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On November 4th, exit polls reported that 22% of the voters self-identified as liberal, 44% as moderates, and 34% as conservative. No one claimed to be conservationists — but 100% of them eat. Is America doing enough to assure a safe and reliable food supply?
Over the last decade, there has been a subtle shift from the development arena to a “new restoration economy.” Not that development has diminished (except since the worldwide financial collapse), but development and building interests have learned to mine conservation programs for their own purposes.
One example is mitigation banking. This is an approach meant to compensate for environmental degradation and destruction before the impacts occur. It began with wetlands mitigation because even after prohibiting wetland destruction in the Clean Water Act in 1972, waterfront and shoreline development continued to fill and drain vital wetland systems. The success of these compensatory approaches varies, but it is generally less than robust.
The troubling aspect of this approach is that much of this mitigation is targeting the lands vital to feeding our growing American population. Many of these public policies are diminishing our future capacity to grow food.
In Washington, for example, the state’s pilot wetland mitigation banking program encourages development of banks on prime agricultural soils and is allowing the mining of these soils for development and commercial purposes – all under the guise of “restoration.”
In one rural county, the state has approved one mitigation bank and is poised to approve a second only a mile from the first. Combined, these two projects will mine 1.4 million cubic yards of prime agricultural soils. To put that amount in perspective, it would take 70,000 dump trucks to move that much soil.
More alarming is the fact that the soils in Skagit County are ranked in the top 2% in the world in agricultural capability. The end result of this short-sighted program is the destruction of two irreplaceable natural resources and twice as much destruction than if there were no mitigation requirement at all.
Can allowing these soils to be used for development really be considered sensible public policy?
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While we cannot eat wetlands, we also cannot drink runoff from farmland. Wetlands are the natural reservoirs and treatment areas for runoff. An appropriate balance must be found between our needs for farmland and wetlands.
Comment by Rane Curl November 16, 2008 @ 2:44 amTo add to Rane’s comment, we can drink the water filtered by the wetlands and we can eat the fish, birds and other wildlife that rely on wetlands for habitat.
Comment by Jesse Richardson November 16, 2008 @ 12:42 pmHammering on farmland as the bogey-person is short-sighted. There is far more pollution from development, including filled and paved wetlands, in urban areas, than from farmland in Puget Sound’s 12 counties. We HAVE ALREADY converted massive amounts of farmland to city uses and guess what, the pollution has increased, not decreased. Saying we would like to “un-convert” the farmland to wetlands is also myopic as we must start from today and look at all the functions that sustain rural counties. Skagit County’s largest economic driver IS agriculture, with the capacity to feed all of the NW corner and alot of cities down the west coast and inland. Skagit produces 300 million pounds of potatoes, for example. Turning Skagit into a nature park or a playground for wealthy citizens is not sustainable. Yes, we need clean water. Taking farmland out of production isn’t going to give us that outcome. There are lots of other changes needed BEFORE we destroy our food sources.
Comment by Ellen Bynum November 16, 2008 @ 7:41 pmHave you SEEN the price frog’s legs are fetching these days at Les Halles?
Comment by Avelhingst November 18, 2008 @ 5:43 amSeriously, though – the productive output of wetlands is high, but the amount of food produced on wetlands versus farmlands is no contest. Besides, the wetland mitigation bank is supposed to somehow mysteriously make up for lost critical areas and habitats destroyed elsewhere – total productivity is hammered twice, not once.
Furthermore, the destruction of wetlands and farmlands is an end-run around several aspects of the Growth Management Act: one, preserving critical areas and habitats; and the other, protecting agricultural lands from urban land pressures.