Washington: Floods caused by housing development rather than clearcutting?
In reading this newsPAPER story below remember that 25,000 forested
acres getting paved over every year has less of an impact than the
half-a-million acres of forest that’s clearcut every year. –Editor,
Forest Policy Research
Josh Baldi, who is helping to lead Puget Sound policy for the state
Department of Ecology, sees in last week’s flooding a legacy of land
use that is exacting a predictable punishment. “Every year it is like
we have forgotten what happened the year before,” Baldi said. “We have
seen a crisis response, but not a policy response. “You have to ask,
how do we get out in front of this, what should we be doing
differently?”
Annual Weyco Flood
The floods show the need to protect what’s left in the
Puget Sound basin of nature’s way of running water downhill in big
storms, experts say. “You fly over Snohomish County, and it looks like
a forest by day, but by night, you see all the lights,” said Brian
Boyle, former state commissioner of public lands. “It’s been
subdivided. “Kitsap County is gone. The forest may look like trees,
but it’s not a forest.” Statewide, about 1.2 million acres of
forestland, almost all of it privately owned, converted to other land
uses including development from the late 1970s to 2002, a little more
than the acreage of Olympic and Mt. Rainier National Parks combined,
according to the state Department of Natural Resources. Every year in
Western Washington, about 24,000 acres, or an area of working forests
almost half the size of Seattle, mostly on private land, is converted
to rural-residential and urban development, according to Luke Rogers
at the UW College of Forest Resources.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008617175_rivers12m.html
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