I see it’s that time of year again, where well-meaning but short-sighted folks start to sprout along with the tulips and the cherry blossoms, and take root in legislative and planning offices whispering their soft refrain into the warm spring breezes: “Liveaboards are bad for the environment! Liveaboards are bad for the environment! Crush them and drive them before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!”
This gentle admonition has been popping up with some regularity in Seattle since the 1950s. And it has worked, driving the number of households living on the water here down from a high of around three thousand to perhaps eight hundred or so now. And what do you know… the water is cleaner now! So we must be on the right track. But this is slow, slow progress. I think that we, as Seattleites, can do better.
I would like to propose a new policy instead of all these piecemeal attacks on houseboats and liveaboards, a comprehensive alternative to take care of these miscreants once and for all, and more besides. It’s called “Don’t touch the nature.” We love the outdoors, and wildlife, and fish, and trees, but for god’s sake, don’t touch any of it… you might break it!
I think you will find that this policy aligns with the general objectives of the new shoreline regulations, and further, that it is much more effective in reaching those objectives than what the city proposes.
Don’t Touch The Nature! Don’t let anyone touch the nature. Ban all boats; ban public access to the shoreline itself, and to any tributaries which might at some point deliver their contents into the Sound. We’re ruining it, all of it, simply by performing our natural and inescapable bodily functions. We should be allowed to look, but not touch. For a fraction of the cost of enacting and enforcing these regulations, large glass viewing towers can be erected at a safe distance from the water, from which those unfortunates who previously were contaminating all if it can get their fix by staring out at it as long as they desire.
I say all this because, while I have no more scientific understanding of the contribution of liveaboards to environmental degradation than do the regulators, I am down here on the water all the time, and I can tell you that it is not at its worst in the cold of winter, when only liveaboards are here: it’s at its worst right now, summertime, when all the other folks come down to the water. Gas sheens blossom, floating candy wrappers multiply, and un-identifiable bits of ick flow in with abandon from both the marina and the nearby beach at Golden Gardens. I shudder to think what Lake Union looks like right now.
Clearly, then, the problem is not just liveaboards, but boats and boaters and recreational shoreline users in general, and the solution must be to do away with all of them, entirely. Our planners mean well, but I understand it’s hard to get out of the office to look at what’s actually going on, so I hope this tidbit of information from a concerned citizen will be helpful for them. Certainly it would be a much easier law to write; the poor dears have been down there slaving to churn out some two-hundred pages of amendments when they could get it down to four words: Don’t Touch The Nature!
This will have the added benefit of getting rid of all that nasty bottom paint without any additional state law required, and probably driving those terrible, polluting boatyards out of business as well. Hey… maybe we can erect those viewing towers in the empty lots of defunct boatyards!
Of course, Puget Sound is only one of our many natural wonders that is being absolutely ruined by people. Eventually, this policy can be extended to the Cascade Mountains, Olympic National Park, and someday to your neighborhood park.
It’s difficult to write about these matters without sounding like an indifferent, polluting heathen or a self-righteous environmental zealot; depending on where you stand along that spectrum I imagine you’ll be able to read this either way. I like to think I’m pretty close to the middle: I think some regulation is necessary to protect and preserve our shared natural resources, but I believe it should be minimal, rational, and as respectful of individual freedoms as possible. Obviously the difficulty arises when trying to make those particular distinctions, but surprisingly often it doesn’t need to be as hard as people would like to make it.
The proposed regulations do not have any justifications for their restrictions at all that I can find (admittedly, they are long, marked-up documents written in dense legalese; maybe I just missed it). Absent some sort of scientific rationale, I think it’s pretty clear that the bias should be against creating spaghetti legal code that impacts the lives and livelihoods of folks just trying to live decently and quietly. I fail to see how that sort of standard could even be controversial, but apparently it is; we keep getting more and more rules with less and less reason. It seems that the reason for restricting liveaboards has largely become the fact that liveaboards have been restricted in the past.
Apparently, a general sense that folks living on top of the same water that our beloved salmon swim in are an environmental problem is reason enough. I think this is a failure to see the forest for the trees. It may be true that liveaboards generate more grey water into the Sound than folks living ashore (this being the only justification I have heard for these regulations). But that is one relatively minor impact on the environment, weighed independently without consideration of any of the benefits to the environment inherent in the liveaboard lifestyle.
Now, I know that my wife and I have a vastly lighter ecological footprint than the average land-dweller, because we house-sit frequently and have an easy basis for comparison. We generate less trash aboard, use less water, heat and cool far more efficiently with far less gas and electric consumption. We even drive less. Not even apartment dwelling is so green. It could be that the folks over at the Department of Planning and Development are all huddled up in 75 square-foot apartments, carefully rationing their water, avoiding purchasing anything over-packaged because they don’t want to fill the trash can up once a day, and keeping their electrical draw down below 20 amps at all times because that’s all their circuits can handle, but somehow I doubt it.
The first half of this post was facetious, but I am serious when I say this: MORE liveaboards would be far better for our local environment, and the health of not just Puget Sound but the planet in general. Forcing folks who are now living, or who want to live, in a lightweight, environmentally friendly manner to move back into energy-hungry, pollution-generating, resource-intensive houses and apartment buildings isn’t doing our salmon any favors in the long run.
All the greywater, the occasional diesel spill, and the bag of chips blown out of the cockpit from time to time don’t hold a candle to the impact of putting up more housing developments out along salmon streams. It’s true that the impacts from the suburban developments are far more detached than those from boaters. I suppose that makes them seem less real to most people.
It might be that exposure to the reality is the final advantage of living aboard. Living on the water, you can see all this up close and in person. The oil slicks, the garbage, the eagles that can’t find fish, the diminishing numbers of other aquatic life… those are not just abstract numbers to us. One of the best ways to get people to change their behavior is feedback. Touching the nature, it turns out, helps you to measure and regulate your impact on it. Keeping people away from the resources that they are going to impact either way, hiding the costs of their daily lives on the environment, isn’t helping anyone to live more cleanly and efficiently with nature.
