I believe we need to humanize our regulatory systems so that they are able to listen to landowners and bring common sense and understanding to their application on the ground. All of us have become too complacent. Oregon s great natural beauty seems vast and eternal. Most of us live in nice neighborhoods and enjoy our towns and cities. We live comfortable lives.
Life is good here.
We have come to believe that if we can just ignore those nagging signs that things are changing, we can go on with our good lives. We must stop deluding ourselves. Those nagging signs appear as more cars on our roadways. Valley residents drove twice as many miles in 1995 as they did in 1975. Those nagging signs appear as environmental degradation.