||| FROM HEATHER NICHOLSON for WASHINGTON WILDLIFE FIRST |||
Until this week, Washington had been a beacon of light in a world growing progressively darker for fish and wildlife. Under the leadership of former Governor Inslee, we were making progress toward an independent wildlife commission that would be more than just a rubber stamp for a regressive department, would prioritize the future of Washington’s fish and wildlife over the demands of consumptive special interests, and would strive to represent the values of all Washingtonians.
We had great hope for Governor Ferguson, maintaining our faith in his leadership even after he summarily fired Commission Vice Chair Dr. Tim Ragen, the former head of the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission, and a preeminent scientist who has spent his career working to recover endangered and threatened marine species. We suspected that Governor Ferguson’s new administration had been misled by NRA-fueled national special interests that had been campaigning to oust Dr. Ragen from the Commission, but we believed the Governor when he said he only wanted to complete his own due diligence on commission candidates. We trusted that in the end, when provided with full information, he would do the right thing and reappoint Dr. Ragen.
Governor Ferguson insisted that he wanted to create a more “balanced” Fish and Wildlife Commission, but instead, he has tilted it away from the values of Washingtonians, and toward the powerful special interests that have long controlled state fish and wildlife policy.
We are not alone in feeling that Governor Ferguson has betrayed our trust. By reversing Governor Inslee’s reappointment of Dr. Ragen, Governor Ferguson ignored the opinions of experts from around the world, who told him that keeping Dr. Ragen on the Commission was one of the last, best hopes for saving our Southern Resident killer whales. He ignored the entreaties of dozens of local, state, and national fish and wildlife organizations, which stressed the importance of keeping Washington moving forward even as the rest of the country was stepping back. He ignored an appeal from the union representing department biologists, which had seen department negligence cause the tragic deaths of two of its members over the past 18 months, and which implored Governor Ferguson to keep Dr. Ragen on the commission as their champion. And he ignored the voices of thousands of Washingtonians, who pleaded with him to put the interests of Washington’s wildlife first.
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This statement is another example of one of the uncountable non-profits in this region weighing in with self-furthering views on a dismal situation. Trumpeting a simple solution to the drastic, cascading failure of government (especially the State of Washington), industry and society in all but destroying the richness and diversity of Salish Sea ecosystems. The reality is that the last 125 years have decimated one of the world’s most bountiful regions in terms of incredible marine resources. Resources that seem to have easily sustained millions of indigenous people in hundreds of tribes for 12,000 years.
I moved to San Juan Island from Interior Alaska in 2007 and have experienced nothing but predictable declines in most key fish species and ineffectively fumbling with protected marine mammals, residual industrial pollution, suburban sprawl and an insane level of recreational boating angling effort and expenditure with little and diminishing legal harvest. People out here, and presumable everywhere in the southern half of the Salish Sea, keep illegal fish and easily overharvest crab and shrimp in their fancy !00K plastic boats in a despicable form of exurban pride.
This non-profit “well-meaning” malarky is rampant and most often has no positive affect at all on resource health or reducing harvest as we collectively “fish everything to the bottom”. So incredibly sad. The term “shifting baseline syndrome” was born here decades ago by a fisheries biologist and I have seen that common human delusion framed by short lifetimes (and biologist careers) and steady declines in important species and entire ecosystems due to uncontained growth and direct and indirect consumption.
The functional success of the fish and wildlife commission, if any, is in a kind of rear-guard retreat and acommodation to the status quo and herds of rec business lobbyists and dishonest purveyors of boats and gear sales to catch fewer and fewer fish as the toilet swirls down and down….and non-effective hand-wringing goes on and on in the depths of the Anthropocene. We represent a nearly complete failure to protect the commons and life forces of the natural world that we sprang from so long ago.