The Oregon White Oak, also known as the Garry Oak (Quercus Garryana) is the only native Oak species in Washington state. A keystone species needed for endangered lifeforms like the Western Gray Squirrel, Garry Oaks occurs in the endangered South Sound Prairie ecosystem, and as such are also called Prairie Oaks by a select few enthusiasts. Prairie Oaks grow slowly in open areas, and support more species of wildlife than any other tree species in the region. This is due to the abundant food they produce (acorns), and their tendency to form cavities that become homes for various types of wildlife. On average, Prairie oaks don’t begin producing acorns until 30 years of age.
The city of Lakewood in Pierce County is home to one of the highest concentrations of these oak trees in Washington state, once part of a vast oak prairie stretching beyond Pierce County into Thurston, Lewis and Skamania counties, then on into Oregon. There are isolated groves of these oak-prairies around Puget Sound as well in Shelton, Port Townsend, and Whidbey Island. The town of Oak Harbor on Whidbey proudly exclaims its oaken character, providing a map of the towns catalogued oak trees, and serious protections for these trees. Their resident Garry Oak Society successfully created a culture of appreciation for the gnarled specimens that dot the town. The state of Washington designates oak stands critical habitat for conservation, and in 2020-2022, I was a part of an effort to develop priority tree protections for Lakewood’s oak trees.
None of this has stopped the proliferation of warehouses in Pierce County, who often set up shop on prime oak habitat.
During the covid pandemic, a global logistics market that was hurdling towards more online shopping went over a ledge. Millions of people were stuck and home, and a new warehouse boom began. WallStreet firms read the writing on the wall, and invested big in logistics. Private Equity and investment firms rallied behind a new concept: the speculative warehouse. That is a warehouse built with the hope of attracting tenants. Many of these warehouses have been built and sit empty in Lakewood.
In 2023, Lakewood activist Christina Manetti saw her worst fears realized. She had sparked the effort to save Lakewood’s Garry Oaks after learning of a speculative warehouse slated for the Springbrook neighborhood that would cut down over 50 oak trees in the floodplain of Clover Creek. Some of these trees were over 150 years old. Bisected by I-5 and the McChord Air Force Base, Springbrook is one of the poorest neighborhoods in Pierce County, and is considered overburdened by air pollution. In spite of protests, the project broke ground, and put the oaks under the axe. This marked a string of defeats for oak activists in Pierce county, as we watched concrete and cement seal over our aquifer for more Wall Street speculation for the fourth or fifth time. In spite of protections for the rare Prairie Oaks, our laws do not allow us to truly get in the way of capitalism. The developers pay minor mitigation fees, and the habitat is lost for the next hundred years.
The State Environmental Protection Act (SEPA) allows a permitting body (city or county) to authorize an environmental review and request mitigation. It also authorizes these bodies to waive this process via a determination of non-significance.
As chair of TDSA’s Ecosocialist committee, I learned of a proposal to build one of the largest warehouses in Washington state in south Tacoma, and organized our small membership to build opposition to the project. We knocked doors and drove turnout to a public hearing, where we learned just how far along the project already was.
The Bridge Industrial Warehouse was fast-tracked by the city of Tacoma as the lead permitting agency, and we quickly learned the limit of the state’s environmental protections laws. The project, which is now under construction, seals over even more of our non-glacially fed sole source aquifer with 2.5 million square feet of warehouse. We had no path within the law to defeat the warehouse.
Front and Centered, a Washington-based legislative advocacy group introduced a bill in 2023 that would have created a lever to stop the Springbrook and Bridge Industrial warehouses. The CURB Act would effectively create a veto option for communities suffering from the cumulative effects of environmental harm. Lack of tree canopy and green space, air pollution from I-5 and Air Force Base McChord, and the existing burden of polluting industry would all be taken into account, as well as public voice. This bill did not make it to the house floor for a vote, in spite of democratic party control of the house, senate, and governor’s office.
Bridge Industrial, the company behind the South Tacoma warehouse, rode a new trend: developing polluted land. Companies like BI offer municipalities a path to clean-up EPA-designated pollution sites that they couldn’t afford to remediate on their own. The “South Tacoma swamps”, where BI is constructing its mega-warehouse, is one such EPA superfund site, a former dumping ground for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe rail company. Companies like BI also peddle public safety, turning sites that function as homeless encampments and illegal dumps into trucking, concrete, and jobs. While this makes communities shudder, this offer makes neoliberal politicians and economic planners salivate. Under this form of capitalism, all economic growth is considered good growth, and even helps fund the government through new tax revenue to appease even some moderate social democrats. Never mind that they’re allowing Wall Street to carve up our communities and economic destinies how they please.
