Life In A Mountain Community:

I am posting excerpts from blogs that I was working on for Mother Earth News and did not have time to post.  Some changes and modification has been added. 
 

I was once told by our community leadership that birds did not eat the spruce budworm. This person was planning to have our entire area sprayed by airplane with a toxin that would kill the spruce budworm and also the birds and their young. I objected and produced a photo I had taken of a robin with several egg producing spruce budworm millers in its beak which it was feeding to its young. The spraying fortunately never happened because this leader wanted the members to  share the expense. 

We have currently good leadership in our community but that has not always been so. The entire area was almost sprayed one time and common sense was seriously lacking but thanks to some members like myself who refused to participate in the cost it was avoided. 

The fact that our community is bordered by other communities who also had spruce budworm and post spraying they would move right back into our area was totally ignored. We have had leaders in the past that looked for quick results and not the overall impact to the community. Not to mention that members would be walking around for days in a toxic environment. Because a leader who had letters behind their name or college degrees does not mean that they possess common sense. 

Another leader wanted to bring a herd of alpacas into the park and have members take turns herding the animals for reduced landowner fees. That made as much sense as spraying the entire community. It too failed as the membership was mostly senior and while several members thought that was a good idea (surprised me) most did not want to fend off bears and mountain lions in their retirement years. 

Sometimes people run for the board of directors to build their portfolio or seek power but they are supposed to serve the members not rule over them. We went through several years of bad leadership and there was quite a bit of damage during that time. It is important that when voting for leaders that they are carefully examined for qualifications. .