CREP is a federal program administered by counties. In Whatcom County it kicks ass. You literally say "dear Whatcom County, I would like to sell you back your river." Whatcom County comes in, does an assessment, plants a shit-ton of native species and gives you CA$H MONEY$$$ in perpetuity so long as you promise to keep your cows away from the "riparian buffer" and observe the stewardship that they're paying you for. CREP in Whatcom County is no joke - they'll pay you $560 an acre per year to keep a buffer next to your stream. CREP in most places is a total joke: the next county over will pay you back for planting your own trees if you promise to never cut them down.

Development swaps are similarly toothy in Whatcom County - you can pay someone to never farm their farmable land in exchange for being allowed to develop another part of land that shouldn't be developable. I saw all sorts of "farms" where you could never again plant a crop, which no realtor on the planet felt a need to disclose. Someone with bucks decided that it was worth paying double for the land so they could build a Starbuck's or whatever. And they had to do this because Whatcom County considers the land valuable. Skagit County? No fucks given.

We have similar programs around here, similar, but different, and a lot of them have similar struggles as well. It reminds me a lot about companies not following through on land cleanups and such, where the laws and contracts come from a good place, but there's flaws in implementation and enforcement. You mentioned carrots and sticks later on in your comment, and my previous comment was pretty carrot heavy, but honestly? Sometimes I think we need more sticks. There's a lot of sideways tomfoolery out there, not just with the environment, but in general, and I think part of it is because a lot of people who do wrong or decide to be just plain careless think that nobody is looking or that if they get caught, no one is really gonna do anything. Sadly, I feel like that's often the case.

I benefit from clean rivers in Skagit County, too. But they're one and two counties over, respectively, so I don't really have a voice in that discussion. Should I? Should more of my tax dollars go into CREP programs for Whatcom and Skagit County in order to better incentivize clean rivers?

I cannot answer for you, obviously, but I think you answered it a bit here . . .

Here's what I know. You can own land? But you can't own an ecology. If you're using land for something that isn't so great for the environment, then we ALL have an economic incentive to make you stop doing that. The person who needs to be incentivized the most is the person who is damaging the environment, but we rely pretty heavily on sticks not carrots.

I can answer for me though, and I'd say yes to all of that. While I don't think I should have as direct of a voice as someone who lives in a county opposite of me, knowing that what happens to a river a hundred miles upstream of me or what happens to the air a hundred miles upwind of me can affect me and my neighbors? I think I should have some voice in what goes on, and I do, through my state and federal representatives. If I have to share in some of the social burden of other people's decisions, I should have some say in what decisions are made and why. When I get to use my voice and how strong it gets to be, well, I dunno.

One of the things I left out of my comment, cause I had way too many thoughts and a lot of them were hard to squeeze in, is that I think we're at the point where we can no longer shrug and turn a blind eye to our interconnectedness and the impact of our decisions. For better or worse, how we live our lives affect others, from the things we say to the things we buy to the foods we eat, so it's important to be mindful of our choices.

It lead me to thinking quite a bit about "private land" and "public land" and all of those things and it's got me to wondering if maybe we're starting to go things out wrong way. I don't know what it would look like, economically or legally, but I wonder what would happen if we started to discourage individual land ownership and started to encourage collective land ownership. For one thing, I think it would do a lot to diffuse power, thereby reduce the risk of harm caused by a handful of individuals making unhealthy decisions, like strip mining or clear cutting, or what have you. I think at the same time, I wonder if collective ownership would spread the wealth around a bit, so to speak, and through that would encourage people to be more active and engaged and concerned with what happens with the land around them and why. But then, I dunno, in a world with misinformation campaigns and information overload, can we really trust ourselves as groups to make healthy decisions?

That last difficult question aside, I think there's another good thing that would come with that, and I think that would be for reincentivizing us to connect with our land. I think part of why we've gotten lost these days is two fold. First, I think for a lot of us (me included sometimes) we think nature is something over there. It's in the park across town, the land preserves controlled by the county, the rainforests in South America or Africa, the great oceans. But nature's not just over there it's also very much right here wherever that might be. It's in our houses and apartments and places of work, in our cars, in our backyards and patios and driveways and parking lots. I think the more we realize it's "right here and now" the more we treat it as immediate and important and give it the gravity it deserves. I think additionally, we don't treat land as important as it is, maybe because we all seem to own less and less. Maybe by owning more and through that sense of ownership and responsibility and community, we'd make healthier decisions.

Chances are good, however, that if Con Agra decided that they were going to start farming in Whatcom County there'd be a different outcome.

I could rant for forever about corporate food. For the sake of brevity though, I'll just list some bullet points. Feel free to pick one out if you want to talk about it at all. 1) Too much concentration of wealth and power. 1a) Controls the market instead of being controlled by the market. 1b) The idea of food companies being too big to fail disturbs me. 2) Destroys local communities and economies. 3) Divorces us from our relationship to food. 4) Promotes monoculture crops and all the risks that comes from those. 5) Large corporations are just icky and I don't like them.

but you're also missing that forests have the highest biodiversity. Go out to the Olympic rainforest some time. Drive out towards the ocean. What you'll discover is that really, the exact same critters are in the fields as are in the forests but in the forests there are also thousands of critters that don't like fields.

Forests have pretty high biodiversity and I love them for it. The majority of the time, when I got outside, I spend it in the forests. But at the same time, forests have different biodiversity too. The organisms that inhabit them are often different than organisms elsewhere. The types of birds you'll see in forests aren't always the types of birds you'll see in grasslands or marshlands and vice versa. If I saw a woodpecker out in the prairie, I'd assume it was lost. If I saw a sandpiper in the deep woods, I'd assume the same. Same for rodents, bugs, what have you. There's some overlap, but there's also a lot of differences too. Really diverse is really good, but that also includes other biomes. Niches are created and filled by accident. but they have an undeniable gravity to them.

Personally, I'm here to argue that people say "tradition" as a way to argue the problem is thornier than it really is because fuckin' hell I come from a long line of lumberjacks who had to try something else when all the trees were cut down and my grandfather was perfectly happy spending his life as a plumber.

I hope you don't think I'm clinging to tradition to justify inertia. I'm certainly not. If anything, I'd say the more we become aware of ourselves and the world around us, the more important it is for us to be introspective about our traditions and think real hard about the impacts they have on our lives. That said, lots of people do hold steadfast to tradition, and not just when it comes to the environment and land use, and if we're to make changes, we need to know that traditions can be both an aid as well as a hurdle, depending on the tradition and its execution and context and all that.

This feels like it is a little less focused than my previous comment. I apologize in advanced. I didn't have the benefit of a three hour walk to help me write it. :)