connecting the dots on the timeline

Another blog from November 2007 - On Adhocracy

2010-03-21T15:42:00.000-07:00

Back in 2007, I built several sites using Marc Andreesen's marvelous NING social network construction set, and one of them, the one which I had named ADHOCRACY, got the following editorial as a seed.

_____________________________________________________________________________

I've been doing politics in this town for decades and along the way, I have discovered some VERY interesting things.

The most serious thing I have observed is that after I help friends and allies get elected to public office or ensconced in positions of power, they pretty rapidly drift out of my circle of friends and quite often step wholeheartedly into a category that feels more like "enemy combatants" than allies, co workers, or confidants.

I find this both amazing and disturbing, and had it not happened to me so many times, at so many levels of government, I would consider it an anomaly or a fluke. But I think it is a reflection of something much deeper, not about me, but about how representative government actually works.

Which is to say: I don't think I can point to a single instance in history where it has really worked. Or where it has created a stable system that remained true to its intentions. Hence my interest in adhocracies.

A bit more about Adhocracies:

Almost exactly 10 years ago Phil Speser and I went out for venture funding of a system to do what this site does, and a lot more. It was better than this because it ran "peer-to-peer" which means it ran a "fat client" (as opposed to a "thin client") and as a result the network (and its data) did not have to reside on a server.

The "due diligence" guys the V-C guys brought in to assess our technology were Lotus Notes guys. And the guys they talked to were pretty much all hardened bureaucrats and Fortune 100 guys. And they all said "this is a BAD idea." The most prescient of their critiques was that It "would allow the development of decentralized systems and we will lose control" ...

Which is EXACTLY what happened a few years later when "peer-to-peer" networking was rediscovered and harnessed by some college kids as NAPSTER as a way to implement music sharing, and look what happened: they basically took down the RIAA and the music publishing business.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adhocracy

Adhocracy is a type of organization being an opposite of bureaucracy. The term was first popularized in 1970 by Alvin Toffler^[1], and has since become often used in the theory of management of organizations (particularly online organizations), further developed by academics such as Henry Mintzberg.

The word is a portmanteau of the Latin ad hoc, meaning 'for purpose', and the suffix -cracy, from the ancient Greek cratein(κρατείν), meaning 'to govern'^[1], and is thus a heteroclite. The term was first popularized in 1970 by Alvin Toffler^[1] and has since become often used in the theory of management of organizations, further developed by academics such as Henry Mintzberg.

Welcome to a WAY better way of doing things

how we got here

2007-06-28T19:22:00.001-07:00

Under what Authority are they doing all this?

That's what Edel Sokol asked at the October 19. 2005 Jefferson County Planning Commission meeting.

"Edel Sokol asked where the authority for the WRIA planning units came from. Kyle Alm replied that it was in the RCW. Ms. Sokol asked about the selection process. Mr. Alm replied that he did not know, although the tribes, the county, the PUD, environmental groups, and other entities were selected."

Here's some more background

HOUSE BILL REPORT
HB 2054

As Reported By House Committee On: Agriculture

& Ecology

Title: An act relating to water resource management.
Brief Description: Authorizing local watershed planning and modifying water resource management.
Background: Water Resource Management - General. With the adoption of the surface water code in 1917 and the groundwater code in 1945, new rights to the use of water are established under a permit system.
However, certain uses of groundwater not exceeding 5,000 gallons per day are exempted from this permit requirement. The permit system is based on the prior appropriation doctrine that "first in time is first in right." Other laws authorize the state to establish minimum flows and levels for streams and Lakes. The permit system and the state's laws for managing water resources are administered by the Department of Ecology (DOE).

Water Resources Inventory Area (WRIA) Planning. The Water

Resources Act directs the DOE to develop a comprehensive state water resources program for making decisions on future water resource allocation and use. The act permits the DOE to develop the program in segments. Under the act, the DOE has divided the state into 62 WRIAs.

Groundwater Planning. The groundwater code permits the DOE to

designate and manage groundwater areas, subareas, or depth zones to prevent the overdraft of groundwaters. In 1985, legislation was enacted that permits groundwater management studies to be initiated locally and allows local governments to assume the lead agency role in developing local groundwater management programs.

Interties. Public water system interties were expressly
acknowledged by statute in 1991, and new interties were authorized under
certain circumstances. By definition, interties do not include the development of new sources of supply to meet future demand.

Summary of Substitute Bill: WRIA Planning. The county with the
largest population residing within a WRIA may choose to initiate local water resource planning for the WRIA. If planning is conducted for the WRIA, one planning unit for the WRIA is to be appointed as follows: one member representing each county in the WRIA, appointed by the county; one member for each county in the WRIA (but not less than two) representing collectively all cities in the WRIA, appointed by the cities jointly; two members representing collectively all public water utilities in the WRIA, appointed by the utilities jointly; one member representing collectively all conservation districts in the
WRIA, appointed by the districts jointly; four members representing the general citizenry, appointed by the counties jointly; and six members representing various interest groups, appointed by the counties jointly. If one or more federal Indian reservations are in the WRIA, the planning unit includes a tribal representative of the tribes on the reservations, appointed by the tribes. Representatives of the departments of Ecology, Fish and Wildlife, and Transportation are nonvoting members of the planning unit. In addition, the largest water purveyor in a WRIA is to be represented on a planning unit for a WRIA in King, Pierce, or Snohomish counties, whether the main offices of the purveyor are or are not located in the WRIA. Except for multi-WRIA planning, the lead agency for WRIA planning follows: in western Washington, the largest
water utility in the WRIA; in eastern Washington, the county with the largest population residing in the WRIA. The lead agency provides staff support for the planning process.

Substitute Bill Compared to Original Bill: Added by the
substitute bill are the following provisions: adding state and tribal
representatives to the planning unit; requiring a planning unit to begin work once two-thirds of the appointments have been made; requiring the unit to seek consensus in decision-making; prohibiting planning units from setting instream flows for the Columbia or Snake rivers and limiting their authority to set instream flows to planning areas that are tributary to the Columbia or Snake rivers or to marine water; allowing the DOE to request a court decision regarding conflicts in a plan with state or federal law; preventing plans from interfering with federal reclamation projects; identifying circumstances under which interties may be used as a primary or secondary source of supply or may be used for the development of new sources; allowing pre-1991 interties to be used to full design or built capacity; and preventing relinquishment for nonuse if the nonuse is caused by water efficiency or processing of certain transfers.

