Diane Fairchild Beck
North Group Conservation Co-Chair

Is Port Development a Cargo Cult?

The Humboldt Bay Harbor, Conservation, and Recreation District, has come into much clearer focus and under public scrutiny since two hugely undesirable projects were brought forward for consideration in the last two years and have been dropped - Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) development and water-bagging.

The goals of this public agency - port development, conservation, recreation - are not at all easy to balance. Therein lies the problem, because developments like an LNG facility overpower conservation and recreation goals, necessitate ever-deeper ship channels, and threaten fisheries and water quality.

The more dredging, the deeper in debt the Harbor District becomes and the more it is pressured to make The Big Fix, one very large business like an LNG facility or a sort of relief port for Oakland for ever-larger container ships from the Far East.

But, after the two public meetings a year ago, one of the Harbor District and the other the Humboldt Bay Stewards, no one could have come away from either of those well-attended meetings with the thought that what most local folks wanted from the Harbor District had anything to do with another huge, polluting, channel dredging, minimal job-creating project on Humboldt Bay.

The Harbor Commissioners are pursuing relentlessly the dream of the railroad from Humboldt Bay south through the Eel River Canyon to hook up at Willitts for the rail south. At the District meeting on February 24, one commissioner even made the absurd promise that it would be a "done deal" in two years. The Harbor District seems to be utterly enamored of developing Humboldt Bay into a "major western U.S. port".

indicate that such an assessment is remarkably optimistic, at best. The last time a train passed along the rail line through the Eel River Canyon was apparently in 1998. Yet, a mere six years on, the damage shown in Bittner's slide show indicates such severe damage and inhospitable geology for a railroad bed - our infamous north coast "blue goo", for example - that it is impossible to understand where such optimism comes from. It is also difficult to believe that the railroad can get money for reconstruction from the state, given California's budget constraints, or from the present Administration in Washington, given its major priorities and expenditures (wars and tax relief for the rich).

I first learned of cargo cults from the movie "Mondo Cane" in the early 1960s. In the film, the South Pacific Islanders inland were on a mountain top, standing around a small cleared area at the end of which there stood a hammered together mockup of an airplane. They were looking and demonstrating toward an airplane flying by overhead, trying to entice it to land and bring them the good things that they had learned, during World War II, that airplanes brought mystically down out of they sky, where only birds and ancestral spirits can fly.