Letter from Katherine Lewis:

The effects of Climate Change and environmental destruction are real and are occurring locally!   Kitsap County water, air, and land that used to bustle with life are sadly emptier as more people move here and as general deregulation of commerce has been widely implemented in the last fifty years and is increasing under Trump’s administration. Beaches and streams that were full of life when I grew up here in the sixties are much more barren, birds flock less here, and Olympic and Cascade glaciers are missing, yet Republicans still continue with systems and ways of doing things that destroy the resources we live within, and Democrats are continually playing catch-up and clean-up. We must change agricultural, logging, and transportation systems to reflect what we know now! We must act locally and act globally too.

 For instance, modern agricultural industrial practices in Washington, developed over the last fifty years, have poisoned and depleted our soil and won't continue to produce a sustainable economic frame going forward, no matter how the government props up the current methods. Research shows that soil not naturally fertilized, but instead chemically fertilized, becomes depleted of organisms which would otherwise do the work of helping to recycle carbon-dioxide.  In addition, the current method of raising animals for food in a factory manner directly increases climate change because the methane gases produced there aren’t diffused naturally. Likewise, and this does concern us locally in Kitsap County, clear-cutting profits the timber industry, but helps deplete climate protections created by living trees. 

All these practices are relatively recent and can change for the better, given what we know now!

Instead of continuing free-form consumption of the planet's lifeforms for the sake of profit, we can come together to face the problems and work together to fix them! To find out more about this information, please see the Netflix movie, “Kiss the Ground.”  And please discuss these issues with leaders who will take on these problems instead of denying them!