||| FROM CINDY WOLF, SAN JUAN COUNTY COUNCILMEMBER |||
This Spring the news from the bigger world has been rough and our own political sphere has been contentious. It is difficult to avoid the vortex of despair. Sometimes we find ourselves putting a lot of emotional energy into small stuff because it is too painful to face how little control we have over the really big stuff. This is a moment in time when we all need some inner peace to keep doing the daily work of the world.
Please be extra kind to others and stay okay with yourself. Take the time to discern what will help solve problems, and what is venting at hazard to a functioning community. Our work crews are our neighbors, and we are about to have a lot of guests all summer long. If we want to get through a very challenging season with the ability to trust each other in a pinch, we must choose to move together rather than fight.
When the proposal for a one year schedule for Prune Alley was made, I asked Council to wait and we did outreach to building owners, residents, and the Chamber of Commerce which polled it’s members. The unanimous decision was one year of pain rather than three years of shoulder season mayhem with added construction costs. We need to see this through.
I am very appreciative of Clyde Duke and Joe Cohen for pulling together and working with business owners to provide extra employee parking in the village. Once school is out, the County has contracted for the public to use the school lots for free all day parking. Soon you will see signs along the streets asking to limit in-town parking to 4 hours to help out our merchants.
We can make the choice to work together and keep civil conversations going to create solutions as problems come up. Your patience and courtesy will make all the difference.
Cindy, when my children were young, our family traveled across the United States from the East Coast to the West Coast, North and South, to every state in the Union, and twice across Canada in our van. I know what it is to be a tourist and what they seek. Coming into a new town, parking the van and walking around, speaking to people, absorbing the beauty of the town, perhaps nestled between the mountains or the plains, I can say that the one thing that was glorious was to observe the placement of the town, its’ businesses, its’ homes, its’ schools, in relation to the Natural Landscape. So when we discuss trees in our town it’s not a mater of “what the hell, they’re just trees”, no, they are living Beings, who breathe oxygen out for our well-being, who lend beauty to our landscape, and what touches the softness that is in all of us, the heart, beating along with the Mother Earth’s heartbeat. Traveling is an exploration, a wonderful restful interlude from our everyday lives, and I completely understand and appreciate the happiness that we, just by living here, as Guardians who protect this place for its’ own sake, give to those who come to our island. And since we are Guardians, we must speak up for Our land, the Earth Mother. Unfortunately, we are failing in our duty to protect Orcas Island by allowing those who have a limited vision, limited integrity, and no connection to She who gives us what we need to live life, on the Planet. This Model doesn’t work. You know, the quote, “The definition of Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a Different result?” That is what is happening here. I venture to say that as we step aside and allow bureaucrats and developers to take charge of our children’s future on this island and the future of the Earth, here, that we have become emotionally dead, mentally children, and completely without integrity toward the place where we live and the Earth Herself. The old way is on the way out, it is dying. The beauty of Life, and loving life, has been forgotten. We are all born here to make the World better, filled with love, respect, integrity, not for material accumulation of wealth. We are here to love, respect, and enjoy the Earth here, not to give to those whose lives are devoted to the accumulation of money, fame and fortune, and most of all power. Those who see power, are the WEAKEST AMONGST US! Aho-Mataquasi. Spirit Eagle.
Hi Cindy, A spin off concerning the construction in eastsound is the abuse of parking at the westbound community dock road parking.The crew from San Juan park their rather large trucks there when they go home. Please take the time to drive through in the evening or better yet the weekend! Maybe you can suggest that a crew bus is in order and maybe the yacht club would allow parking for it. Not only is this project hurting Eastsound business it’s got to be hurting Westsound as well!
With all due respect;
Construction upheaval is NOT only for one season.
It happens every Spring/Summer.
From the worthless sidewalks that took away untold street parking, to the “Mt. Baker Raceway” experiment,
To the “Swan Road -S- curve”, which I understand will continue to Olga in coming years,
And now the Prune Alley Plague, Just up from “Covid Corner”.
This county is too hungry for growth.
It needs to slow down again.
There are limits to growth, especially on islands.
Again, Spirit Eagle – Thank you for saying what needs to be said. Spot-on, from your heart and the wisdom you hold – thank you for speaking truth to power. Just yesterday I was in a room looking at an art show in the midst of a class and idly listening to conversations. A lady I don’t even know expressed her disgust and hurt to another lady I don’t know, about all the cutting down of trees going on. We’re not the only ones feeling this; a groundswell is building.
Cindy; I must respond to this.. letter? Response to our concerns? Whatever this is. It completely skirts the big issues and ignores what we addressed in our respectful requests for you, Colin, and Jesse to give us audience and work together with us. Can you see that this would seem… hypocritical, rigid in stance, and evasive in failing to address our respectful concerns and requests?
You three are the only ones with the power to do anything about our concerns – that letter is printed here in the Orcasonian if you need to refer to it, in case you didn’t read it. Your post here doesn’t make any real offer of “working together” with us. Other people wrote and called the engineers, trying to have some kind of audience with any or all of you toward creative solutions that might spare some of the trees – save money, even. They/we got scolded with the same old rhetoric meant to shut us down and remove any hope of working together: “Where were you for the past two years?” (Covid, anyone?) “Now just shut up because you are tearing apart our community by complaining about it.”
