Victory!

 

Victories do happen - and sometimes not at all as we have anticipated.   While working for TCAT, I had begun an effort to stop the neighboring town of Lacey from removing one of its two protections for residential trees.   And I continued this work for the first 5 months of my Restoring Earth Connection time. Like other local cities Lacey have what I call a “floor method” – they have set a very miniscule minimum number of trees you have to have on your property, and so you can cut all the way down to there.  (In fact, you can cut them all, but then you have to replant that small minimum number).  But their other protection which tended to act as a brake on getting quickly to this floor was they had what we called the 5 in 3 rule.  This rule said you could only cut 5 trees in 3 years.   But Lacey wanted to do away with this ordinance.  It was never clear what exactly motivated this (other than the ever going drive towards development) since they had a survey they did which showed clearly that the vast majority of the public wanted stronger ordinances or the existing ones enforced. 

It went to the planning commission – we fought there for 3 months – then it went back to city council and the fight started all over.  It would be scheduled for a vote, and it would get pulled, a special work session was called, etc.   It also became very clear that the staff wanted to do away with this rule, and we dealt with the frustration of having our three minutes of testimony and the staff giving an hour presentation.  We lobbied council members and who was on council changed during the 15 months and some council’s positions changed back and forth as well.   Over and over, we turned out the public to testify and to write letters.  Since the public will was clearly being fought and ignored at many points I prepared over and over again to lose, and yet….there always seemed hope and end apparently close at hand.  It seemed bad form to give up that close to a decision.

Before the final vote, I tried for 6 weeks to reach the council person I knew would be the swing vote, but there was little response and so the night before with no call I thought “Ok he is avoiding me, we are going to lose.”   But the day of the vote at 6pm, he called me at 2pm.   To my surprise he told me “No, we cannot eliminate tree protections” and “I will do you one better, I am going to propose that we change the protection to you can only cut 3 trees in 5 years”  And he did.  Almost all his colleagues were caught by surprise, but 4 of 7 voted for it.  I wish I could say they sited all the benefits of trees that we had been testifying too for over a year.   But what each of them sited was that they had heard over and over from the public who wants the trees protected.   So sometimes….public pressure does work!   I had simply been trying not to go backwards and yet the public pressure actually created forward motion.

It of course felt good to have a victory, and when we do we should surely celebrate them because there are many loses in climate work.  There are some who might say:  “So you saved some trees in one community…big deal how does that really address climate change?”   The Quaker Thomas Kelly expressed the idea that we are not each to die for each struggle, but rather to find the concern that God has made our heart tender to and to faithful to that particular one.  For me this is such a good example.  Climate change is way to big and covers way to many subject areas and is also everywhere now.   So we cannot define effectiveness by some earth shattering stop action…rather we must chip away at it, one bit at a time…each of us doing our piece.   It will only be controlled by each of us doing our piece and we may often have to do that when it looks like we are going to fail, and we are often going to do it painstakingly and drawn out battles.   This little example is a microcosm of the effort ahead of us.  I was faithful.  I did my part.  I kept going – and it had surprising results.