Documentary's wake-up call rings for Puget Sound

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith examines ecological distress in the nation's estuaries in a two-hour documentary called "Poisoned Waters" airing on "Frontline" at 9 p.m. Tuesday on KCTS 9.

The former New York Times reporter and author of such books as "The Russians" and "The Power Game," about how Congress wields influence, focuses largely on Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound.

Smith acknowledges that many of the details about the Sound will be familiar to Pacific Northwest residents. But he found similarities in estuaries, lakes and rivers across the country interesting. We sat down with Smith to ask about the documentary.

Q: What compelled you to tell this story?

A: This is a personal project as well as an investigative project. I have lived on and sailed and swum in and boated and crabbed in both bodies of water. For a long time I had a house on one of the main rivers flowing into Chesapeake Bay — 15 years or so.

I have a home on Orcas Island. My wife's daughter and family live in West Seattle. These are bodies of water I care about, I know something about. And it's really my own experiences with them and people I knew on the water talking to me about the conditions in the water that said to me, 'Hey, this is a topic I ought to do.'

Q: Before you set out on this, was there a moment when you realized there was something going on with Puget Sound or other waters that was worth exploring?

A: Only in the sense that I knew both were in trouble, but nothing specific. I wasn't starting with any predisposition.

Q: What struck you most?

A: I certainly had no idea of the magnitude of agriculture pollution as a problem. One and a half billion pounds of chicken waste are generated by the 570,000 chickens grown on Chesapeake Bay's eastern shores every year. That's more waste than the cities of New York, Washington, San Francisco and Atlanta put together. And the human waste is treated and the animal waste is not.

I could not have imagined that there was the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez dumped off our cars into Puget Sound from traffic every couple of years. (Runoff from roads and parking lots funnels at least 6.3 million gallons of petroleum into the Sound every year.)

I knew something about dead zones (areas like southern Hood Canal, where marine waters starved of dissolved oxygen essentially suffocate fish and plants.) I didn't know dead zones occupy 40 percent of the main stem of Chesapeake Bay every summer in hot weather, that dead zones are doubling every 10 years in the world, that there's a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of the state of Massachusetts.

Q: When you look at competing demands — climate change, an economic crisis, two wars — how do you justify investing the time and resources required for massive restoration in Puget Sound or Chesapeake Bay or the Great Lakes or the Everglades?

A: That's a good and important question because this is a slow-motion crisis and we're a fast-motion people and if things aren't critical then we don't react. So we take a problem like this and put it on the back burner.

And it's very understandable. When you have an economy collapsing, people out of work, worried about how they're going to pay for their kids going to college, worried about how they're going to pay for retirement, then the environment goes to the back burner. When you have 9/11 and a nation absolutely obsessed with terrorism, it's understandable it goes on the back burner.

It can go on the back burner for six weeks, for six months, maybe it can even go on the back burner for six years, but we're playing with fire if we let it go on the back burner for 20 years.

Q: What encouraging signs did you see?

A: I see hope in the Nisqually River, where Billy Frank and Jim Wilcox — the Indian tribal leader and the major farmer — and the logging interests and the power interests got together and they've really begun to move ahead on saving that river system.

I see hope in the strategy of smart growth, in Arlington County in Northern Virginia, where along the metro rail corridor population has tripled, jobs have doubled over the last 25 years and the automobile traffic has stayed level and there are more green spaces and more open spaces than before because they followed smart growth, which is building up rather than building out, which is recovering old car lots and parking lots for development rather than pushing out into new green areas.

And I see hope in the fact that the governor in the state of Washington has found a bipartisan colleague in Bill Ruckelshaus (head of the Environmental Protection Agency under Presidents Nixon and Reagan) to come together and say, darn it, we've failed before, we've got to do it right this time.

Now, none of it, certainly not the political stuff, in anyway guarantees success. That's the wispier part of the hope, the more gossamer part of the hope that I've just listed. I don't see us past the point of no return, but I do see us approaching the point of no return and we have to take it seriously.

Craig Welch: 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com