By Janet Alderton
Deregulation is the removal of regulation. Our severe recession is a direct result of deregulation of the banking and finance industries. The Growth Management Act and The Shoreline Master Program were passed in response to creeping environmental degradation and the loss of open space and farmland. Some people consider the adoption of the GMA and SMP unnecessary. They are ignorant of the gradual loss of once abundant species and habitats over decades of human population growth. San Olson of Lopez Island has called this “the shifting baseline syndrome.” We accept the degraded state of our local environment when are born or when we move here from another place. If you talk to people who have lived in the San Juan Islands for 40, 50, or more years, they say that the abundance of life on the land, in the skies, and in our waters has declined sharply. These declines affect the quality of our own, human lives. They also should alert us to emerging threats to our own health.
There has been an explosion of man-made chemicals created since World War II. Industrial chemicals have long been assumed to be harmless until proven otherwise. Decades of human illness and early death may pass before a chemical is regulated or banned. DDT and asbestos are examples. The pace of development of synthetic chemicals is increasing at a rate that makes the careful testing of toxicity to people and to the environment logistically impossible. Our regulatory agencies are understaffed and underfunded.
There is a vocal movement, especially in the San Juan Islands, to limit government regulation of environmental and land use issues. Imagine that there are no land use or zoning regulations. Your neighbor builds a noisy and polluting industry next to your home. Tough luck. Pollution continues to degrade our land and waters. Tourism falls continuously. Land values fall as the once beautiful San Juan Islands loose their appeal to visitors.
Janet Alderton is a Board Member of the Friends of the San Juans
It’s time to wake up!
How do we get from the Great Recession to the GMA and SMP? Land values are falling due to the (1) the economy and (2) the unpredictable regulatory environment in the County. No one I know is lobbying for the elimination of land use law. Most are arguing for some balance in the discussion; for some evidence that there is a problem CAUSED IN the San Juans and that the proposed burdens on property owners do something to address the identified problems. A polluting industry coming next to your home? This blatant hyperbole, which is not uncommon in this debate, undermines the credibility of those who purport to protect the environment.
I wrote this letter in response to a long column in The Island Guardian that was railing against regulation and specifically the GMA and SMP. Many garden, household, and personal care products are directly toxic or breakdown into persistent toxins that are carried into our fresh and marine waters by stormwater. Body weight is increasing not only in people but also in our pets that share our homes and in pests, such as rats, that live close by. Hormone-disrupting chemicals are at least partly to blame for this. See “Canaries in the coal mine: a cross-species analysis of the plurality of obesity epidemics,” Proceedings of the Royal Society, Dec. 23, 2010.