8/8/08

It’s been said that Puget Sound is like a patient in ill health needing immediate attention if it is to be saved.

Unfortunately others are putting forth a “triage” concept that focuses protection and restoration resources in certain areas at the expense of the rest as the only sensible and practical strategy. This usually means saving rural areas and writing off the health of more developed areas.

Let’s put the wooden stake into the heart of this kind of thinking. It’s this kind of thinking that gets us museum pieces of protected natural areas, like “islands” of wilderness, while the larger ecosystem necessary to sustain life goes down the tubes. 

This is the kind of thinking that gets us beautiful places to visit but unhealthy places to live.  This is the kind of thinking that gets us places for salmon to spawn but nothing for the salmon to eat when they leave the rivers.  This is the kind of thinking that gets us lovely areas to observe orca whales—as they die out because of contamination in our urban bays, and not enough salmon to eat.

This is the kind of thinking that encourages us to believe that it doesn’t matter what poisons we pour on our lawn or how much pavement we spread around in our urban areas.

If we “triage” and write off our urban areas, we write off the lowlands and we write off a healthy Puget Sound. That’s because a healthy Puget Sound ecosystem is tied together by clean water, clean air, shorelines, wetlands, currents and plants and animals that move from place to place.  Simplistic thinking about “triage” might sound practical, sensible, efficient, business-like and even effective—but it’s not.

To bring Puget Sound back to health, we need to do the things that will most quickly and effectively restore the health of the Sound.  Stopping sprawling development, cleaning up and preventing toxic pollution, restoring healthy habitat in our river mouth estuaries and shorelines, using rain gardens, green roofs and “pervious” pavement to absorb rainwater and curtail stormwater pollution—these are the priorities that will save the Sound.

This doesn’t mean we have to plow our cities under to save the Sound.  Far from it.  Based on dramatic, inspiring progress in some of the Sound’s most damaged areas—like the Duwamish in Seattle and Commencement Bay in Tacoma—we know that by removing contamination and restoring habitats along the shores, we can help salmon and other wildlife, improve conditions for people, and still conduct our business.  Living and working here does not have to destroy the natural systems that keep our Sound—and us—alive. 

And we’re not going to save the Sound by only rejiggering how we currently spend our protection and restoration dollars; we’re going to have to address seriously the size of the problem and scale up the financial commitment to the tasks at hand.

We want to bring the patient back to health. Trying to save its heart at the expense of its kidneys and liver is the path to failure.

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