📢 Cascadia Voices 05/16/26

Of frogs and satire: E.B. White, the American author, essayist and contributing editor to The New Yorker, warned against explaining a joke, comparing it to dissecting a frog. “You understand it better,” White wrote, “but the frog dies in the process.”

The same goes for satire; actually, more so, because there’s often more to explain and more of the frog to slice and poke at.

Regular readers of Cascadia Daily News can get a regular amphibian post-mortem of recent news, courtesy of The Hammer each week in Opinion; short-takes of snark leveled at the things that make us go hmmm. (Hat tip to Arsenio Hall; kids, ask your parents.)

But some subjects inspire longer-form satire, which is why Executive Editor Ron Judd, referencing the less-than-dire “austerity measures” unveiled by the Whatcom County Executive’s Office this week — voluntary furloughs, turning out the lights upon leaving for the day, office cardigans, I assume — issued his own belt-tighten memorandum to CDN staffers this week: Among the diktats:

Recognizing that it’s already not easy being green, I’ll follow White’s advice and not elucidate any further on Judd’s column this week, except to note that as the new guy, I’m first on the list for “voluntary” furloughs.

The acute toxins are blamed for the rapid death of pets and wildlife that drink from these lakes. The chronic toxins are directly linked to ALS, and recent research has found that these toxins aerosolize and expose humans downwind of these lakes. Reducing phosphorus can remove the threat these organisms pose.

I was the president of the North American Lake Management Society in 2016, and we put together a session at our annual meeting on managing phosphorus inputs from the watershed and the overall effect on lakes. There are several examples nationwide where millions of dollars of non-point work have solved the watershed problem with no change in conditions in the lake. In-lake phosphorus mitigation is a tool that fixes the lake and it is often not even considered.

This article says that the City of Bellingham removed 166 pounds of phosphorus last year and the county hit about 350 pounds. My company sequestered and removed 16,500 pounds of phosphorus during April using in-lake strategies. This work was done in Clear Lake, California; Willard Peak Pond in Brigham City, Utah; and Cottage Lake in King County. This month, several other Washington lakes will be fixed.
So we have tools that work; don’t overlook them.

Terry McNabb
Bellingham

Read more letters to the editor here.

Submit a letter to the editor (250 words max) or guest commentary (500–800 words) online at cascadiadaily.com/submissions.

“The Opinions”: The New York Times Opinion podcast recently brought together Times opinion writers Michelle Cottle, David French and David Wallace-Wells to discuss how the war against Iran has struck the global economy. While all three hit on various and vexing headaches, Wallace-Wells notes one unintended yet fortunate consequence: the convincing case the Trump administration is inadvertently making for the transition to green energy; not just among richer nations, but poorer nations, too. He notes: “We’re helping them by staging a war that makes it obvious and undeniably expensive to continue to depend on the old fossil fuel systems, and suggests, very clearly, that there are obvious cheap alternatives, which, in addition to being cleaner and healthier, also mean that your energy supply is actually domestic and domestically controlled.” My thought: Go ahead and slap an “I did that!” sticker of President Trump on the nearest solar panel.

Politicians choosing their voters: New York Times Opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie sees larger damage to federal democratic representation beyond the distressing loss of majority-minority districts following the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that gutted the last vestiges of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. “The main consequence, however, might be to undermine American democracy altogether and push this nation’s politics to an even more dangerous place of high partisan tension and ideological Balkanization.”

Rainy Wednesday morning bus ride playlist: “Scrapple from the Apple,” Dexter Gordon; “You Got it Bad, Girl,” Stevie Wonder; “Bye Bye Blackbird,” Miles Davis; “Hate it Here,” Wilco; “The Married Men,” The Roches; “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” Joni Mitchell; “You’ve Changed,” Wilco; “Waiting in Vain,” Annie Lennox; “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” Bob Dylan; “Turn Around,” Nancy Griffith.