Neoliberal economics has been the name of the game for some time in the county. Under the leadership of the Master Builders Association, a powerful developer lobbying group, Pierce County has consistently chosen to forget environmental protections in favor of economic development. The MBA fielded several County Charter Review candidates this cycle, and until recently held the seat of County Executive under their lobbyist Bruce Dammier. The unincorporated Pierce County community of Fredrickson is a prime example of this legacy. Designated a new industrial and logistics hub, Fredrickson today is more asphalt than anything else. Here the headwaters of Clover Creek, once the main drinking water source for the city of Tacoma, is besieged by a massive Amazon warehouse, Boeing plant, and the Niagara bottling facility, devastating the natural recharge of the aquifer and causing dry conditions downstream.
A preemptive tool granted to municipalities is zoning. It was industrial/light commercial zoning that created the modern Fredrickson. Municipalities are granted this level of planning, if done ahead of time. Zoning cannot be changed once an investor has submitted a project, no matter how much the locals dislike it. This is playing out today in Dupont, where the city will have the distinct embarrassment of having a warehouse built directly across from their city hall, destroying over 20 acres of forest and a section of the beloved Sequalitchew Creek Trail. The Dupont West project, another speculative warehouse, is a product of poor planning, loopholes in regulation, a polluted site, and a city leadership afraid to confront an economic giant. My watershed-based advocacy organization, the Clover Creek Restoration Alliance, organized against the Dupont West project, which was unanimously opposed by the town residents. Large projects with environmental impacts like Dupont West are arbitrated by an appointed judge called a hearing examiner, who reviews state law, as well as county and city code to determine the legality of a project. During this time, public comment is accepted into the record as a part of the consideration. On rare occasions, members of the public are able to persuade hearing examiners that development proposals are not consistent with the law and must be rejected. More commonly, mitigation measures are recommended and projects are approved. In the case of Dupont West, the project is to be on a site steeped in history, the site of the first Methodist Mission in the state, as well as the first Fourth of July Celebration in the Washington territory and thousands of years of indigenous history primarily associated with the modern Nisqually tribe. The hearing examiner ruled that the project be approved, but ordered the developer to provide a small buffer around the historic mission marker as mitigation. The historic Methodist Mission Marker will now be cartoonishly placed as an island amidst a sea of asphalt.
The last option available to cities is that of eminent domain, a power to force the sale of private property for the public good. While we made a strong case for the city of Dupont to do so, the timid town councilors refused to consider this in spite of public support, fearing the financial burden and a potential legal battle.
As a solely rain-fed system, the watershed I advocate for, the Clover-Chambers watershed, is uniquely harmed by these warehouse projects. The impervious surfaces created by large buildings, asphalt, and even the non-native turf grasses repel the water needed to replenish our wells and flush them into storm drain and retention ponds, picking up pollutants like the salmon-killer 6-PPD, found in most tire dust, along the way. Add in the state of drought we find ourselves in today, with rainfall at 50% of average (75% is considered drought conditions), and we find ourselves in a water crisis. Lakewood, Spanaway, Dupont, JBLM, and Parkland all rely on water drawn from aquifer wells. Tacoma also considers the aquifer its back-up water supply, should water from the Green River run low. Warehouse impacts are being felt in the rest of the county as well, like in Puyallup, where the Puyallup tribe has filed an appeal against the city and a new mega-warehouse that would pave over critical farmland. To neighboring King County, we also must remember the loss of the farmlands in the Kent valley, which are now almost entirely warehouses.
As climate change worsens, it’s expected that a majority of alpine glaciers will vanish in the next 25-50 years, meaning more water demand and less availability from here on out. Global temperatures are rising as well, as is population and demand for electricity. There is absolutely more that can be done for mitigation. Warehouses are a blank canvass for the production of solar energy. Permeable pavement and eco-friendly design like green roofs, tree retention, native landscaping, or even submerged structures would reduce the blight on the environment. And at the core of the issue, communities need to be able to democratically plan the communities they live in, and if needed, reject economic plunder. Under the madness of capitalist development, we must stop condemning our future to a hydrophobic, polluting, heat island Warehouse Hell.
by Sean Arent