Speaking of Living Things, ...

I ran into this today while looking for something else. Didn’t find the something else, but was happy to find this on this day, this week, in this world. Note the tattered condition of the ribbon. Wore this for a lot of years back in the 1960’s and 70’s. And it’s still a sound sentiment, well to be remembered.

And speaking of other living things, there is the very good news for this new year that the second parcel of Lily Point property has been obtained by the Nature Conservancy to add to our cherished Lily Point Reserve. According to the Bellingham Herald, this brings the total Lily Point Reserve acreage up to about 280 acres, all to be used for ‘conservation and public recreation.’ The Conservancy will eventually deed the land to Whatcom County and the County expects to get grants to cover the costs. This is a major achievement for Whatcom County, for Point Roberts and for the many people here who contributed time and money and spirit to get it to happen.

Awhile back, I fantasized that maybe some zillionaire could just buy all of Point Roberts and that would be the best way to keep this little gem from becoming what the area to the north of us has, understandably, become: i.e., formerly wild land now wallpapered with houses and postage stamp lawns. (And, very beautiful gardens, it must be acknowledged.) Suburbs are okay; they are what they are, but the Point is really something else and it is so worth keeping, but it is so hard to know how to keep it.

Maybe, instead of the zillionaire, we could persuade the Nature Conservancy to just buy it. E.g., each year they could purchase yet another 150 or so acres. At that rate, the whole place would be in the reserve in twenty years. I could talk to them. We have about an acre and it includes a lot of great trees, including one arbutus and one (volunteer) young Geary oak. Not only that, we have an eagle roosting tree and also, out in the back corner, quite a respectable area of wetlands. (Also, if I do say so myself, a very nice garden.) We ought to be preserved! Right now, living here is the best way to preserve it I guess. But I’m happy to think that this year’s 150 acres might lead to even more…more living things!

What's Our Problem?

I remember World War II quite distinctly and especially the sense of urgency about doing things that were in the service of the war. The ration books that told you how much stuff you could obtain, the saving of things that the war somehow needed: tin cans, toothpaste tubes (which I think you had to take back to the drug store when empty in order to get a new one), jars of meat fat from cooking (like bacon fat), tin foil, tin anything (I guess). The saving of small amounts of money so that you could buy War Bonds. (If you could get together $18.75, the government would pay you back $25 in, as I recall, ten years). Even little kids saved their money for War Bonds. The practice air raids in which the black curtains had to be put on the windows and the local air raid warden walked around to make sure no lights were visible. There was such an every-day presence of the idea that we all were in a big problem and only if we all worked on the big problem would the big problem find its ultimate solution.

It is such memories, I think, that made the 9/11 advice from George W. to go out shopping so profoundly irritating. One the one hand, I was being told that life as I had known it was now gone (as in, after 9/11, everything changed); on the other, I was being told that nothing was any different, just get a nice, expensive meal at a nice expensive restaurant and you’ll feel fine. Cognitive dissonance, I believe that’s called, and an invitation to a schizophrenic response. So maybe we are just in the schizophrenic response phase.

It certainly appears that we are in a really big problem, at least as big as World War II. Perhaps we are just waiting for the equivalent of Pearl Harbor to join up. What would that be? Record floods? Record large hurricanes? Record heat waves? Melting glaciers and ice shelves? Apparently not. Whatever it’s going to be, I guess it will have to be more astounding than 9/11 for everything to change.

I saw Al Gore’s film; I thought it wonderfully impressive and, given all the positive response, I thought that the film itself might be somehow the equivalent of Pearl Harbor (at least in the sense of convincing people that something astoundingly dangerous had happened). Al Gore now has a website where you can sign up to be part of the solution: it’s called ‘We Can Solve It.’ I signed up, you can too, but so far I doubt if any of us signing up will be as helpful as my saving tinfoil was in WWII, and believe me I don't think that had much effect. But it’s something. Maybe it’s a start. The site itself urges you to tell other people to sign up and to nag your elected officials. I have to say that the site disappointed me because I want to be saving tinfoil or being told what my ration card allows (even if I don’t particularly long for a ration card itself). [ JUST IN: Having sent out a puzzled cry for help to my offspring, I am told that Al Gore’s site does have advice for individual action. It’s well hidden here. And it’s good advice.] /

Switzerland has something called the ‘2,000 Watts Society,’ which urges people to try to think about the energy they use. If everybody used 2,000 watts/year, that would be sustainable. In Europe, the average per-capita use is 6,000 watts; in developing countries like India, closer to 1,000. And, in stunning first place, we find Canada and the U.S., with 12,000 watts per person. So my next job is to try to figure out how many watts I am using per year and at least to think about how I can reduce it. I already have the swirly low-watt lights in all the places they can be; I keep the thermostat in the house at 65 degrees during the time we need heat, and we don’t have or need air conditioning, luckily; full washer loads, only, with cool water; clothes drying outdoors during the non-raining months; no driving without multiple reasons to go out. Stuff like that.

