of the day), this should make a big difference for water quality.

At the same time, some environmentalists are pushing a bill in the State Legislature that would jack up taxes on petroleum and chemical producers to raise money for Puget Sound restoration (although, current environmental accounts are already being raided for the general fund; so, you've got to give the Green Label on this a jaundiced eye)

Conservation and Prostitution?!

Conservation. Prostitution. Well, those are two businesses I would've never linked together...but, according to this enlightening and somewhat (unintentionally) humorous article from the NYT, at least in Nevada, former brothels make good places to launch habitat restoration projects.

Legalized prostitution, as it turns out, has made this parcel particularly promising to conservationists because it essentially kept development at bay, improving the chances of restoring the flora and fauna.

Well, I'll put that in the category of things I didn't know before.