President's Column

By Janine Gates

I love this time of year. It's a time for change, personal renewal and goal setting for me - probably because my daughter and I share September as our birthday month. At SPEECH, we are experiencing positive change and growth as well.

We are very excited to announce our new website at http://www.oly-wa.us/greenpages/index.php Set up by our website developer Scott Bishop, it will direct you to our regular domain name listed on the masthead. It is a work in progress and we invite your feedback.

We intend the website to be an interactive resource of environmental information, conversation, articles, photos, and up-to-the-minute news. As we found with this current issue highlighting water issues and the upcoming elections (the primary is August 21st), we just don't have the room to print everything we'd like in the Green Pages. Please go to our website to see more questions and responses from local candidates.

On that note, please consider subscribing to the Green Pages. Not only does this ensure that you won't miss an issue, it will help us raise needed revenue. We are finding no extra copies around town shortly after our initial distribution, so with this issue, we will be increasing the number of copies printed. Thank you for your support!

Knowing that Green Pages would be covering water issues, I recently delved into Fred Pearce's When the Rivers Run Dry: Water - The Defining Crisis of the 21st Century. The issue of water, locally and globally, is huge.

While The Olympian has recently offered an excellent series of articles on local water issues, I must comment on the downright misleading coverage of the Capitol Lake Adaptive Management Plan meeting held on June 20th. Several of us in attendance at the meeting were disturbed to read The Olympian's front-page "opinion" that the workshop leaned towards preserving Capitol Lake. This simply was not true. I can't help but think that the consultants, too, were surprised to read that their carefully crafted presentation of the issue was so misconstrued.

The "lake vs. estuary" pictures that accompanied the article were also unfortunate choices, seemingly intended to reinforce The Olympian's effort to divide the conversation. We hope The Olympian will cover this issue with more care in the future.

As a 25-year resident of Olympia, I personally love the lake and walk around it nearly every day. It's the reason I bought a house so close to downtown. I have taken many pictures of the lake and the habitat it provides for herons, migratory birds, and yes, even those nasty nutria. However, I see the environmental value and reasons it should be allowed to revert to an estuary.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it will still be possible to take those same images, walk the dog, bike, run and do tai-chi around the area as the tide flows in and out. The water will still offer a beautiful reflection of the Capitol Building, most of the time.

Any change will, of course, take careful planning. What a unique opportunity we have to restore and cleanse the southernmost tip of Puget Sound of an environmental wrong. Really, what's most important is what's best for the health of our environment and wildlife, at the same time balancing our human interests and economy around that focus. It can be done.

Janine Gates, president of SPEECH, can be reached at http://www.janinegatesphotography.com/