A small community like Point Roberts is, conceptually, a wonderful place to try to create community programs to showcase what people themselves can do, either singly or as a group. But somehow, I have the feeling that the libertarian nature of Point Roberts doesn’t exactly lend itself to this. But in time, real necessity will overcome even that, I suppose. I have been saving flattened tin cans for several years: it was for an art project, but maybe it will come in handy to defeat global warming. I mean, didn’t it work to overcome the Axis Powers?

Living With and Without Water

If there is one thing Pt. Roberts has, it’s water: all that ocean, all that rain. Except that if there is one thing we are seriously short of it is water. And that is a tiny version of what will be a much bigger story for many people in the world very soon, even those in first world countries. For us, it is a more extreme issue: although we have ocean and plenty of rain, we don’t have any source for potable water. Neither the state nor the county has any interest in providing us with drinking water because, obviously, it would involve miles of water lines and they would have to either go through Canada or under the ocean. Not a reasonable expenditure of public funds for 1,000 Americans. Wells are unreliable—especially during the summer dry season--and there is probably insufficient ground water for many of them, though there are a few around. So, awhile back we turned to our neighbors, the friendly Canadians, and said, ‘Please would you sell us some of your large supply of water?’ And they said yes.

Until they said, ‘But no more.’ Currently, there is a long-term agreement to provide Point Roberts with X gallons of drinking water/day. Because Canadian water standards are different from U.S. standards (different, not better, not worse), that water has to undergo additional treatment once it gets here, but we have learned how to deal with that. Several years ago, it became apparent to the B.C. legislature that they had a lot of water, that there was going to be a real demand for water resources in the world, and that they were at risk of inadvertently losing control of theirs. To avoid this, they passed a law that no water access can be sold to anyone outside of Canada, although current contracts were to be honored. However, they couldn’t be increased.

There’s a lot of empty land in Pt. Roberts and over the past few years, a lot more people are moving there (a lot more is, of course, a relative term). In any case, we have had something of a building boom with Californians and Canadians increasing their presence. And their water use. A year ago, the water board (one of our very few local government functions) announced that they were almost out of water use permits: indeed, there were more applications than there were permits. There were developers who wanted dozens of permits, there were people who had been planning for 20 years to built the cabin of their dreams and now wanted a permit, there were people who were moving up from California to build the houses that the sale of their overpriced California real estate now made possible and they wanted permits. For a year, this tiny community struggled with the issue of water permits and, but not so much, water itself as a resource.

Many angry meetings, many angry letters, much self-righteousness, much hiring of consultants, and some selection and resignation of water board members led to a final lottery in which everyone had an equal shot at the permits, whether he/she wanted one permit or 60. There are plenty of hard feelings still around from this year and there’s a plan proposed for water use, but the count/state isn’t on board with it. Most important, perhaps, is that all this discussion was largely among those who controlled the water and those who didn’t have water. Those of us who live in the community and have water and would not be directly affected by any decision other than one that also involved raising the monthly price of water were outside the discussion.

What it seems to have been was a terrific opportunity to engage the community in broader water resource issues that are going to arise with lots of natural resources and will arise again for us about water and soon: How much do we really need? How can we use conservation principles? Why are there no programs for encouraging or mandating low use of water? What about rain barrels and other methods of water re-use (grey water, e.g.). None of that. We missed that opportunity. I think that was not because we weren’t prepared to have such a discussion but because the issue got framed as ‘how to apportion permits when there are insufficient numbers of permits.’ We should have been asking, 'How are we going to think about our water use?' At the end of the discussion we didn’t have, there might have not been so many angry people. And we might have moved a few steps toward incoporating into our being a more rational approach to living in this world and not just on top of it.