Restoring Puget Sound: It's the land use, stupid!

”It’s all land use,” Puget Sound Partnership chair Bill Ruckelshaus said early last year, talking about the problem of restoring Puget Sound. Looking at the Partnership’s draft action agenda, you see that concept has finally hit home.

You also see that key recommendations made repeatedly by a group of dissident scientists have been taken to heart (or arrived at independently; who cares?). Critics may still say that there’s too much agenda and not enough action, but in the real world, action will depend on the Legislature. The Partnership comes up with a final version of its agenda on December 1. That’s three months later than originally advertised. Does it leave enough time to build support in the legislative session that starts on January 12? Everyone connected with the enterprise believes that this year’s legislative decisions will be crucial.

Taking even a cursory look at the draft, you see that it’s as much about western Washington’s rivers, floodplains, and estuaries as it is about what most people think of as Puget Sound. Of course it is. The quality and quantity of freshwater habitat is critical to salmon and, indirectly, to the orcas that eat them. (Scientists announced recently that seven members of Puget Sound’s endangered orca population have died or disappeared in the past year, matching the decline of Pacific salmon populations on which they feed.) The quality and quantity of fresh water flows are also critical to the overall health of the Sound.

A lot of people’s minds clearly haven’t expanded to see saving the Sound as a whole-landscape problem yet. But some scientists and activists have been trying to convince them of that for years. Everything is connected. “Floodplain restoration presents our best opportunity to provide salmon with sanctuaries where their interests would not be sacrificed to human interests over the next century,” writes University of Washington geologist David Montgomery. Montgomery argues that “letting rivers and floodplains revert to a more natural state may sound radical, but this strategy could be implemented through floodplain-buyout programs, a ban on development within historically active river corridors, or by simply stopping direct and indirect subsidies for levee maintenance and controlling bank erosion.”

In order to accomplish that, writes John Lombard in Saving Puget Sound, .“we must accept a substantial transfer of wealth from urban areas to ecologically more important rural areas.” Lombard explains that “taken as a whole, urban taxpayers far outnumber rural taxpayers, while investments in ecological conservation must target rural areas, where the large majority of our best habitat remains." He then adds, "The science is clear that urban areas cannot support the diversity and abundance of native fish and wildlife that rural areas can (if that obvious point even needs documenting). We still may invest in urban natural areas to improve our quality of life and minimize the harm urban areas do to larger ecosystems. But we must invest in rural areas if we are to save our natural heritage in this region.” Once again, it's all land use.

The action agenda doesn’t target specific rural investments, much less create a mechanism for making them, but its “Priority A” is to “protect intact ecosystem processes, structures, and functions.” It suggests that “permanent protection of intact habitat can translate to dedicated networks of open spaces, preserves, wildlife corridors, functional working resource lands, and nearshore and estuarine environments, making this a cornerstone of the Puget Sound protection strategy. Protection tools include regulatory programs and acquisition programs, including the outright purchase of property or partial acquisition of development rights or conservation easements.”

The day after the Partnership released its draft, executive director David Dicks said he had been reading Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s history, The Coming of the New Deal. Schlesinger recounts a story in which FDR’s first Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace, complains that the ambitious young New Dealers working under him think the Department Agriculture is really “the department of everything.”

Dicks was making the point that the Sound’s problems stem from the whole complex fabric of life in western Washington, and that the solutions will ultimately have to address that complexity. The day before, on Steve Scher’s KUOW talk show, he had suggested that improving the quality of Seattle schools was one way tor restore the Sound. He had been only half joking. If you want to save the salmon and the orcas that eat them and preserve clean water and natural flows, you have to keep people from developing every square foot between the mountains and the beach. To do that, you have to concentrate growth in cities. If you want people to live in cities, you have to make urban housing affordable, as the Cascade Land Conservancy recognizes. And, yes, you probably have to improve urban schools.

Dicks says this is the first time that a governmental organization has actually committed itself to preserving the parts of the Puget Sound ecosystem that still work. Non-profits have done it, but government has been slow to jump onto the bandwagon.