If humankind changes nature, returning nature to its natural state is right, isn’t it? But, if nature changes itself, it doesn’t feel so right to change it, does it?

The notion that humankind straightened the Skagit River so that it no longer flows through the Barnaby Slough is a central rationale of the Barnaby Reach Project. At the Sedro-Woolley public meeting to present their study, the Skagit River System Cooperative staff claimed that the difference between the Skagit as mapped in the 1880’s and how it appeared in the 1940’s was due to the deliberate efforts of humans.

That claim is absurd. The Skagit straightened itself.

Let’s call the vision of forcing the Skagit into a path drawn on a map 130 years ago exactly what it is: a fantasy.