Here is a map of our WRIA

Here is a map of the Planning Unit negotiating table

Timeline of Understanding

2007-06-28T17:07:00.000-07:00

The Timeline of Understanding

1862: Smallpox Epidemic 14,000 Native Americans perished, about half the Indians living along the coast from Victoria to Alaska
1864-1868 bad fire period. One fire burned from Port Ludlow across Mt Walker, Mt Turner and Quilcene Ridge in a few days
Port Hadlock was founded as a lumber milling town by Captain Samuel Hadlock in 1870. It's located on the southwest shore of Port Townsend Bay.
1881 Port Townsend ssketch: Charles Nordhoff
1889 Statehood and Constitution, Riparian Doctrine
1891 agricultural land in cultivation, in timber Entire population about 200,000, not including British Columbia
1900 Tenth and Eleventh Annual reports of the Fish Commissioner
1902 Worst fire year of the past 275 years on the Olympic.
1904 Olympic Gravity Water System under construction
1904 Special election voted 445 - 2 to: "become indebted $250,000.
1904 Letter from U.S. Army ... no delay in the contract ...
1905 United States v. Winans, 198 U.S. 371
1905 Quileute Village at La Push
1908 Winters v. United States, 207 U.S. 564
1910 steel ingots at the Irondale works,
1910 Big Auction of Irondale Lots
1914 Fish hatcheries accepted as mitigation State Fish Commissioner
1915 Fort Worden, Port Townsend,
1916 salmon fishing season scene.
1917 Surface Water Code 90.03
1917 Slab Camp Fire 3000 acres, Duckabush Fire 4810 acres, Dosewallips Fire 2665 acres, Canyon Hill Fire 3000 acres
1918 Mt. Zion Fire 2000 acres, Duckabush - 2000 more acress,
1921 The Great Blowdown" windstorm strikes the Washington coast
1921 Thirtieth and THirtyfirst Annual Reports Fish commissioner
1924 Penny Creek Fire 1774 acres, Snow Creek Firs 3100 acres, Discovery Bay fire 5000 acres
1925 Green Mtn fire 9615 acres, Snow Creek Fire 3825 acres
1926 Penny Creek Fire 1774 acres
1928 Crown Zellerbachs Mill in Port Townsend in operation

Some web-scraped information related to George Gibbs

2007-06-28T16:38:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: You need to know that George Gibbs was a polymath, not only one of the leading geologists in North America at the time, but a specialist in the languages of the northwest coast's Indian Tribes and not incidentally one of the translators who accompanied Isaac Stevens on both his survey of the route for the Pacific (Great Northern) Railroad, but on his treatying adventures as well, and his dictionary of the Chinook Jargon was dissected by The Hon. George Boldt and provided an essential component of the Boldt decision.
"In 1854 he received the appointment of collector of Astoria, which he held for several years, and on the expiration of his term of office remained in the west, devoting his attention to the study of Indian dialects and to geology and natural history. Later he was attached to the United States government boundary commission, where his knowledge of natural history made his services of great value, and he was also geologist under General Isaac I. Stevens on the survey of the North Pacific railroad. In 1857 he was appointed to the northwest boundary survey, and at the close of its work prepared an elaborate report on the geology and natural history of the country. He returned to New York in 1860, and was active in his efforts toward preventing secession. In 1861 he volunteered and did military duty in Washington. During the draft riots in New York, two years later, he offered to defend the residence of General John C. Fremont when a night attack was threatened. Subsequently he was secretary of the Hudson bay claims commission in Washington, and also was engaged in the arrangement of a mass of manuscript bearing on the ethnology and philology of the American Indians. His services were used by the Smithsonian institution to superintend its labors in this field, and to his energy and complete knowledge of the subject it greatly owes its success in this branch of science. He was an active
member of the New York historical society, and was its secretary from 184.2 till
1848. His papers on Indian dialects contributed to the various Smithsonian publications include numerous titles, and his separate publications are " The Judicial Chronicle" (Cambridge, 1834);" Instructions for Research relative to the Ethnology and Philology of America " (Washington, 1863); "A Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon or Trade Language of Oregon " (1863); " Comparative Vocabulary " (1863) ; and "Suggestions relative to Objects of Scientific
Investigation in Russian America " (1867)."
http://famousamericans.net/georgegibbs/

Harvard Education
Gibbs had studied law at Harvard University, but was more inclined to literary pursuits, which led him to work as a librarian for the American Ethnological Society. In Oregon, he worked to draft treaties with the tribes in the Willamette Valley. Skilled in the study of languages, he compiled invaluable dictionaries of a number of native languages. His expertise in cartography produced the first accurate map of the region.

Stevens's Railroad Survey and Treaty Team
At age thirty-eight, Gibbs was hired by George McClellan, a family friend, to work on the Northern Railroad Survey. From 1853 to 1855, he studied rocks as a geologist and mapped the homelands and languages of native people as an ethnologist for the Pacific Railroad Survey under the command of Isaac Stevens.Gibbs was also instrumental in gathering and preserving geological specimens for the Smithsonian. He adhered to rigid procedures for the preservation of creatures of various sizes. The specimens he supplied to the Smithsonian became part of the zoological report of Stevens' survey report. In 1854, Gibbs reported to McClellan on the Indians of Washington Territory providing what he thought was comprehensive information on Native American societies prior to the treaty period. Once the railroad survey was done, he was hired by Governor Stevens to help with the treaties

The Treaty Process
Gibbs was by this time earning a reputation as the "most apt student of the Indian languages and customs in the Northwest," skills that earned him inclusion at the main table, with Governor Stevens, during the treaty councils. One issue placed before the treaty team and producing the most vigorous debate was the question of how many reservations should be created. Gibbs argued passionately that, due to the variety of the Indians' customs and languages, and their need for fishing rights, many small reservations should be created.

http://washingtonhistoryonline.org/treatytrail/context/bios/george-gibbs.htm

And what is truly remarkable, is that some of his most important writings are now online!

INDIANS TRIBES of WASHINGTON TERRITORY by George Gibbs originally published in the United States Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region Washington, 1877

including his census figures Estimate of Indian tribes in the Western district of Washington Territory - January, 1854. This is right before the Stevens Treatites

Names of tribes and bands.	Where located.	Men.	Women.	Total bands.	Total tribes.	Remarks.
Upper Chinooks - 5 bands, not including Cascade band.	Columbia river, above the Cowlitz	--	--	--	200	Estimate. - The upper of these bands are mixed with the Klikitats; the lower with the Cowlitz
Lower Chinooks - Chinook band, Four others, (estimate.)		32 ---	34 --	66 50	----- 116	One of these is intermixed with the Cowlitz - the rest with the Chehalis
Chihalis.	Gray's harbor and Lower Chehalis riverr	--	--	100	---	Estimate.
Do.		--	--	200	----- 300	Estimate.
Cowlitz and Upper Chihalis.	On Cowlitz river and the Chihalis, above the Satsop.	--	--	--	165	The two have become altogether intermixed.
Tai-tin-a-pam	Base of mountains on Cowlitz, &c..	--	--	--	75
Quin-aik, &c.	Coast from Gray's harbor northward.	--	--	--	500	Estimate.
Makahs	Cape Flattery and vicinity	--	--	--	150	Estimate.
S'Klallams	Straits of Fuca	--	--	--
Kahtai	Port Townsend	67	88	155
Ka-quaitl	Port Discoveryy	24	26	50
Stent-lum	New Dungeness	79	91	170
All others	False Dungeness, &c., westward.	--	--	475 ----	----- 850	The last estimated.

