25 Years of Salmon Recovery

If you're in a place where you have tremendous natural resources and you're not taking care of them, that's an injustice to yourself. You're only going to protect this place and keep it special if you're vigilant about what is here that's so valuable. And these fish are really valuable. And they're beautiful to watch. When I was a little kid growing up, I would spend hours not just fishing but watching the fish and realizing that every fish is a unique little creature. Salmon in particular for me growing up was always a kind of cornerstone of our way of life. Whether it was learning about it in schools or going in the summers and falls to be able to see those in the rivers. It's all tied together. You know, ever been on a ferry boat when someone spots the orcas out there? The ferry almost tips. Everybody runs to that site, looks out the window. But they need salmon. The reason that so much of this work was founded 25 years ago was because we saw things moving in the wrong direction. We could see them declining across multiple watersheds. These species are going to die. They're going to be gone. And that if we want to make sure that these fish can sustain their populations into the future and grow, that we need to do something about it. We had to take collective action if we wanted to be able to see our salmon be able to thrive over time and our communities to thrive with them. Well, it was a remarkable period of time. Back in the 90s, it was clear that the old way of developing land was disastrous. There are very few places that we haven't extensively modified. Dams modify the environment. Logging modifies the environment. Our pollution modifies the environment. We had lots of growth. Too many people, too much asphalt, too many cars, too many buildings, too much industry, whatever. Growth was not under control in terms of being managed well for the future. And the stresses on our natural systems were pretty complete. We need a variety of tools in that toolbox if we're going to preserve natural resource lands. What it really comes down to is our ability to get development to occur in urban areas and discourage development in rural areas. Our salmon stocks have been in trouble for a long time. But when I got wind of the fact that there might be an endangered species listing for Chinook salmon, the potential impact is huge. It's the first time that a major urban area in the United States has been faced with a potential ESA listing. Heavy urbanization, it just makes it incredibly complicated. Our waterways are shared and interconnected with our neighbors across all of our jurisdictions. But the salmon, they don't see political boundaries. You have a dynamic community with 39 cities and a huge unincorporated area and 2.3, 2.4 million people. Well, okay. Well, now what do we do? Local governments didn't want to be controlled by the federal government in terms of everything it was doing. Once the federal government got a hold of you, the way it usually works is you just get told what to do and they don't care how much it costs you. Coming up with the money is your problem. So what we decided to do was to roll up our sleeves and say, hey, we have enough resources here between all the various jurisdictions to draft a plan to get ahead of the problem. There are three main watersheds in King County. We started this work by developing this structure to bring together jurisdictions to work collaboratively in these watershed-based groups. As far as I know, that's never been duplicated anyplace in the United States. Local governments have developed a plan that is approved by the federal government and they implement it locally. So we did. You get the good leadership with citizens saying, yeah, this is a priority. The art of the possible becomes possible. Yeah, I think they should be saved. I think we should help save the environment. We should help save the salmon. When the fish go away, it will have a devastating effect on the ecosystem of the environment. People got invested in supporting us. It's kind of like all of a sudden now, as a biologist, where you're usually an afterthought, now you're front and center. Give us a plan. We knew we needed much stronger regulations for managing land development. We needed to figure out how to get out ahead of the development curve and acquire critical areas before they became developed. And we needed to recover these places. It's all about restoring habitat. Thousands of volunteers spend weekends in October restoring native plant life to the banks of the Sammamish. This is harder work than it looks, but it's a lot of fun. If we do these kinds of replantings, if we conserve better, if we acquire new habitat, if we make our buffer system work, if we can get our wetlands to function again, we can save salmon in this community. And what a statement. To restore the habitats, we had to start revisiting how we were managing these big rivers. This is places that were dynamic, not static. Rather than fight nature, we could understand its processes, get people out of the floodplain and work with it. By opening up floodplains, removing levees, we can give the river a little boost, a little jump start, and the ability to create its own habitats. To erode, to capture trees, allow new plants to grow, creating the habitats that these fish have evolved to over millions of years. When I first started on the Cedar River, there were biologists who said it was a dead river, it was too urbanized. So Rainbow Bend was kind of a touchstone for me. And you walk out and go, oh my gosh, it's actually happened. There's fish here, and here, and here, and here. And that story is kind of repeated over and over. It isn't often we get to say that we were here when it started, and we were here when it was completed. On behalf of the Muckleshoot Tribe, on behalf of the ancestors who once called this valley, Skopotch Valley, home, I want to thank you for the work you've done. It's the largest restoration project by area in the history of King County. As this forest grows, we continue to restore more habitat for the benefit of our future generations. Thank you. When you have the room and the places to do them, these really large floodplain connection projects, we know they work. But we're in these confines of this urban environment where these fish are at, and sometimes we don't have the space to restore an entire stretch of river. Salmon, to survive, have to make it everywhere. Tukaloa is where they transition from freshwater to saltwater, and they go through a big change in life. But we had the same issues for all of the cities up and down the river. Commercial property is worth more money than park property or open space by a long ways. There would be a battle between two cities as to which piece of property got developed or not, and they sat down and talked about it. And then the rep from that city went home to their council and said, hey, this is the best decision we can do overall. And we based almost all those decisions on the science. In these confines, you can't just go back to the way that it used to be. The river isn't capable of making its own habitat, so we have to get more creative about it. The place we're standing in now, Chinook Wind, was the site of a dilapidated hotel sitting in a sea of asphalt. Today, this urban riverbank now will offer, again, critical habitat. Frankly, 15 years ago, we didn't know if fish would use these projects. So we're actually putting these tiny tracking tags inside of juvenile fish, and we've been able to follow them as they migrate through our river system. We even have studies that have been able to look and see are these projects actually providing the food that these fish need to grow, to thrive, and come back as adults. We have been able to document that our efforts are in fact working. These fish are using these projects as long as there's water in them. They're surviving better, and if we're going to reach the goal of salmon recovery, we need to do more of this work. In order for us to be able to achieve our goals for salmon recovery and to make sure that we have a thriving natural environment, we have to work together. Being able to see what we've done in the last 25 years through collaboration amongst our jurisdictions makes me hopeful about the future. It was an opportunity to work together on something positive, and it did turn out to be positive. We slowly made things better for the salmon. We had this thought that, gee, wouldn't it be great if, and a lot of those things are really coming true. We've come a long ways from where we were a thousand chinook headed to extinction 30 years ago, and 19,000 returning this year, but we have some more work to do for chinook salmon. I'm optimistic based on our work, but again, we have to stay vigilant. We're constantly building on the things that we learn every single year, and we know what we need to do to get there. If you give nature the opportunity and the time, landscapes have an ability to heal themselves and restore themselves. In another 25 years, my expectation is it's going to be even better. Looking forward, even with the challenges that we face from growth to climate change to chemicals that we need to address in our waterways, one of the things that we can rely on is that we can work together to protect and steward these spaces, this incredible natural environment, and this wildlife that makes our region such a special place to live.