This is little more than a discounting of the people who see the web of life and its connection to us all; people who care about what this project is doing to Eastsound, the little slice of earth and heaven that is Home to many of us – including other non-human living beings.. Your letter minimizes the taking of all the Natural Life that makes town livable for those of us who must live here and have no right to say ‘NIMBY!’ because we’re in what someone decades ago decided was going to be our “Urban Growth Area” – so just suck it up and be ‘kind.” Is what is happening to all the non human life in town and elsewhere, ‘kind?’
Do most folks even know that our downtown commercial village is zoned FORTY units per acre? Imagine that! Why even plant anything, except buildings slated for teardown in a few years so that higher buildings can fill our density capacities. This enters the realm of the Theater of the Absurd.
For those who love the little natural beauty we have left now in our town that we call Home; we have tried to talk to bureaucrats and engineers. We have grieved every loss wrought by people who sit behind desks and never walk the lands we walk, yet make plans to destroy what is Alive about them. It’s no small thing to us. Anyone who sees the interconnected and interdependent web of life can’t look away and pretend there’s no loss here, while we witness in disbelief, the inane idea that if you denude a place of trees in the midst of Climate Change, new young trees will automatically grow to replace them, in the midst of drought, wildfires, sea level rise, and soon, water table DROP. Look at the Cedars. They are telling the story with their dying..Ignoring what’s right in front of you and to proceed in these ways is an arrogant and hurtful stance for everyone else, whether they yet know it or not – it’s ignorance at its worst.
I also know that other concerned citizens have been trying, and continue to try, to express what it feels like to see the destruction of more trees and blatant disregard of the vision for our town as a walking village and a rural town. Those folks have written you too; is this the best response you can give us all?
I have the petitions here that several of us made up; we weren’t at it long, and we only got about a hundred signatures from being at the Saturday Market and canvassing neighbors and friends a tiny bit in the midst of all of our busy lives with too much to do. I will send those along to Council and the two engineers, despite technical difficulties with my ancient scanner not darkening them enough. They will serve as placeholders until I can figure out how to darken the scans so they’re more readable and send you better copies of them for the Record. I’m left here imagining what could have been done in the way of signature gathering on petitions if we had started many months or years ago, instead of Saturday. But then I remember the Haven Road fiasco. And I see, again, that only certain voices matter.. I still imagine a vision of what really working together could look like for us, and continue to work toward and pray for that day – as so many of us are. But it won’t come from a system that sets it up so we never have equal footing with the powerful people, nor equal voice or choice.
This letter from you asking for patience, and lauding the two landowners allowing parking in a wetland next to Eastsound Swale Creek, claims that you worked with the landowners and residents. That’s not how the non-landowner residents of the Longhouse remember it. They don’t remember being included in the discussion about what impacts them more than anyone else; nor were other town resident renters and non-landowners – unless you call a few open houses before covid, ‘working with us.’ Please do not insult us all by minimizing these impacts on us.
When I read this I feel… repulsion. Leaders beloved by their people think about how their every action affects their base and all the things they are trying to do in representing the platform on which they ran. It’s not weakness to apologize to a person or person wronged; to admit making misjudgements or mistakes; then making amends. The above letter goes on to say how much we all need to determine what is small stuff and what is big stuff beyond our control, and keep our inner peace. That’s easy to say when you don’t live daily with the losses and impacts.
Trees are big (living) things to me and a lot of people here. They are important to the people of Longhouse who are about to lose their shade and shelter and place of serenity and beauty. Birds are big things to most of us too; necessary in the Web of Life. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which you all will be violating when you cut these Prune Alley trees – especially if it’s done now – just proves that this is yet another bureaucratic bit of pablum saying… nothing.
I’m gobsmacked.
Sadie, this wasn’t about the Long House trees or your request to meet. It was about asking people to behave in a way that allows people to communicate constructively about the many issues we will need to deal with during construction. One thing we need to practice is sharing accurate information. As you know, the trees you are referring to were, unfortunately, planted over utility lines 20 years ago and their roots are now tangled in those utility lines, which need to be moved.
Why can’t they just move the utility lines? Why can’t OPALCO think more creatively than this – or century link? We were told an ADA sidewalk will go in there. Which is it, Cindy? I have lost trust and faith if this is the best that can be done. As John Titus pointed out, this goes beyond Eastsound. Move the lines and spare the trees!
I unfortunately pushed send before really thinking. Here’s the thing: those utility lines – if they are THAT old – probably need replacing with brand NEW utility lines. No, I didn’t know because we couldn’t get a straight answer every time we asked and whatever concrete goes over the whole mess will just have to be jackhammered up for repairs or when Fiber becomes obsolete to the Next Big Thing – which is already here.
https://wallstreetpit.com/114358-new-cutting-edge-tech-fibre-optics-obsolete
A lot of this is about installing fiber optics, which many people seem to want, no matter the expense to them or cost to the environment, or the fact that one utility company here will have the monopoly on it. Read this and weep; I give this technology 5 years before the next grant monies are given to tear it all out in the next “road improvement.” It’s hard not to be cynical.