Chima-kum	Port Townsend..	---	---	---	70
To-an hooch	Hood's canal.	123	109	265	-----
Sko-ko-mish	Hood's canal - upper end.	---	---	200	-----	Sko-ko-mish estimated.
				----	465
Guak-s'n-a-mish	Case's inlet, &c.	19	21	40
S'Kosle-ma-mish	Case's inlet, &c..	14	13	27
Se-heh-wa-mish	Hammersly's inlet, &c.	11	12	23
Sa-wa-mish	Totten's inlet, &c.	2	1	3
Squa-aitl	Eld's inlet, &c.	22	23	45
Stell-cha-sa-mish	Budd's inlet, &c.	---	---	20	-----	Estimate.
Nov-seh-chatl	South bay.	---	---	12	-----	Estimate.
				----	170
Squalli-ah-mish - six bands	Nisqually river and vicinity..	84	100	184
Steila-coom-a-mish	Steilacoom creek and vicinity	---	---	25
				----	1700
Pu-yallup-a-msih	Mouth of Puyallup river, &c.	---	---	50	-----	Estimate.
T'Qua-qua-mish	Heads of ….do…….do……	---	---	50	-----	Estimate.
				----	100
Su-qua-mish	Peninsula between Hood's canal and Admiralty inlet.	215	270	485
S'slo-ma-mish	Vaston's island	18	15	33
				----	518
D'Wamish	Lake Fork, D'Wamish river.	89	73	162
Sa-ma-mish S'kel-tehl-mish	D'Wamish lake, &c.	71	30	101
Smul-ka-mish	Head of White river..	---	---	8
Skope-ah-mish	Head of Green river..	---	---	50
Se-ka-mish	Main of White river.	---	---	30
				----	351
Sin-a-ho-mish		161	138	350	-----
Qunk-ma-mish Sky-wa-mish	Upper branches, north side Sinahomish river.
Sky-wa-mish Sk-tah-le-gum	Upper branches, N. side Sinahomish river.	---	---	300	-----	Estimate.
Snow-qual-mook	South fork, north side Sinahomish river.	---	---	195
				----	275
Sto-luch-wa-mish	Sto-luch-wa-mish river, &c.	---	---	200
Kikiallis	Kik-I-allis river, L. Whidbey’s island	---	---	75
				----	275
Skagit	Skagit river and Penn’s Cove.	---	---	300	-----	Estimate.
N'qua-cha-mish Sma-lih-hu Mis-kai-whu Sa-ku-me-hu	Branches of Skagit river.	---	---	300	-----	Estimate.
				----	600
Squi-na-mish Swo-da-mish Sin-a-ah-mish	North end Whidby’s island.	---	---	----	300	Estimate.
Samish	Samish river and Bellingham bay.	---	---	----	150
Nook-sank	South fork of Lummi river.	---	---	----	450
Lum-mi	Lummi river and peninsula.	---	---	----	450
Skim-i-ah-moo	Between Lummi Point and Fraser’s river.	---	---	----	250
					7,559

Later Population

Estimate of Boas

Anthropologist Franz Boas, whose studies of Indian life are respected,
visited the Peninsula in the 1890's. He estimated in 1870 the number of Native
Americans living in the Olympic Peninsula area as follows:

400 Chimacum lived on the Quimper Peninsula and along what is now Hood
Canal;

2,000 Clallam (along with their sub tribes) spread in 17 villages from
Discovery Bay to Clallam Bay;

2,000 Makah and Ozette occupied the Neah Bay area and west of Lake
Ozette;

500 Quileute lived where the village of La Push is located;

To the south of La Push lived 250 Queet and Quaitso - both related
linguistically to the Salish Clallam and Chimacum;

Additional smaller tribes, such as Hoh and Tsooe, resided on the coast

Boas estimated the main tribes at nearly 6,000 strong in the Olympic Peninsula area in 1870.

Chimacum is the reanglicization of a previous anglicized word "chemakum"

Franz Boas noted
"When George Gibbs studied the Chemakum, they had a population into the 90’s."

Of course, this story has come once again to the light as the PUD's LOSS
project at Beckett Point has hit the almost inevitable human remains.

Illigitimus non carburundum esse

2007-06-28T09:28:00.000-07:00

The next major factor in our landscape, after the glaciers, has been erosion.

In a sense that is an oversimplification, because erosion was a major factor before the glaciers came, but almost all evidence of prior landforming aside for the obvious uplifiting was removed by the galciations, at least in the lowlands - but it was a crucial factor that erosion of the uplands continued DURING the glaciations and that will prove to be a really major thread as this this discussion of erosion unfolds.

Tabor and Cady decoded the matrix of rock and explained how the rivers consistently follow the easy routes to lower elevations, following and downcutting through the softer rock and spreading out into gravel banks when the encounter layers too hard to cut. You just heard something important, that you already know intuitively: the velocity of water in a river is a function of the gradient and the channel width. For a given rate of flow (governed by runoff from rainfall, snowmelt or simply the intersection of the stream channel with the water table) the velocity is clearly a function of the area of the channel.

You know this empirically, from holding a garden hose: obstruct the flow with your thumb and the velocity increases spectacularly.

In fact, the title to this piece is a multilevel pun, integrating erosion (carburundum) with Bernoulli's law and the "carburator" on the car you used to drive, that was based on Bernoulli's physics and used a "venturi" (the equivalent of the Dungeness River Bridge) and a throttle (the equivalent of your thumb on the hose) to neck down the airflowing into the manifold and thus increase its velocity in different areas to selectively pull fuel from different metering jets.

What you may not know is how particles or cobbles or boulders move downstream in a channel. The process is generally called "sediment transport" and in streams, "bedload transport" and the mechanism is called "saltation". John Downing, the author of one of the textbnooks I point to for this part of the discussion is an oceanographer and instrument designer, who also happens to be one of the world's great experts in this field. He designs and builds tools used by scientists all over the world who are studying sediment transport and monitoring sediment produicing projects.

I have had the great pleasure of arguing the actual mechanics of this with John, drawing the same force vectors shown in his drawing at the whiteboard in his office, and we have been sponsored by USDA to do fundamental research in this area of science.

