Ignore 'em
Sorry, spotted salamanders. Sorry, wood frogs. Maine Governor Paul “go to hell” and “they can kiss my butt” LePage just isn’t that into you.
Well, not you exactly. But the places where you hang out.
Vernal pools. They’re the recent target of the governor’s state-wide “red tape removal audits” aimed at reducing regulations. Last month, speaking to a business forum, LePage summed up his future policy about vernal pools by proclaiming: “If they are intermittent and dry up after rainfalls, I am going to recommend we ignore them.”
So the folks who like the blunt-and-tells-it-like-it-is approach (and are likely among the 38% who voted for him in a three-way race last November) probably applaud such a statement. Then there are those who thrive on being able to cite the latest in another of the new governor’s colorfully-worded statements and will undoubtedly be rewarded on numerous occasions over the next four years. This I predict with some expertise given that here in Illinois, we’ve had long experience with “colorful” governors, Blago just being the latest incarnation – though I can say without equivocation that few others have been as fixated with their hair or peddled pistachios in TV ads while awaiting a federal trial. On the other side of the LePage divide are the vernal pool supporters concerned with what an “ignore ‘em” policy might imply.
Ignore them? On behalf of salamanders and frogs, let’s just say we recognize a snub as a snub. The brush-off. The cold shoulder. Of course it’s pretty certain we’ve all had some experience in this regard – or shall I say disregard? – beginning with the first unreciprocated smiles or waves issued from our strollers or later in middle school while walking its halls or looking for a seat in the cafeteria. I, too, learned early: “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.” Meaning, in other words, ignore them. And on a more personal level, when our young brother hurled himself on a department store’s floor in another writhing, red-faced tantrum, my sister and I were instructed by our mother: “Just ignore him. Pretend he’s not with us.” Benign instructions that didn’t last long or, best I can tell, leave lasting scars.
But before parsing to ignore, some of us might have to ask, not knowing that we live near or among them, what are vernal pools anyway? Usually found in the woods and sometimes referred to as “spring pools,” these mostly basin-shaped depressions ranging in size from small pond to big puddle, fill with snowmelt and rain each spring. And yes, without an above ground outlet or inflow, they are intermittent. They dry up in summer. But because they do, they can’t sustain a fish population. Therefore they’re perfect breeding spots for frogs and salamanders to lay their yummy-to-fish eggs, and where, later, in pool-turned-nursery, the young survive, often providing lunch – yes, in that “circle of life” thing we learned in school – for great blue herons and egrets, fox and wild mink. Vernal pools are also where migrating warblers pause to sip, where caddis flies swim and wood frogs quack like ducks, and where spring peepers, like ambassadors from another world, seem to pour their bodies into song. A clamoring, chiming chorus hard to ignore – and why would we want to? As one of the purest signs that on the heels of another long and brutal winter, a new, much-welcomed season is upon us, peepers also make it easier to believe poet Allison Hawthorne Deming’s claim, “Frogs were the first singers on Earth; the birds learned from them.”
But, as it so happens, at least according to a Maine bank executive, vernal pools are another thing that “just drives so many people crazy.” I mean, who knew?
As noted by Maine science writer Hannah Holmes: “The power to induce madness is not a feature biologists have previous attributed to the vernal pool. But you heard it here first. Stay away from those things unless you’re an amphibian.”
Actually, staying away is not what the folks who want to relax or abolish vernal pool protections have in mind. They object to the restrictions signed into law in 2007 that affect building within a 250-foot radius of a “significant” vernal pool. It’s estimated that about a third of Maine’s vernal pools are considered significant, meaning those with a large number of species – obligates— that must use a vernal pool to sustain their life cycle. But few maps have yet to show where these are. And true, given that vernal pools dry up by mid-summer, evaluations need to be made in May and June and so can gum up the works for projects proposed in, say, August.
If only these infernal vernal pools were more like “real pools!”
Unquestionably, it’s hard these days to stand in the way of a banker with money he’s actually willing to lend (that being purely the assumption here). And surely the state’s economy needs a lift-off, a fact that we ignore at our peril. But having worked with developers in the late 70s and 80s, I’ve seen up close that though in their eyes there are always too many regulations, all of them burdensome and never a one they seem willing to embrace, there are never too many ways to attempt to leap over or squirm around, under or through regulations, often in acrobatic maneuvers that rival a vernal pool’s inhabitants.
But developers can also be community builders, stokers of a local economy. So, and in spite of our increasingly “either-or” (environment or jobs) climate, might it not be advisable to take a deep breath and look at the current protective regulations and before suspending them, determine if in fact few developments have actually been blocked by them as has been claimed by various agencies and reported in several state newspapers? Where permits have been required, what impact have they had? What are the types of projects that have been delayed or blocked? Or would be? If the value of a vernal pool is to be measured by its “pesky” habit of intermittency, as the Gov recommends, shouldn’t there also be a means of weighing a project’s promise to bolster a local economy, create new jobs?
Ah, but an “ignore ‘em” policy points in another direction.
And let’s face it, the beauty, if not the value of, say, a salamander is in the eye of the beholder as much as the mouth of a governor. Part of what he proposes to ignore – turn a blind eye anyone? – I have longed yearn to witness. But I’ve yet to be on the island on whatever appropriately wet and warm night in early spring abruptly rouses salamanders from their subterranean slumber, when the Big Night migration shifts them into (relatively) high gear and, no matter the obstacles, they make their way back to vernal pools, usually the same ones where they were hatched, in order to breed. Like a wildebeest migration on the Serengeti Plains – okay so I overreach in the analogous here given that there are not millions of salamanders and nothing in our topography even remotely resembles a vast plateau of plains. Also, while wildebeest may well succumb to the jaws of crocodiles while crossing the Mara River, salamanders are more likely to meet their fate beneath the car tires of unsuspecting drivers while crossing a dark road like the one we live on.
Still it’s a journey of heroic effort and urgent, deeply embedded drive. Another sign the cosmos is still clicking along according to cycles that long predate me.
And one, dear governor, I refuse to ignore.