By Mike Weland

This is an open letter to Darrell Kerby and all his ilk;

Darrell Kirby is an educated man who was born and raised in Boundary County, who served on the city council for more than half his life, served a controversial term as Mayor of the City of Bonners Ferry and brought about changes that will serve this community well for years to come, who sat for awhile in the Idaho State Legislature filling in for Shawn Keough when she couldn’t attend her duties due to her husband’s illness, and who had the gall to post on Facebook critical but common sense information as regards a federal proposal to set aside most of the West Side of Boundary County as critical caribou habitat.

“Again.....you can't make this stuff up,” Mr. Kerby wrote (I should have added that he was talking about a proposal by the US Fish and Wildlife Service to set aside 600-plus acres, most of them in Boundary County, to accommodate an animal that doesn't seem to want to come down here. If they ever did, Highway 3 in Canada, where caribou are hit and killed like deer down here, seems to dissuade them.)

“Tony McDermott is an Idaho State Fish & Game Commissioner,” he said .... wait, what?! He cited an expert?

Either I’m stupid or I’m not real smart, but having read Mr. McDermott’s response, I can’t find the link to the full text what he said, but that’s okay … I know it’s there, I read it and it had words. Harsh ones.

I invite readers to look it up, and if you find it, send me the link, his words merit publication here, even if only to raise controversy and argument.

I publish on-line, but I’m not real good at the interwebs.

Anyway, IDFG commissioner McDermott was saying how stupid the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service  proposal is as regards setting aside 600+ square miles up here as “caribou country.”

Mr. Kirby is clearly out of syn … wait, WHAT?! An Idaho State Fish & Game Commissioner said that?

That makes about as much sense as a devout environmentalist needing lumber or the goods of a community to build his own house or wanting electricity, heat and other comforts, instead of building and powering it out of entirely natural resources.

That's like asking snow to shovel itself.

Heresy.

According to the people who forced this issue ... and grizzlies, wolves, mosquitoes, wolverines, lynx, fox, cougars (mmm ... cougars!), Tasmanian devils, rabid deer and ground squirrels notwithstanding ... the only thing that will entice caribou back into the U.S. is if we, the people here, set aside 600+ square miles of territory they checked out back in the '50s and apparently didn't like, and keep our human butts out of it ... except for our scientific endeavor of introducing more bear, wolves, wolverines and rabid squirrels into it.

If we only do that, our San Francisco Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals says, the caribou, who seem to be happy where they are up in Canada, and who are getting run over regularly on Highway 3 in Canada ... effectively discouraging them from traveling south, will romp here in great numbers, be happy, eat U.S. lichen and breed like rabbits. The elite neighbors we have on our Ninth Circuit will then have a reason to visit here, they and their kin will flock here in great numbers, and our economy will thrive.

Thank God for judicial logic.

Mr. Kirby, you grew up here and you should know better than to argue.

Turning the natural resources the forefathers of this community worked so hard to extract so as to provide the products and services needed to build the houses and homes for the people of the world is no longer a viable option … the real money, the future economy, is in the stock market, retirement income and tourism.

In today’s economy, nobody needs real products that you can put your hands around, build or make to build a home, heat the winters or eat. We no longer need to transport or refine those products. Instead, we should create "art."

The world has enough of all that other stuff, and if we need more, we can always call upon places where there are fewer or no environmental regulations and where people who are poor will make it for us, and ship it in. It makes sense economically in more affordable goods, and it's not taking place in any of our back yards. If they get sick, ruin their environment and die, that's okay.

They're foreigners ... not the good citizens of our country. They'll learn what we did once upon a time. Eventually.

I can’t understand why you, Mr. Kerby, don’t clearly see that what we should do, as a community, is adopt to the new, green tourism economy … It’s the wave of the future! If it's not happening in our backyard, it's green. We're freed the noise dust and nuisance.

The lumber and sand and gravel, cement, ore and raw materials upon which this nation was built, of which this county has in such abundance? Pshaw! We have enough! All we have to do now is recycle.

