Letters to the editor | Dec. 15 edition

Published 1:30 am Thursday, December 15, 2022

SEA MAR

Gratitude for clinic staff

As a member of the community and the Vashon Health Care District board, I want to express my appreciation for the Family Medicine providers and staff at the Sea Mar Clinic who have been caring for island residents during trying and uncertain times.

The focus on the relationship between the District and Sea Mar has often overlooked the day-to-day reality of the work at the clinic. Larger issues related to our complicated and fragmented medical system are beyond the control of front-line staff and often affect care delivery, leading to frustration for both patients and providers. Our clinic staff has to deal with those systems issues as well as local needs.

Family Medicine is one of the most stressful areas in medicine due to the required breadth of knowledge, demands on time, low reimbursement, increasing administrative tasks and high levels of burnout. This has contributed to a growing shortage of primary care providers in many parts of the country.

While Sea Mar Administration and the Health Care District have been working through a sometimes-fractious relationship, the front-line clinic staff and providers have continued to show up despite the challenges of uncertainty, COVID, staff shortages, lack of space, unexpected crises, and long hours to make sure their patients receive good care.

We owe them our gratitude.

Wendy Noble

FISH AND WILDLIFE

Preservation v. Conservation: A False Dichotomy

In response to the Dec. 1 commentary by Claire Loebs Davis, I laud her passion for the state’s fish and wildlife, but have reservations about the adversarial approach laid out in her Dec. 6 talk at Vashon Center for the Arts.

She and her organization, Washington Wildlife First, seek to reform the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), criticizing actions under their mission element to provide “sustainable fish and wildlife recreational and commercial opportunities.”

Her view that WDFW “has become an agency focused on killing fish and wildlife, not preserving them,” sets up hunting and fishing as part of the problem. To the detriment of fish and wildlife, this creates a false dichotomy between preservation on the one hand and conservation on the other. We need both.

At her talk, Davis stated strong support for science-based wildlife management, but her views are more indicative of a philosophic divide between preservation/protection and sustainable-use conservation. As a professional conservation biologist, I’ve too often seen this divide limit our wildlife stewardship.

My point is: hunters and anglers would support some of the measures she espouses — I already do — if this philosophical divide can be overcome. The founders of wildlife conservation such as Aldo Leopold (who established modern wildlife management and its ethical foundation) and Theodore Roosevelt (who protected 230 million acres of forests, parks, and preserves) were hunters. These and many other early sportsmen/conservationists were the first ones to the party, creating agencies that successfully curtailed unsustainable human impacts on fish and wildlife. Were their values good then, but not now?

Today, the cornerstone of wildlife conservation is still habitat protection and improvement, a principle supported by every state fish and game agency including ours, and by every game species NGO from the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation to Ducks Unlimited. Anglers and hunters pay for, support, and often carry out this conservation, with results that sustain far more biological diversity than just game species. Human impacts on wildlife have changed and WDFW might well need some changes as well. Why not seek common ground with this small percentage of the public that pays a lion’s share of conservation costs?

Frank Shipley

BEACHCOMBER

Late delivery

I couldn’t help note the irony in The Beachcomber’s editorial “As postal problems mount, here’s one way to help” (Nov. 30) when my copy was finally delivered to my mailbox the following Monday — four days late.

The editorial suggested shopping at home to both reduce the number of packages postal workers have to deliver and support the local economy.

Sound Publishing (which publishes The Beachcomber) elected to switch its delivery service to the USPS earlier this year. The result: a further burden on our local post office, layoffs of our local newspaper deliverers (pulling income from the local economy) and papers that are regularly so late that their content is no longer useful (such as the holiday coupons for the Open House that had already happened).

Time for Sound Publishing to admit its mistake?

Lesley Reed