Just about everyone will say they are concerned about the degradation of the environment, the impact humans have on Nature.
It’s an easy thing to say because “the environment” that is worth protecting is always somewhere else, somewhere that hasn’t already been despoiled by the byproducts of people living in large concentrations.
So there are pushes to call the congressman to stop oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s pristine arctic regions, pressure the Canadians to not open previously closed coastal waters to oil exploration, give a dollar to buy an acre of Amazonian rain forest.
The environment closer to home falls into that other category. Why bother with an environment that hinges on counts of cars flowing through intersections rather than fish up a stream?
Such urban-dweller rationalizations have much farther reaching consequences than many would like to admit.
Just blocks away from those traffic-clogged intersections are small rivulets, often more ditch than creek, but just like those clear mountain-fed cascades in the nature-photography books, they run downhill. And they merge, coalesce growing larger and dragging with them every seemingly insignificant and far-removed bit of pollution that seeped in along the way.
To see the effects, no journey to the hinterlands is needed, just pull out of traffic and head to the nearest public beach on Puget Sound. Just offshore, literally a stone’s throw away is a critical incubator called “nearshore habitat” that nourishes young fish at the bottom of the food chain.
Recent studies show that 66 percent of such habitat in King County and 75 percent in Snohomish County has been destroyed by a combination of human factors, including pollution and land-use decisions. Hood Canal was recently targeted by Gov. Gary Locke for a study to find ways to help it recover from what he called “death by a thousands cuts.”
Nature, however, is resilient and what has been done can often be undone. The only question is, do residents here have the will?
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