The Five-Step Regulatory Guide to Converting a World-Class Beach Town into a Pile of Shit
26th November 2012
Step 1: Be a lovely California seaside town with gorgeous bluffs and rocks that everybody (this author included) loves walking and sitting on.
Step 2: Ban people from walking and sitting on the bluffside rocks, “partly because of safety concerns.”
Step 3: Discover that when you remove the presence of humans, those bluffside rocks swell up with sea gulls and cormorants, and predictably begin to smell like like shit.
Step 4: Discover that hosing down the guano is verboten because of state environmental regulations, to the extent that “multiple state regulatory agencies would have to issue permits before the [cleaning] agents could be used, a process that regulators have indicated would probably take at least two years.”
Step 5: Enjoy the smell of regulatory success!
“We need to consider a range of alternatives for cleaning the rocks, and one of those could be no project, just sit and wait for rain,” said Kanani Brown, an analyst for the California Coastal Commission, one of the regulatory agencies. “I know that’s not ideal for local businesses, but that’s historically been the approach.”
November 26th, 2012 at 14:48
So it’s better that a few people should fall to their deaths every year than that the author should put up with the true smell of nature…
November 26th, 2012 at 18:35
Dennis,
Do you think CA should impose a ‘nerf world’? Sue God for not making mountains and rifts handicapped accessible? Cliffs and such are fairly obvious risks that people can accept if they so desire—there’s nothing insidious about PE=MGH. Imagine if we applied your calculus to, say, driving. Tons of deaths every year on the highways, enough to dwarf almost every other unnatural cause.
November 26th, 2012 at 18:41
Ja, democrats can’t have the base of their party going over cliffs. All those lemming jokes would be hurtful.