I heard a crazy story the other day, a terrible story. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein drained the vast southern marshland between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a unique and vibrant wetland comparable to the Florida Everglades.

His aim was to expose the Shiite rebels who were hiding there, as well as punish the villagers who lived there and were suspected of aiding the rebels. As well as being a humanitarian disaster, the draining of the wetlands was an environmental tragedy, made more horrible by its deliberateness.

After hearing this story my first thought was a consideration that despite whatever issues anyone may have with the governments of the western world, at least we didn’t have tyrannical leaders wreaking deliberate environmental havoc on a scale like this.

Then I remembered the first time I went to meet my wife’s family in West Virginia, and saw the effects of mountaintop removal.

If you want to go looking for abuses of the natural world carried out by governments and corporations, you don’t have to look very far. The history of modern people’s interaction with the environment is a dark and regrettable one indeed.

I am fearful that in the same way we look back at the days of segregation and accepted racism and exclaim “I can’t believe we let that happen — how could those people not see the wrong?”, in decades to come we will look back at our erosive relationship with the environment and wonder how we could act in such a way, in all good conscience.

But from what I have seen of late, people are determined to improve the way we interact and maintain the environment that surrounds us.

Even though the Shoreline Master Plan discussions in Sammamish have so far been dominated by landowners and developers seeking their own protection, at its heart the plan recognizes that we need to lessen our impact on the earth.

So too, the Sammamish Town Center Plan charette last week showed that in the development and design world, environmental conservation is the cutting edge.

And cities and new developments more often have it as priority number one.

I spoke with a young guy called Tom Puttman, an engineering consultant, who came to the planning charette to talk about the possibilities of providing developers with incentives to do the right thing, environmentally.

Tom was involved with the Portland Clean Rivers project, whereby businesses were provided with incentives to reduce their water usage. The payoff? Not only a smaller water bill but also concessions from the city.

With developers currently jockeying for a piece of the town center action, Sammamish is in a strong position to make clear what it wants the development to represent.

And if that is a sensitivity to the environment, then the ideas are out there — the great thing about this day and age is that the idealists now wear suits.

What I mean by that is that yesterday’s ‘greenies and hippies’ are todays architects, town planners, sewerage experts, and builders.

It is this convergence of bureaucracy, commerce and environmentalism that represents the great hope that we may be able to leave our dark history behind.