This discussion of mechanisms is essential because we have inherited a landscape that is dominated by what was left behind when the ice retreated, and almost everything we do, and the long-term consequences of what we do, are directly influenced by this.

Some of it is easy to recognize at the landscape scale - at least after some one points it out to you once or twice:

As you drive west out of WRIA 17, headed toward Sequim and you look up to the southwest, across Bell Hill, you can see a series of meadowed and forested terraces that end abruptly in steeper hillsides. These are best understood as reminders of the dozens of enormous debris flows that left criss-crossed mudflows as the fjords and glacial lakes that were once perched above the ice collapsed, over the thousands of years between glacial stades.

Here is a map from Easterbrook that shows how thick the ice was .at maximum extent of the glacier.

This map is significantly enhanced by the detail found in W.A. Long's field notebooks:

I want to call your attention to the three major river systems on the northeastern peninsula, the Dungeness, the Quilcene and the Skokomish, all draining the Olympic mountains. They were still doing that when a mile of ice was covering the Puget Sound lowlands, just about like they do now.
The big Quilcene River actually changed its course significantly over the millenia that ice choked the sound: It was eventually deflected Northward along the edge of the ice - but it apparently used to discharge to saltwater on the other side of Mt Walker. Look at the Dungeness, flowing North: nearly half of that river's length is running through the area that was at least once a glacial moriane, a river of water running through another river, a river of stone. Same for the Skokomish, and the lower reach of the Quilcene. Strip back the thn layer of vegatation covering most of the landscape an this is what you'd see:

The generallly repeated fiction is that native Amrericans walked here either across remnants of this sea of ice or walked across a land bridge that appeared as a result of dramatic fluctuations in sea level (hundreds of feet) associated with the ice and the rebounding crust. Regardless of the path they followed, there is plenty of archeological evidence to place them here when a lot of the landscape still looked very much like the last pair of images in the next series.

25,000 years ago 20,000 years ago 18,000 years ago 16,000 years ago 6000 years ago

What you have to remember from this is that the glaciers left behind an almost incomprehensible amount of gravel, distributed along the margins of the ice, and pockets of clay that slowly developed from weathering of the terrestrial rocks above the ice, that accumulated in lake bottoms (remember: Puget Sound was a landlocked lake for thousands of years).

These clay layers, interspersed with gravel from glacial moraines and streamchannels formed during the retreat of the icesheet provide the basis for many of our aquifers.

The glacial landscape also extends into the saltwater regions in our bays and estuaries: our beaches and sandspits are continually formed and reformed according to predictable dynamics, governed by the same fundamental sediment transport processes that apply to our rivers and streams.

John Downing offers some profound advice to developers in his book The Coast of Puget Sound, its processes and development that applies every bit as well to terrestrial development and work around streams as to shorelines:

"In the past, siting and construction decisions have been based upon local knowledge of the sedimentation patterns in a coastal
area and quite frequently they were correct. New developments, however, now occur in areas of Puget Sound which are inappropriate for a
planned usage or where local knowledge is unreliable simply because existing information covers a short time span. Key project decisions in
the future will necessitate more complex engineering evaluations than ever before. The basis for these evaluations consists largely of ideas
about sediment transport acquired from studies conducted in other parts of the world and must be adapted to the Puget Sound region."

Under what Authority are they doing all this?

2007-06-27T21:12:00.000-07:00

HOUSE BILL REPORT
HB 2054

As Reported By House Committee On: Agriculture

& Ecology

Groundwater Planning. The groundwater code permits the DOE to

Here is a map of our WRIA

Here is a map of the Planning Unit negotiating table

Come and Get It!

2007-06-27T19:46:00.000-07:00

Settlement period
George Gibbs' Census
Census of Western Territories Indian Tribes

Gibbs was a Harvard educated geologist/polymath - a linguist who was determined to learn the languages of the west coast Indians. He traveled with Isaac Stevens on the Pacific Railroad survey and then continued with him on the "Treaty Trail, when Stevens met with trinbes to install the treaties that quieted title to the land. I used to have copies of his journals as well as his census. In one journal he bemoaned being confined to the tent while the Treaty was negotiated in Chinook, a trade jargon of 122 words that was substantially lacking in abstract constructs, which he considered preposterous, since in the entourage at that moment was a team of translators capable of accurate real-time communication across the "native" dialects spoken by all of the participants. His census is now online: http://www.wellpinit.wednet.edu/sal-hist/gibbs_toc.php#Q10

"Among their articles of manufacture are blankets and capes, made of the inner bark of the cedar, and edged with fur. Their houses are of considerable size, often fifty to a hundred feet in length, and strongly built. They sometimes place their dead in trees, at others bury them. Their marriages are said to have some peculiar ceremonies, such as going through the performance of taking the whale, manning a canoe, and throwing the harpoon into the bride's house. The superior courage of the Makahs, as well as their treachery, will make them more difficult of management than most other tribes of this region. No whites are at present settled in their country; but as the occupation of the Territory progresses, some pretty stringent measures will probably be required respecting them.

Next to the Makahs are the Clallams, or, as they call themselves, S'Klallams, the most formidable tribe now remaining. Their country stretches along the whole southern shore of the Straits to between Port Discovery and Port Townsend; besides which, they have occupied the latter place, properly belonging to the Chimakum. They have eight villages, viz: Commencing nearest the Makahs, Okeno, or Ocha, which is a sort of alsatia or neutral ground for the runaways of both tribes; Pishtst, on Clallam bay; Elkwah, at the mouth of the river of that name; Tse-whit-zen, or False Dungeness; Tinnis, or Dungeness; St-queen. Squim bay, or Washington harbor; Squa-que-hl, Port Discovery; and Kahtai, Port Townsend. Their numbers have been variously estimated, end, as usual, exaggerated; some persons rating them as high as 1,600 fighting men. An actual count of the last three, which were supposed to contain half the population, was made by their chiefs in January, and, comprehending all who belonged to them, whether present or not, gave a population of only 376 all told.. The total number will not probably exceed 800. That they have been more numerous is unquestionable, and one of the chiefs informed me that they once had one hundred and forty canoes, of eighteen to the larger and fourteen to the smaller size; which, supposing the number of each kind to be equal, gives a total of 2,240 men."

There is LOTS more including great stuff about the Chemakums

Isaac Stevens' Treaties

Tribal water rights claims "vest" here, in 1855, 45 years before Statehood:

But in fact they predate even the U.S. Constitution, because the tribes - at the point in time when the treaties were signed - still held title to the land. Much of this title they knowingly ceded to the US Government. But what is most important to understand is that they RESERVED from what they ceded to the United States certain rights, and therefore what they reserved was never granted and hence, were never available to the US to bestow on its citizens.

