How Life Led Me to the Friends of Clark County, Gregory Kummery – Board Member
My first memories are of the Rust Belt. Growing up during Pennsylvania’s socioeconomic nadir left a lasting impression. The despair, resentment, and anger of a citizenry betrayed by the industries and institutions they helped build left an indelible mark. Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, if hope sprang eternal, those waters never reached the people of Allentown and the Lehigh River Valley. I grew up in a city where hope was lost and dreams deferred because city and county leaders didn’t have a comprehensive plan for what to do when the rug gets pulled out from under you. I don’t want that for my children who call Vancouver and Clark County home.
I graduated from Florida State University, earning degrees in English, with a focus in Creative Writing, and Asian Studies, with a focus on China since the revolution (1949). What do you do with those credentials? Well you travel to the People’s Republic of China to teach English as a Second Language of course. This turned into a decade-long sojourn where I got to witness and experience China’s incredible economic and technological growth, as well as the devastating human and environmental costs associated with it.
The fossil fuel-driven global supply chain that provides those of us in the industrialized north with a level of comfort, convenience, and sophistication never before experienced comes at a human cost to the people of the global south. We didn’t just offshore our manufacturing to China. We offshored the resultant pollution and staggering amounts of industrial waste. We offshored our exploitative labor practices, valuing profit and shareholders over worker’s rights and safety. Simply put, I saw how the sausage was made and to quote Charlton Heston in Soylent Green, “It’s made out of people.”
As a respite from the hustle and bustle of China’s explosive growth, and because I wasn’t ready to return home to the United States just yet due to disagreeing with many of the policy decisions coming out of DC., I took a job working offshore in environmental mitigation as a Protected Species Observer aboard oil exploration vessels.
It was during this time that I struck up a conversation with one of the geophysical engineers out with us on a “hitch” in the Gulf of Mexico. We were surveying a stretch of sea floor that, for legal purposes will remain nameless, some 2 miles beneath us. The engineer was bragging about how well they’d designed their remote-operated drills; how they could operate at depths of 10,000 feet with pinpoint accuracy. As the environmental lead on the ship I asked him, “What happens when something goes wrong at 10,000 feet?” The engineer answered with a voice drenched in arrogant self-assurance, “When they pay me to solve that problem, I will.” Well, as of 2010, at the time of the Deep Water Horizon accident, they had not. And it became the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. To this day, I won’t let my children play in the water at the beach, because I know what we’ve done to it.
Today, as I watch my sons grow up and help my fiancée with her flower farm grown on our little plot in East Vancouver, I look back on all those instances when people thought all about the profit and not about the problems. Strong, safe, self-sufficient communities require a comprehensive plan, and currently, Clark County is updating its comprehensive plan under Washington’s Growth Management Act (GMA). Clark County has a history of failing to meet the goals of the GMA regarding protection of resource lands in its comprehensive planning. That’s where Friends of Clark County comes in.
Friends of Clark County defends the GMA and is the leading local organization advocating for responsible land use planning Every day they are working to keep the public informed of what matters. Every day they are working to hold Clark County to account, and to remind them they serve the people and not the other way around. I joined the Friends of Clark County because they inspired me to get off the sidelines and fight for what’s right. I encourage all of you to do the same.