Island County Wetlands Regs Codify ESA Salmon Deaths

The following poem was spoken as if the stuffed Chinook salmon I held was speaking to the Island County Commissioners January 7, 2008.

Wetland’s Salmon Mitigated Away

I’m a fish out of a wetland, my children will die
with no stream water to grow my fry.
Salmonid, my babies, can’t live downstream
if wetlands are bulldozed away.
Gone by way of development, stamped okay.
Practical you say, reasonable okay
to kill my kind you pave and slay.
Do you not know the cost to you under the ESA?
$15,000 - $25,000 for each salmonid without habitat
protected today by Federal law, the ESA
is the cost to progress, so the law says.
Progress paved over, the sources that fed
so many streams, that are now dead.
In the past Island County shorelines were fed
as uphill wetlands fed the streams
that are lost to memory – now a Dairy Queen.
So King Salmon, Chinook my kind
are an Endangered Species, because development holds sway
over stewardship of what was our birth ways.
These regulations you would codify
will kill us faster than you do today.
Your planning process has ignored the call
from our Governor to save Marine life for a future day
by saving existing wetlands, no matter the cost
or Puget Sound and all who live in it will die and be gone
no salmon, no herring, no whales, no way
if the source of our lives, your wetlands
are mitigated away.

© Copyright Theresa Marie Gandhi January 7, 2008