The "iron fist" in the Boldt decision is in the conclusion that the Tribal Rights to water (as required for fish habitat) are protected by the U.S. Constitution, and that therefore any claims of the settlers to rights granted through Riparian Doctrine or other basis under the Homestead Act of 1862 or acts that followed it, are not so protected. This is my brutish paraphrase of Fay Cohen's thesis, but I believe that this interpretation is accurate.

Subsequent attempts to reinvent the meaning of this deal, through reinterpretations of Winans and Winters, and the MCarran Amendment need discussion. This is a good place to start talking about it.

Old Fort Townsend

Civil War

Homestead Act of 1862

1889

Statehood and Constitution, Riparian Doctrine until replaced by State Surface Water Code 1971

(Some water rights claims vest here)

Fishways required on all dams

There is an excellent discussion of the intial problems that were unfolding around water access and water rights in the western states under the Homestead act of 1862, that provides context for understanding the laws that were enacted later, such as Washington's Surface water Code

" In Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado, homesteading cut into the access of the
large ranches to water. In response,
ranchers (themselves or their cowboys) homesteaded prime spots to reserve water
access. At times, tensions escalated into violent conflicts called range wars, for example, the Johnson County
War in Wyoming.

The Homestead Act helped create more than 372,000 farms. By 1900, settlers
had filed 600,000 claims for more than 80 million acres (320,000 km²) of land in
the West under the Homestead Act. The historian Paul Gates has concluded, "their
noble purpose and the great part they played in enabling nearly a million and
half people to acquire farm land, much of which developed into farm homes, far
outweigh the misuse to which they were put". ^[2]

The intent of the Homestead Act was to grant land for agriculture. However, in the arid areas west of the Rocky Mountains, 640 acres was generally toolittle land for a viable farm (at least prior to major public investments inirrigation projects). In these areas, homesteads were instead used to controlresources, especially water. A common scheme was for an individual acting as a front for a large cattle operation to file for a homestead surrounding a watersource under the pretense that the land was being used as a farm. Once granted, use of that water source would be denied to other cattle ranchers, effectivelyclosing off the adjacent public land to competition. This method could also beused to gain ownership of timber and oil-producing land, as the Federal government charged royalties for extraction of these resources from public lands. On the other hand, homesteading schemes were generally pointless for land containing "locatable minerals", such as gold and silver, which could be controlled through mining claims and for which the Federal government did not charge royalties.

There was no systematic method used to evaluate claims under the Homestead Act. Land offices would rely on affidavits from witnesses that the claimant had lived on the land for the required period of time and made the required improvements. In practice, some of these witnesses were bribed or otherwise collaborated with the claimant. In any case the land was turned into farms."

The Land of Fire and Rain

2007-06-27T16:33:00.000-07:00

Earthquakes and shifts on fault lines

Landscape level change during the pre-contact period was clearly dominated by tectonic activity. Sea level fluctuations were dramatic - at rates that apparently exceeded 1 foot per year in some areas. So it can only be assumed that these shifts were accompanied by earthquakes as well as inundations

Climate

In our own experience of the environment , climate plays a major role. So major that I have used a monthly assessment of climate along a timeline, as a primary measure of the conditions under which settlement and development of the region occurred.
See Climate on a Stick

The climate timeline begins shortly after the earth moves out of a period called the little ice age, in 1839. So from 1750 - 1850 this was a reasonably inhospitable region, with cold snowy winters and advancing glaciers in the mountains

Sea Level Fluctuations

Sea Level Fluctuations including sea level falling 300-400 below today's level during the ice , and then rapidly rose between a low estimate of 250 and a high of 600 feet above present sea-level are believed to have followed the retreat of the ice. It is also assumed that sea-level in this region experienced 2 significant rebounds more recently - at approximately 11,000 and 10,000 years b.p.

Forest Fire history

The recurring pattern of forest fires over the past 6000 years has dominated the landscape, in 150 - 250 year cycles. As a result of these fires, there are very few trees in WRIA 17 that are older than the the last big fire in 1701, and the regrowth in the wake of that fire provided the majority of the Peninsula's "old growth" timber.

The last of the three great burning episodes during the Little Ice Age occurred between 287 and 320 years ago. During that time there were two fairly well documented fires or burning episodes, one in about 1668 and the other about 1701. Since the fire about 1701 (287 years ago) was the last of the big fires, we have the best records of its distribution. Areas where stands from this fire occur are shown in Figure 5. This fire or series of fires apparently burned more than one million acres on the Olympic Peninsula, and 3 to 10 million acres in western Washington. Henderson 1988

There has also been a great deal of interest in correlations between higher than normal solar output (as indicated by sunspots) and drier than normal weather. One of the more interesting discussions I have seen applied to local conditions is discussed in Henderson, and involves mapping the pollens that accumulate in bogs to different plant communities and inferring weather required to support those plant communities. Bogs also collect layers of charcoal and volcanic ash, and the ash layers precisely link the timelines for various places scattered across a landscape.

There appears to be a reasonably strong correlation between fire history and solar activity. The three worst burning periods and the three lowest sunspot periods line up well.

The Reading Room

2007-06-27T12:16:00.000-07:00

The relevant background readings for this section can be found online, and what is not immediately available there can be found in a few books - much of it in a book from the USDA-FS, two books from U fo W Seagrant program, one by Burns and the other by John Downing, and a magazine article by Jim Lichatowich, who will probably be recognized as one of the more important people in the history of anadromous fish on the Olympic Peninsula, if we actually do manage to save them.

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I believe that you will have to read both of these Sea Grant books, as their content overlaps in important ways.
The good news is that they are reasonably easy to find and delightful.

The USDA-FS book () R6-ECOL-TP-001-88) is harder to find. We got copies of it when it was published for each of our local libraries, but that was years ago and I have no idea if they are still around. There is no clearer introduction to the role of forest fires in our landscape and I will excerpt large blocks of that section for this site.

Jim Lichatowich's story "River of Stone" was published in Peninsula Magazine in Spring 1991. This brief article sets the stage for his 1999 book Salmon Without Rivers, and contains one of the core concepts necessary for understanding the current instream flow dilemma, set forth with such mathematical purity that I am sure that a school-child can understand it.

"An aggraded river is difficult to detect and repair because it changes so slowly that we forget what the river looked like in its pristine state. Our collective memory does not go back far enough to associate today's condition with a deteriorated change. I've had people tell me, "Well the river has always looked that way." The events that led up to the present problem may have originated back in time beyond the memory of present-day residents of the Dungeness Valley. But natural and man-made markers can help us gauge long-term changes in the river. One of those gauges is the lower river levee. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the levee to contain flood waters along the lower 2.5 miles of the east bank of the river. When the levee was completed in 1964 it was capable of containing flood waters the magnitude of which we expect to see in the Dungeness only once every 200 years. Now, twenty-six years later, the levee is only capable of containing the flood waters we expect to see once in every twenty-five years. In other words, today the levee will contain a much smaller flood than in 1964. The levee hasn't worn down, the river bottom has risen-the result of gravel aggradation."

