Saving the Sound and the Straits

Winter 2007

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
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by Getting Up Close and Personal

by Mike Sato

On a cold, early December Saturday evening along the dark shoreline on the western side of Puget Sound, over a hundred souls—men, women and children—gathered together in their raingear, parkas and rubber boots. And flashlights.

Led by a dozen beach naturalists, they spent the next couple of hours exploring the marine wonders revealed by the Sound’s low tide. In the cold and in the dark.

This was not a special class on marine invertebrates with required readings and a final paper. This was done for fun, for family entertainment, for the sheer joy of being outside, experiencing and learning.

The same alchemy of experiencing and learning—and appreciating—comes during the spring and summer low tides when beach walks happen in more comfortable weather. Or on whale watching tours where youngsters and adults are in the presence of stately creatures not of human scale. Or on kayaking excursions when we are eye to eye with our marine neighbors.

As more people move to the Washington and British Columbia region surrounding the Salish Sea, our population centers grow, our suburban areas spread, and the places once considered wild become tamed. We will share what we now have with another two million souls within the next 15 years. Eight million souls in all, even if they were to live as lightly as they could on this land, would change it.

On the Washington side of the border, we are coming to understand that the problems associated with growth, with disappearing salmon, with dying orca whales, with declining seabird and bottom fish populations cannot be addressed as isolated problems, but are ecosystem problems requiring ecosystem-based solutions. That’s an old idea that’s easy to say, very difficult to carry out.

Twenty years ago, Washington state established the Puget Sound Water Quality Authority, and endeavored to knit together the jurisdictions in the Sound in an early ecosystem approach.

In 1992, non-governmental groups on both sides of the border declared the Salish Sea a single ecosystem, and developed the Orca Pass International Stewardship Area proposal in the region along the marine border.

In 1994, the Washington-British Columbia Marine Science Panel issued ecosystem-wide findings and recommendations, spawning creation of transboundary government groups to get together to talk.

In 1996, the second and final attempt to establish a U.S. national marine sanctuary in the north Puget Sound and Strait of Juan de Fuca came to an end, but the concept of an ecosystem approach to the area’s problems was embodied in the formation of the Northwest Straits Commission and local marine resources committees.

In recent years, local jurisdictions like San Juan County and the Islands Trust have formed informal alliances and San Juan County has established a stewardship area throughout its county waters.

And in 2007, Washington state is preparing to move forward with Governor Christine Gregoire’s Puget Sound Initiative, that will take concrete steps toward restoring the health of the Sound by the year 2020. It’s not a year too soon to get started to approach salmon and orca recovery, growth management, and pollution prevention in a holistic and comprehensive way.

Well and good, these commissions, these stewardship areas, these initiatives, these intentions. A big obstacle is that a lot of people don’t see the waters of the Sound as distressed; they don’t see the population changes that fishermen and divers and birders have seen, don’t see the toxicology reports of seal biopsies, and can’t measure the declining amount of oxygen in the waters of Hood Canal and parts of the South Puget Sound.

Lots of people don’t know how much our Sound has declined, but they still want to see the critters of the Sound at low tide on a cold winter’s night or on a warm summer’s day. They want to be on the water in a boat with the assurance that if they chose to fish, there would be fish to catch. They want to be in the presence of orcas, eagles and seals. They want to know, even if they don’t go today, that there will be a Puget Sound out there for them to experience tomorrow, a place their children can share with their children.

Getting up close and personal with the Sound and its critters, whether it be on a nighttime beach walk or whale watch excursion, teaches an important lesson found in all the plans and initiatives aimed at saving the Sound and the Straits: you can’t separate the orcas from their habitats, the salmon from where they spawn and feed, the sea stars or urchins from their rocky pools or mudflats.

For people who know that the Sound and Straits are not in good health, now’s the time to take actions to restore them to health. For those who think the Sound and Straits are in good health, let’s work together to keep them in good health. If you don’t know what shape the waters are in, take a guided beach walk or get on a boat excursion or a kayak trip. Get up close and personal: you’ll never see the Sound or the Straits the same again.

Mike Sato is director of communications, education and involvement for People For Puget Sound (www.pugetsound.org), a grass roots organization established in 1991. He has been involved in Puget Sound protection and restoration for much of the last 22 years.