If we get the caribou back, Darrell Kerby, the tourists will come, and we will no longer need the blessings or the hard work, sweat or toil by which we extract  the myriad natural resources so abundant around us … especially not the logging ... or the farming ... or the mining … industries that nearly ruined this county for the awesome potential that is tourism.

Just look at the year past.

Over a period of a generation, our federal government, at little to no expense to the folks who work live and work here except to cost them their jobs, pride and heritage, not to mention kept them out of the woods their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents once frequented both to work and play, has done so well at furthering our national interests that efforts to recover the grizzly bear have borne such fruition that tourists flocked to our region to figure out why we’re now shooting them when they threaten our children, or why they’re now eating us.

Not even the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientests seem to agree with the courts that if we set aside habitat, stay out of it with our stinky bi-pedal bad selves, a species that may or may not be endangered because they were once seen visiting here will come back ... and isn't that like trying to say the Huns were indigenous to Europe because they were unwelcome tourists once?

Historical evidence shows that the caribou who once visited are back home, using Canadian roads to reach Canadian logging equipment because Canadians like logging and the caribou like strolling down logging roads and eating the grease off the skidders.

Given these facts, sir, you can’t deny that if we set aside 600 square miles of North Idaho and western Washington, what we're actually going to save is the overabundant pileated U.S peckerhead ... a species that lives primarily in the law offices of  lowland U.S. cities and which depend on loud outcries, lawyers and charitable donations, coupled with a loud, well funded but not earned effort to monger irrational fear, stoked by the nation’s major media, who accept ad dollars to tell you that giving $1 a day will make save the life of a child or a dog, and you will earn the great comfort of knowing that you've  made a real difference.

Those people, Mr. Kirby, deserve great credit, because their organizations have some of the richest coffers in the world with which to hire more attorneys and lobby justices. If it were otherwise, they'd run out of starving kids by whom to attract our continued donations.

Don’t let on that those fine, global minded people aren’t doing their best to look after us, or that what happens here doesn’t affect them.

Lord forbid that we revert back to the 1950s and early 1960s when the local economy was booming thanks to hard working local men and women ... when our loggers and miners built roads, cleared paths, made a real and tangible living and generated an honest product and honest wealth ... wealth that converted a natural resource into a product of benefit to people the world over.

The people with the money, big cars and fine houses who move here because of this region's great beauty need us more than we've ever needed them; someone, after all, has to be there to mow their lawn, build their fence, plow their snow.

It seems incongruous ... I've met a lot of environmentalists, I've interviewed them over the years; loggers, miners, builders, farmers, people who work sun up to sun down and depend on the environment for their living, and who cherish it.

They remember the hard work, sweat, sacrifice and toil of their forebears in scratching out a meager but fulfilling living, and they're proud to carry on that legacy.

I've yet to meet a pileated peckerhead that (and I say that, not who ... there is a distinction), doesn't like fundraisers, pleading for more money for kids, causes or animals they'll never see in person except for the occasional photo op, or that don't already live in a fair house ... often surrounded by a metal gate … who only ask from the local economy the people who serve them and the needs of their comfort.

They like the loggers who sell them the firewood to keep their hearths bright ...  it lets them stay smug and warm and protect their environment, even while they criticize those who ply the century old livelihoods that made this place great, and strip away very ability of the very hard-working ethos that made this place what it is.

But they do have good reason to complain ... They invested the money they worked so hard for, most often those low-lying cities in other places, so as to enjoy their retirement years in the most beautiful place they've ever seen on earth.

But now, the heirs of those who made this such a great place might continue the legacy of their parents and forbears, and that might infringe on the pilieated peckerhead's "right of enjoyment of the use of their land," for which they will sue at the least provocation.

See what I'm saying, Darrell? The things you and your family worked for and stood for ... hard work, to create a solid product and true wealth earned by the sweat of the brow, the pride in raising a family and watching children and grandchildren prosper, of friends and years-long kinship with neighbors ... of building a modest life and a legacy in a place where living is hard ... that doesn't matter any more.

The pileated North American peckerheads that seem to have settled here lately have more money and better attorneys ... and for now, they always seem to win.