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January 6-12, 2016 I VOLUME 41 I NUMBER 1
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DEVELOPERS DO RUN SEATTLE Nick Licata dishes on 18 years in City Hall. BY CASEY JAYWORK
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It’s Getting Wild Out There By Daniel Person Fishers, grizzlies, and the “reverse apocalypse” of Washington’s wildlife.
SCOTT TRAVIS
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long an unnamed creek in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, seven pine crates are lined up in a row, hatch doors pointed toward an anonymous swath of Pacific Northwest pine forest consumed by green. In the misting rain, even the air seems to take on an emerald hue. One by one the doors on the crates are slid open—an act that, from the inside, must look like an eyelid awakening to a paradise of Douglas fir and fern and cling moss and lichen. This is land that instinct and millennia of evolution has made familiar to the boxes’ freight. It is habitable, for all the dens provided by downed trees in the underbrush; plentiful, for all the mice and squirrels; safe, for all the canopy cover it can provide.
Ancestors to the species in the crate, the fisher, likely first came to North America in the midPleistocene epoch, a million or so years ago, by way of the Bering Ice Bridge. The fisher is a small animal, 12 pounds set so low to the ground that its belly can drag against the forest floor as it hunts for prey. It is agile as well, and can climb down trees face first. A thick, rich coat means it can hunt and travel in temperatures well below zero and stay warm in soaking winter rain. A highly solitary animal, fishers use a somewhat mysterious system of dark, sticky deposits to communicate for purposes of mating. Vicious, it’s the only preda-
tor known to selectively prey on porcupine. As Edward McCord, a professor of environmental law at the University of Pittsburgh who has published extensively on wildlife, noted in his 2012 book, The Value of Species: “Every living species represents a dynamic process of the earth that is infinitely astonishing.” That is, in every species, one can see the sum of a million small impressions made on it by its environment— clay sculptures with the sculptor’s thumbprints detectable to the savvy eye, “something that is unique and unrepeatable in the universe.” Such is the relationship between these fishers in the boxes and these woods. Each fisher emerges from its captivity in full lunge. For a moment, to the dozens of government officials, school children, biologists, and journalists gathered
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“The film’s collection of atrocities is like a to-do list for the next Cormac McCarthy novel: scalping, neckwound selfcauterizing, arrows through all body parts, horse disemboweling, a breakfast of bison liver tartare.” The Revenant,
reviewed by
Robert Horton Page 20
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hen Nick Licata was first elected to the Seattle City Council in 1997, Amazon was happily headquartered in SoDo, the SuperSonics were happily playing at Seattle Center, and Microsoft was happily taking over the world. Now, after 18 years sitting on a council responsible for governing one of the country’s fastest-changing cities, he’s returned to citizen ranks, ready to dish on how progressives can move the heavy cogs of government with his new book Becoming a Citizen Activist. “I think the best thing that I can do, and that I try to do in the book, is fight cynicism,” says Licata on his first official day of retirement—Jan. 1, 2016. “One of the great advantages that I believe Ronald Reagan had in promoting a reactionary agenda was he was optimistic. The problem that people who are progressives have is we concentrate so much on what’s wrong and how we want to correct what is wrong and how if we don’t correct it, we’re to end up in horrible shape. We have to change the way we look at what is around us, and say that we can change things and things are changing for the better.” Seattle Weekly sat down with Licata to get his take on what makes City Hall tick, and whether little people stand a chance in the new Seattle.
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