Thinking big, working the environment of landscapes

TOKELAND — High on the list of new ideas is the one about the Big Save.

The big save has many other names, some academic and formal, but the idea latches onto the notion that it's not enough anymore to preserve a stream or a watershed. How about preserving something the size of a small country? The latest exploration of the big-save idea appears in Environment: Yale, environment.yale.edu, a publication of that university in which two authors describe an ecological zone stretching from Yellowstone National Park to the Yukon. A half-million square miles are included in that habitat — bears, buttercups and people.

The idea dates to 1993 but leans on equally big saves, such as the Buffalo Commons, which would speckle the Great Plains with new generations of bison, or the goofier idea of transplanting African predators and prey to America's heartland — a drive-through zoo as friendly as Jurassic Park.

Writing on the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative, author John G. Mitchell says conservation groups are being tantalized into thinking big because small, precise preservation planning isn't sustainable.

"At last, in response," he writes, "the uppercase-C Conservation community has decided to eschew little plans for big ones. Now come staggering proposals to protect vast swaths of land many times larger and more complex than the world's greatest national parks."

From the big-save idea come the arguments over what, exactly, to do with the people.

The best answer ... is nothing, which brings us around to Tokeland, that tiny seaside village on the western edge of the continent that is, on a hot July day, as bare of activity as Qwest Field.

Tokeland is a treasure of estuaries. It has a small casino, a nice hotel dating to the 1880s and piles of sun-bleached lumber, but it is the surge of estuarial life that lifts Tokeland into the high realms of environmental dreams.

In the Puget Sound region, there is no greater uppercase-C organization than the Cascade Land Conservancy, often affixed on keeping local forests in timber production but not letting them go into development. It is doing similar work on the estuaries of Western Washington, especially Tokeland, where the meeting of fresh water and saltwater has the simplicity of a favorite hymn.

"Obviously, we are not trying to conserve every estuary," said Mark Johnsen, a program manager for the land conservancy. "But we try to preserve those places that have some risk of being degraded over time.

"The thing that makes Tokeland and Willapa Bay so attractive to us is that Tokeland is just a bit out of the range of urban Seattle, has a reputation for being rainy and has such a shallow bay that commercial use is restrained."

In other words, not many people want to go there.

Johnsen, also a land-use attorney at the Karr Tuttle Campbell law firm, said the conservancy has dealt with 20 to 30 pieces of land in 10 Western Washington counties. To date, about 6,000 acres have been kept from development along estuaries.

At the same time, the conservancy is planning on commercial thinning of forestlands nearby, keeping land in production.

Before we all rise to ask, "What about the people?" the future of Tokeland comes to mind. As waterfront land diminishes, as the estuarial surge of new people coming into the state increases, Tokeland's best bet is to make itself the most attractive, affordable home on the block.

The imprint of Puget Sound is going to get thicker and denser with people. Tokeland may seem like a long poke down the road now, but they used to say the same thing about Issaquah.

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com