Dear Port Commissioners and Staff,
The Port is planning on spending $6.5 million on a warehouse. They’ve thus far spent $500,000 on design and planning. It will cover 70,000 square feet, 150 feet × 460 feet. It will be a metal frame covered with seven layers of ripstop nylon fabric. It will be placed between the existing warehouse and the log yard.
The plan is to import eucalyptus pulp from Brazil. Eucalyptus is water intensive. Even in places where it is supposedly grown conscientiously, the water table has dropped:
Suzano, the corporate giant the Port hopes to bring into the deal, is now growing genetically engineered (GE) eucalyptus. GE plants are typically engineered to withstand a certain herbicide that will kill everything else.
https://watershedsentinel.ca/article/brazils-green-deserts/
We have a situation where the water table has been drawn down, there’s only one type of plant growing, it’s non-native and it’s a product of the lab rather than nature.
Single species ecosystems don’t exit in nature. Equatorial forests are home to half of all the living animal and plant species. A single hectare of rainforest may contain 42,000 species of insects, 300 species of trees and 1,500 species of higher plants.
Biodiversity in all its forms, from genes and bacteria to entire ecosystems, is in crisis. One million species are threatened with extinction. Irreplaceable ecosystems like parts of the Amazon rainforest are turning from carbon sinks into carbon sources due to deforestation. 85 per cent of the earth’s wetlands have disappeared.
https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/biodiversity
Because they are transitional areas between the land and the sea, and between freshwater and saltwater environments, estuarine wetlands can be seriously impacted by any number of human activities.
The greatest threat to estuaries is, by far, their large-scale conversion by draining, filling or dredging. These activities result in the immediate destruction and loss. Many estuaries in North America have been filled to create shipping ports and expand urban areas. In areas of the United States, estuarine habitat loss is as high as 60%.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_estuaries/est09_humandis.html
The Port of Olympia sits on East Bay, an estuary that’s seriously degraded in all respects: it’s been dredged, armored and filled; the fill is contaminated dredge spoils; the number and variety of species has crashed. The $6.5 million the Port plans to spend on a ripstop nylon warehouse for eucalyptus pulp would go a long way toward fixing some of this.
Harry Branch is a marine biologist and retired vessel captain who writes about urban estuaries at garden bay blog
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