Puget Sound: the silent crisis

The new state agency created to restore and protect Puget Sound needs your help to return a beloved, complex body of water to robust health.

Puget Sound Partnership is holding an opening series of workshops in nine communities to acquaint the public with the current condition of the Sound and identify the greatest threats to it.Information collected will be used to help develop an action agenda to be presented next fall to Gov. Christine Gregoire.

A fundamental challenge for David Dicks, executive director of the Partnership, is convincing Puget Sound residents there is a problem. The scenic beauty of the Sound belies deeper, persistent problems.

An updated report, State of the Sound 2007, describes the current condition "to be one of decline, with continuing harms to the clean water, abundant habitat and intact natural processes that are the foundations of a healthy environment."

All of us have to better understand the problem before we see our own role in helping solve what the report portrays as a "silent crisis."

Restoring Puget Sound means rethinking some of how we live, work and play along its shores and near the waterways that feed into it. The days of easy targets are past. A thriving population and the prospects of a million new neighbors are part of the calculation.

Part of the solution is very close to home, but it will take resources and political cooperation at the federal level to make a difference. Puget Sound is a beneficiary of the lessons learned from restoration projects in the Great Lakes, the Florida Everglades and Chesapeake Bay.

Dicks sees a primary function of the Puget Sound Partnership to be something akin to an auditor, who holds all the mix of agencies and working groups accountable for progress and getting something done.

The public shares the dual roles: Contributing ideas and willing hands, but also creating the political pressure to ensure action plans turn into demonstrable accomplishments.

For a list of the public workshops and conversations, which begin Feb. 27 in Seattle and end March 7 in Sequim, go to:

www.psp.wa.gov/actionagenda3.html