I hope at least that Westsound will get some parking spaces freed up, since Paul Culp pointed out that large trucks just parked there that are taking away community parking on evenings and weekends. This project is impacting Westsound residents and visitors too.
Why is it that I get the feeling that everything we are saying are falling on deaf unwilling ears? We are expected to behave in a way that allows constructive communication – so is that just one way, when people just in this thread are telling you all the ways this is impacting them, along with all the other projects that have run roughshod over our concerns.
Is nothing sacred? This whole island is one big unlimited growth development sprawl. This is why pushback keeps happening. People are tired of this one pointed track we are all dragged on when we could be an example to other places on how to not screw things up.
I agree with you 100% Sadie, and I hope that you, Cindy, would see the science and the heart, of our arguments. This is nothing new, here, in Eastsound. Hearings occur, the people are listened to attentively by those who will make decisions for our lives for many years to come, but the one thing that is missing is the hearing of the pleas of the people from the Heart, for the Earth Herself. I, for one, am fed up with money being the deciding factor, when it comes to deciding the fate of projects in Eastsound. If we have representative government. Then who are our representatives? We all know and can see that “money talks” far louder than Hearts and peacefulness within our village. For at least the last 20 years, there has been a feeding frenzy in the development of Eastsound for those who see dollar signs as the only criteria of planning. ENOUGH ALREADY!
It shows how little power people have, and how little respect, when an event as significant as the return of Native peoples to this land and their welcome at the Village Green, is drowned out by the machines breaking up the earth in Prune Alley. This day was also long in planning. This day was historically significant. Many of us came to honor this moment, and many understand that true respect must be shown our earth, and we must not delay.
Pegeen White’s astute point is the most important of all in this continuing travesty on the land for ‘progress,’ and it says it all. The irony is not lost that when the Lummi come here to what is their (stolen) tribal lands and burial grounds to offer their hearts, their prayers, their stories, what do our leaders and governmental entities continue to offer them? Subjugation and destruction of Nature from a fear-based patriarchal so-called culture that only knows war on the land, war on the feminine, control, and destruction of what can’t or won’t not be controlled. Orcas and these San Juan islands are a microcosm of this.
We offer the Lummi Prune Alley road improvement project – (before all the tree murders to come). Liberty Hill, known by whites as “Victory” Hill – another example of a colonizing name of domination and control. That was the “north gate” of Eastsound, a natural feature that was supposed to be protected; sacred ground to the Tribal peoples. It’s slowly, sneakily, much of it after work hours or on weekends getting denuded of trees and developed in a most ugly and disrespectful manner to that land – see the newest lopped off Madrona tree leaving a 15 foot dead stub.. Why this blatant violence toward a living tree housing birds in nesting season – AGAIN?! All the lands surrounding Madrona Point (closed due to lack of respect for that sacred land) being clearcut for more luxury condos and concrete for cars; the fear-based and greedy idea of property rights over the rights of nature. I am disgusted.
The absurdity of this latest road improvement project and everything being done to the lands and waters will not be lost on our esteemed Lummi visitors. This is our legacy here in our little microcosm – American Exceptionalism and domination, subjugation of the land, disrespect of the waters. And we wonder why there is a plague of homelessness and mental illness among today’s dispossessed and colonized people right here, due to market patriarchy.
My long-held conclusion is, we have no real representation here (or anywhere in the USA) in our co-opted governmental system. Russell Means said it best; “We’re all American Indians now.” He also calls out the cause of this destruction; Patriarchy. I am disappointed in every woman who buys into it, and puts herself in a place of leadership not as a woman, but as a would- be patriarchal sellout. This is betrayal of the worst kind.
Russell means should have won the Nobel Peace Prize – not that charlatan Obama. Listen and weep – if you still know how.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3RhU6l_550
Sadie, it’s so heartbreaking to listen to the Elder Russell Means’ pain over the condition of his people, and all Native peoples in this country. His breaking heart touched my heart, as I hope his words touched the hearts of all people. Russell is such a beautiful soul and has worked so hard for his people over the years. Russell is an example for all Men of all races, to follow in order be an example for generations to come. He truly speaks to the emotional survival of all people in this world. AHO! All My Relations, Spirit Eagle
I also wrote a letter to the three people in county government who have the ability to alter the plan and save the Longhouse trees. In it I posited that we need to change our idea of “progress” so that it is not used as an excuse to destroy nature, a pain we must endure for progress’s sake. True progress in this moment is being flexible and respectful and understanding that trees and all Nature have rights that we can learn to respect and accommodate. If it truly is a choice here of putting down 20 feet of new electric wires and leaving those trees in place, let’s do it! I have seen the project workers dig countless holes and fill them again since this project started, one more ditch dug and filled seems a small price to pay for living mature trees. As Sadie asked, isn’t there a possibility that those old wires will need to be replaced anyway? My letter: https://theorcasonian.com/guest-opinion-about-those-trees-at-the-longhouse/
Good letter, Pegeen. I hope it gets tons of supportive comments.