The situation Jim explains is NOT simply the result of human activities like diverting the river into irrigation ditches, diking the river bank, or building bridges that stand with their feet in the river. This is a problem that began far upstream in the glacial lakes, with the sediments and gravels at the bottom of the fjords that formed while ice was still heavy on the land. It is the millions of cubic yards of gravel that came down from Canada with the ice and were left behind, perched in valleys as much as 5000 feet above sea level.

Father upstream, in the canyon of the Graywolf you can see it clearly in the landscape. On one side of the river is the basalt bedrock - the remains of that seamount that got stuck in the subduction zone - but on the other side, where there is a trail, the ground slopes steeply into the river. What you see if you stop to look, includes layers of lake bottom clays and a river that continues to downcut along the rock wall.

Some of the these sloping sediment layers are exposed far above the river, under the duff of the forest floor. Every so often the river takes a bite out of the eastern bank, and chokes on it, sending a breif torrent that moves more gravel toward the sea. And every few hundred years, fire returns and in the wake of the fire, water finds its way onto the clay between layers and lubricates a huge landslide that falls into into the river and yet another pulse of material begins its journey to the sea.

Jim wrote:
"The heavy load of gravel in the Dungeness channel has affected all the people and animals that depend on the river. As the layer of gravel gets thicker, more and more water flows subsurface through the gravel instead of above where it can be used by people, fish and animals. As the channel widens due to bank erosion, the remaining surface water spreads out and becomes shallower. In some places, the amount of water flowing on the surface has been reduced to the point where it is too shallow for adult salmon to migrate upstream to spawn without help from man. Water withdrawals for irrigation and other uses such as municipal water supply increase the problems the salmon must deal with. Farmers can point out that they have been withdrawing water from the river for 100 years without hurting the salmon. The slow changes in the river of stone have altered the relationship between farmer and fish. The ripples have radiated out to encircle both farmer and fish in a struggle for water, a struggle neither created but neither can avoid."

Now comes the tricky stuff: This next discussion leads directly to the jaws of the current hot potato issues surrounding "Best Avaialable Science" about which I've written an essay that I will only mention here, but not reference yet.

The following unpublished 1972 manuscripts by W.A. Long USFS Geologist are w/o doubt some of the best available science - arguably some of the best science ever done in this region, and they explain more than most of the peer reviewed stuff can, cuz they are the real thing: geology done by a geiologist walking around with a sighting compass and an altimeter and a rock-hammer, following the trail of the glaciers, breaking rocks and making maps. We put a complete set of these in the Library in about 1993, but I did not see it last month when I was looking for old documents there. I still have at least 6 volumes of these complete with maps.

When Worlds Collide

2007-06-27T10:12:00.000-07:00

OK - all that stuff about the geology and the glaciation and the erosion was the preamble, this is what you really need to know:

We've just about lost the fish. In fact, if we were to count the cost of the fish-permit buybacks and the litigation and the failed hatcheries and all the process that has followed the Boldt decisions, we have probably spent more money on "not losing" the last of these fish than we spent putting astronauts on the moon. And the fact that you can often buy the flesh of an endangered species in the supermarket for less than you pay for cheese, is at least deeply ironic.

In fact, it seems every bit as absurd as buying gasoline at the pump for under $10/gallon when we are spending $100,000/minute in an even less effective effort to control the world price of oil.

So, we need to ask ourselves, and one another: what is really going on?

I am going to tell you that the reason that these particular fish are having more trouble now than they had after the glaciation, when the place was about as habitable as a supermarket parking lot, is twofold:

Because we - them and us - have a lot in common. We are really top-of-the-food-chain predators and we are both "opportunivores" - that is to say: we eat anybody smaller or slower or dumber than we are for dinner, and not only that they taste good and are full of stuff that is hard to find elsewhere, and we really like to eat them.

So problem #1 is that we did not look at them in terms of their "functions and values " in the ecocsystem - we looked at them as a limitless supply of free food and hunted them w/o mercy.

But it now appears that a problem at least as serious as overfishing is that we have each gone blindly after the same physical territory. And right or wrong, we are cleverer than the salmon, and so we have been winning consistently in our own efforts to develop and maintain our nests in and along their rivers for about 100 years. That does not mean we are wiser, but we are clever certainly.

But very few of us have even considered the disproportionate consequences of our actions until quite recently. The huge advantage we have over them, at least for the moment, is that we can easily move out of their way, but they really can't move out of ours.

This image does not completely communicate the issues, because it does not really show the hydrograph - the fluctuating amount of water in the rivers. But it does an excellent job of showing who is in the river, and when they are there. But it is still very useful because we can easily run it against the hydrograph.

It does not really geolocate the spawning gravels of the different species, either. And there is the rub, because these are fish who have "co-evolved" with the streams to effectively utilize every accessible reach of the stream, and we have substantially changed the lower reaches, with outright barriers to fish passage and by diking.

These two images from the Dungeness River illustrate the precise nature of the problem. When river channels narrow, the water accelerates. At higher velocity it moves more and larger cobbles. When the channelizing is past - in this case the dike and the bridge, it slows and drops the payload of gravel it was carrying, locally raising the level of the bottom of the stream. During periods of low flow, this elevated bottom presents obstacles to fish passage, and if fish foolishly spawn in these gravels (as they have done very successfully for the past hundred centuries) when there is clearly adequate flow, their nests may very well dessicate when the flow goes subterranean - and most of the water in the river is running subsurface, through the gravel.

The Glacial Pace of Change

2007-06-27T05:48:00.000-07:00

Glacial Timescale

The second major player in shaping the landscape has been a long series of glacial-scale geological processes. You can still see them operating in the high country, as the tiny remnant glaciers tear bowl-shaped valleys off the north facing slopes of the Olympics.

There is lots of debate about global warming and global cooling cycles. Suffice it to say we have ice-cores from the antarctic that go back thousands of years and we can examine the chemical content of water that fell as snow a very long time ago.

This frozen water has some interesting attributes that will reenter the story eventually: the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 varies over time in CO2, but Oxygen has isotopes as well and these isotopes allow us to age-date water in certain kinds of aquifers rather accurately.

