The suit was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Seattle by Friends of Magnuson Park. It claims that proposed city plans to fill 5.86 acres of wetlands for the development of five lighted athletic fields violate the Clean Water and the National Environmental Policy acts. ...
The [U.S. Army Corps of Engineers] last month gave Seattle Parks and Recreation the go-ahead for the project when it granted a permit, which included "special conditions" requiring the city to perform mitigations.
Citing drainage, wildlife and other effects, the plaintiffs say mitigations will not prevent wetland damage. Nor will city plans to create new wetlands offset the loss of natural ones, plaintiffs say. More
The suit highlights two problems with the policy status quo.
Like Hamm Creek, the role of the Corps is to make sure the rules are followed. But due to the negotiability of 'mitigation,' the Corps ends up merely facilitating wetland destruction -- as long as the destroyer has the wherewithal to recreate wetlands somewhere else.
This is termed 'mitigation banking,' as though wetlands can be deposited in an account for later withdrawal. This system can be gamed if a developer is extremely determined to do so.
Municipal bureaucracies have such determination in spades.
The flaw in banking is obvious. Man-made wetland cannot have the diversity and complexity of natural wetland. Even restored wetland requires long term, labor intensive monitoring to check the ecosystem functions, and regular maintenance to prevent and remove problems. Imagine the difficulty of monitoring and maintaining a completely man-made site.
The underlying problem is society's attitude toward nature where it abuts civilization. For civilization, read 'economic interests.' It's the paradigm that says Shoot The Mountain Lions, rather than question the policies allowing construction of McMansions in mountain lion habitat.
It's up to us to tell our representatives to do things differently. Right now, this may be happening in Seattle with regard to trees. Neighborhoods prize their old trees, and now we also know this "urban canopy" (as the Sierra Club so aptly puts it) helps with smog and surface temperatures.
Yet Seattle's tree policy does little to stop developers from bulldozing trees. Even when the city Arborist rates a tree as 'Exceptional,' there is still a banking-like procedure for 'mitigating' the killing of that tree, by planting a sapling somewhere else -- and not necessarily even in the same neighborhood.
Recently most of a block near my house was nearly denuded of the few trees it had in preparation for a new retail development. Only an outcry saved some of them. Ironically, because of groundwater issues on the site the developer is likely to install a wetland -- in the same location as a much larger wetland that was asphalted-over in less enlightened times. We'll have a resolution on the site design in a few months.
Is Seattle going to end up like the movie? Will the trees be 'banked' in sealed domes orbiting Saturn?
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