Anyway, until we get access to more complete data that's now emerging from melting ice near the poles, the beginning of our Glacier story starts here, above the Vashon lobe of the Cordillaran Ice Sheet barely 12,000 years ago:

You can still see deep grooves carved into the rocks on the back side of Mt Zion from when ice over Bon Jon Pass into the Little Quilcene River Drainage. In fact, one of the reasons we believe that the Little Quil provides such good drinking water is that it was protected from the sediment riding along the bottom the glacier by clean ice from the top of the glacier pouring down the drainage from above, and if you know your rocks (hint: the ones you are looking for are not basalt ...) you can trace the lateral and terminal moraines left behind by dozens of overlapping tongues of ice as the glacial ice advanced and receded.

One of the things this photographic reconstruction does not really communicate is that the rivers above 2500 feet were still flowing and their erosional processes were still running essentially as they do now except that the water they discharged did not return to the sea - instead it formed enormous fjords, and these fjords filled with sediments as well as boulders that were carried in icebergs that calved off the main ice-sheet and floated up the fjords. you may have seen them: huge boulders - some as big as you house, with trees growing on top.

You see them and climb up on top and you look up and wonder how much noise they must have made as they rolled down the valley and then it hits you: you realize the cliffs are all basalt and the boulder is all granite. Where did this thing come from?

It came from the Canadian coast range, carried south in the river of ice.

OK, now we have to get serious for a minute.

The ice was thousands of feet thick and water weighs over 62 pounds/cubic foot. Ice floats but even frozen water weighs more than 50 lbs/cf so that means 50 X 2000# of 50 X 3000# per square foot loading. Enough to deflect the earth's crust significantly! And to scarify the surface to a level that a bulldozer operator would be proud to have achieved.

The generally repeated fiction is that native Americans walked here from Asia across this sea of ice or walked across a land bridge that appeared as a result of fluctuations in sea level associated with the ice and the rebounding crust. Regardless of the route, there is plenty of archeological evidence to place them here when a lot of the landscape looked very much like this.
Regardless, there is pelnty of archeological evidence to place them here when a lot of the landscape still looked very much like this.

25,000 years 20,000 years 18,000 years 16,000 years 6000 years

Following the retreat of the ice, several things happened in sequence, the most important being revegatation, as shown beginning in the image.

Where did the plants come from? There were islands offshore that did not get buried under ice and they served as refugia for plants and animals.

The other critical thing that happend was that the salmon came baclk to their rivers. And fertilized the watersheds with their carcasses, making it possible for nature to revegatate the area rapidly. Within a few thousand years, there were forests again!

I wrote this almost 20 years ago, but the facts have not changed so it's still worth reading:

"Since that time (the retreat of the icesheet) the forested lands and the rivers that drain them, and the salmon that return to them year after year, have been developing together.

People have been here the whole time, and have left a telling record in their garbage dumps. We find them exposed in landslides and dig them up when we excavate the foundations of our homes: firepits and middens, the remains of the campsites the Indians left behind. We see another record in the pollen layers preserved in lake-bottoms and bogs.

This shows the pattern of forest fires, and the slow parade of flowering plants that gradually recolonized these mountains and shorelines. The salmon return from the sea to spawn and die, carrying back to the upper reaches of our rivers the richness of their bodies, ions of metals not found in the rocks of our mountains, proteins built from nitrogen and carbon, all collected during the years they spend foraging in the estuaries and oceans.

In the blind passion of their return they bring these nutrients from the sea back to the land and in their death they leave them behind, to be distributed into a vast food-web containing at least 22 vertebrate species. Nothing else in nature does this.

Every other natural process eventually depletes the land, drains its riches to the sea. The glaciers abrade it, the fires release it to the rain. The rain erodes it away and flushes it downstream, hurrying it back to the sea. It is very probable that in the wake of the retreating ice-sheet, the salmon prepared the barren mineral surface of the land for the forest we now see. Run after run of salmon fertilized the upper reaches of the streams and built up the nutrient supply until trees could take root and grow here.

The forests appear to be very young on the Olympic Peninsula. According to the records left by the Indians, the big trees have only returned during the last 3000 years, and some of them are over 1500 years old. After there were big trees, the people on the north coast could build boats and take to the sea themselves, and they hunted for seals and whales. Until then, they
lived off the land, off the salmon and deer, and other, smaller mammals.

The geology of the central Olympics is some of the most complex on earth, and defied mapping until the middle of this century. The mountains here are composed of uplifted layers of ancient sea-floor, of basalts from undersea volcanos and sediments deposited during 40,000,000 years of continental erosion. Some of these ancient sediments remain as shales and sandstones, others have been metamorphosed into slates and schists.

Each layer responds differently to erosion. About 15 million years ago, the material which became the Olympic Mountains was scooped off the bottom and slowly uplifted by a great ongoing collision. The horseshoe-shaped basalt crescent of mountains that flanks the peninsula on the north and east flanks, from near Neah Bay around the end of Discovery Bay to well south of the Skokomish River, represents the remains of a series of seamounts, great undersea volcanos, containing over 10,000 cubic miles of material.

These enormous basalt mountains became caught in the subduction zone, the area where the eastward advance of the sea-floor runs under the lip of the north-american subcontinent. Behind them, the sea-floor continued to advance and the crust, which is thinner at the bottom of the ocean than it is at the surface, buckled and broke into gigantic slabs, the advancing sea-floor sliding under each broken plate and tilting it on edge. This happened dozens if not hundreds of times and created a unique landscape: alternating layers of harder and softer rocks. Eventually, the subduction zone moved west, off the coast this entire tortured landscape floated above the surface, and in the process, folded like a strudel."

There are some really wonderful books about this, including my copy of Roland Tabor's book which is missing so I can't scan it (Tabor and Cady are the people who decoded the mystery of the geology) and you should read them, and then we can go for a walk down the ridge toward Lake Lillian and I can show you places where the a dozen layers of sedimentary rock are folded like strudel.

But that is not the real issue here: What is REALLY important about the glaciers is what they left behind. Which takes us to the discussion of erosion, saltation, bedload transport, aggradation, and that will explain WHY, after all these years, the fish that make nests in the lower reaches of our rivers are in so much trouble, and that will take us straight into the reason that this whole instream flow discussion is "suddenly" taking place.

Our precise location on the landscape-level timeline

2007-06-27T02:48:00.000-07:00

Until the 20th century and the arrival of explosives, machinery and concrete, the surficial geology that supports the landscape we know and love was the result of three major actors: geological processes, glacial processes, and erosional processes. Compared to these three, the impact of human activity might appear to be be pretty minor, but our impacts have been both rapid, in terms of the scales of the other processes, and highly selective, whereas most natural processes tend to have broader impacts.

Geological
Processes

This section describes the effects of geological processes that are dominated by seafloor spreading - a process that is currently occurring at around rates between about 10 mm and 4 cm/yr in our region. That is a lot of movement. Mountain ridges around the headwaters of the Bogacheal River are RISING that much.

The following images summarize the current knowledge sets. It should be recognized that much of this information is VERY new, and that human understanding of the geology of the world is very new - the late 20th century - and human understanding of what's going on under the Pacific Northwest is some of the newest information in the world.

The geology of the Olympic Mountains was initially decoded in 1978 - barely 30 years ago. The following images are from the 1999 USGS Report SUBDUCTION ZONE AND CRUSTAL DYNAMICS OF WESTERN WASHINGTON: A TECTONIC MODEL FOR EARTHQUAKE HAZARDS EVALUATION which is one of the most interesting papers I have ever encountered.

What these maps have not told you explicitly is that this is one of
the youngest and most tectonically active landmasses on Planet Earth but they do show that we are right in the middle of something major. The next map ought to calibrate you. The map above locates only the earthquakes that occurred during the past 27 years!

This map shows all of the earthquakes (from the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network), including those relocated using the tomographic velocity model. The colors represent depth ranges for the earthquakes with red for 0-10 km, green for 10-20 km, blue for
20-30 km, and black for 30-60 km. PHFZ=Portland Hills fault zone, SHZ=St. Helens zone, WRZ=western Rainier zone, SFZ=Seattle fault zone, SWF=South Whidbey Island fault, SJF=San Juan fault, DMF=Devils Mt. fault zone, DAR=Darrington fault zone,
OWL=Olympic-Wallowa lineament.

I believe you need one more map to get the picture solidly established: the location of the deep earthquakes. Go get it!

http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1999/ofr-99-0311/illusframe.html

http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1999/ofr-99-0311/grayeq60.gif

best available science

2007-06-12T17:46:00.000-07:00

This term (BAS) gets bandied about quite a bit these days. Mostly by people who do not know what it really means. Its meaning has been practically constrained by the needs of two powerful factions with somewhat different needs: the economic interests of the professional science lobby, and the reluctance of electeds and their designated decision-makers to make "hard" decisions. Which is to say, decisions which might prove to be "hard" on some of their constituents, and are therefore "hard" to make. The area of overlap between these group's need-sets defines the meaning of the term.

Katherine Baril has a great story that I am going to post as an interview, about the creation of the EPA, in the wake of Nixon's signing the historic Clean Water Act. And how it came to pass that in the US "Environmental Protection" became the domain of lawyers and regulatory scientists rather than the domain of ecologists and environmental scientists. And the fundamental irony of that situation as it applies to the burden of proof, and whose burden it has become, and what must be proven .

This is a much larger story than I am addressing here: the story of how it came to pass that it became the inalienable right of corporations to do harm and the responsibility of society to prove harm has been done - and how the legal construct "beyond reasonable doubt" (which in ecospeak is just another way of saying "we have clearly defined the point of no return and are now crossing it ... ") seems to have become a condition of that proof.

But in the meantime, we are stuck with this awkward situation where the electeds (and the general public) have been convinced that they need hard science to draw hard lines to support hard decisions, because if they don't have the hard science (and hard data) to support their decisions, then lawyers will bring in experts to knock the flimsy foundations out from under their squishy assumptions and tear their house-of-cards regulatory framework apart (causing a domino effect that exposes the foxes guarding the henhouse, I suppose) ... I don't know how far to carry this.

But the regulators cannot just hire staff scientists (agency scientists) to develop lawyer-proof policy. Because the academics who control the orthodoxy of "hard science" and work for the lawyers as "experts" will come in and challenge the validity of the data and the methodologies of the field scientists and the conclusions of agency scientists, in an all-or-nothing effort to demonstrate its complete inapplicability to the conclusion at hand, without further studies. Because this is how an orthodoxy works. Science is a really big business now, a secular orthodoxy. There are almost certainly more scientists alive now than all the scientists who have died in history (and more lawyers, too) and they are almost all looking for work.

Let the science consumer beware.

The most ferociously disputed opening line I ever offered as a journalist began "Geologists generally agree ..." I had called Roland Tabor, the guy who had mapped the peninsula for USGS and decoded the pattern of tectonic activity that had resulted in the land form we know, the guy who had "written the book" and then after a through rewrite of my own article I had called the Park Service's geologist, who had written a book of his own, that appeared to me to be completely congruent with and largely dependent on Tabor's earlier work, and he didn't even l;et me finish the first sentence. He said "Stop right there: Geologists NEVER agree."

The area of overlap between these two group's need-sets SHOULD define the meaning of the term "Best Available Science" - it should be available and it should be science and it should be applicable. But in fact, the scientists DO agree on one thing. And they agree with the electeds on this, too. They agree on the need for more studies.

Before the electeds will make decisions, they need recommendations, and before the scientists will make recommendations they need more studies. But as soon as the study is published in DRAFT form, other scientists working for people (or their lawyers) who for one reason or another do not want a hard line to be drawn "yet" will step up to the plate, shred the report, and demand more studies.

You think that's funny? Listen to this!

http://www.co.jefferson.wa.us/commdevelopment/PDFS/2004Cycle/BAS/BASletterWSAC.pdf

The next installment of this discussion will address the problem of "repurposing" data.

If you only knew what I already know ...

2007-06-12T17:02:00.000-07:00

We all say this, if only in our heads. We all even believe it, at least most of the time. That what we believe is based on what we know, and that if others knew what we know, they would see what we see.

So the idea behind this blog - the read/write web - is to see if we (meaning you and I) can find a way to share what we each see. So that I can show you what I've seen, and what others have seen, and so that you can show me, and in doing so, show others, what you have seen that maybe we have not seen.

And this tool gives you a chance to show important stuff to other people, and to tell people why it is important, and why it ought to be part of the discussion.

Pretty simple, really.

So I am not going to post long soliloquies or rants that you have to wade through.
Just short, succinct little statements, like this one, and I hope to hear comments, and I hope that that the comments you post will attract other comments.

illuminating local history

2007-06-10T23:22:00.000-07:00

One of the basic ideas of civilization is that we can see and know more, collectively, than we can see and know individually. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is the physical reality that we do not get to live long enough to see, let alone understand, the long term effects of our actions as they unfold over time. In an attempt to overcome the limitations of our short lives, people have created libraries and archives, in which history can be stored and stories saved.

We all know that "history" is really just "his story" - the story told and recorded after the fact, by the survivor(s) and that there may well be a lot of critical information that was lost in translation. Someone else's story. Failures. Ideas that were tried but that did not acheive the desired objective. Whole collections of field notes that were lost, or simply not published.

so the idea of this blog is to provide a chance to expose what I have uncovered in our local history archives to illustrate our situation. And since it is interactive, it provides a chance for us to show one another what we have found in the stories and the data that others have saved for us.

By the way "trans-lation" literally means something very much like "over the wall" ... the wall of course being the walls we build around ourselves.