Snow!

I couldn't think of another title. What else do you need to know, other than it's snowy out there?!

The office was mostly closed today. Hillary and I both worked remotely, while Tamera, who lives within walking distance of the office, held up the fort. Tamera, by the way, is a real unsung hero of the Hylebos, keeping the office humming and keeping me on task and on track.

Hopefully, road conditions will improve Friday, but current predictions are not encouraging. Oh, well. At least my daughters are enjoying the extra time off from school and the rare opportunity to play in the snow. I did get out for a brief walk to the nearby Metropolitan Market. It's been exactly a week to the day since my surgery and man, it was nice to take a walk with my daughters and 1 of my pooches in the snow! Life is good!

Puget Soundings
Anyhow, while the snow looks so beautiful on the ground, it will eventually melt and become surface water runoff, flowing ultimately to Puget Sound. As it travels, some of it - too much of it, in fact - will pick up pollutants from our roads and parking lots and deliver that into our already beleaguered inland sea.

Scientists who've been studying core samples of Sound sediments have begun to paint a picture of the history of toxic pollution of the Sound. The analysis shows that while past environmental regulations reversed pollution trends for specific chemicals, non-point pollution runoff from our ever-growing population began outstripping other sources in the 1980s and now poses the largest pollution threat to the Sound.

The bad news, Brandenberger said, is that the sediments indicate that these dramatic gains started to slow down in the late 1980s -- and, in some cases, appear to have even started to worsen -- the result of "nonpoint" pollution from the region's population growth, development and consequent increases in contaminated stormwater runoff.

"If we continue on with what we're doing now, it is likely Puget Sound will never recover," Brandenberger said.

Here's a thought. Is the Puget Sound our region's analogue of the global climate crisis? What I mean is that the scale of change needed in our region - from our transportation system to the way we manage stormwater, to the way we manage growth - is on a par with the scale of change needed on a global level to address the crisis of global warming.

The analogy isn't watertight, I know. The consequences of global warming are much less forgiving. While we can probably ruin the Sound ecologically and still continue living much the way we do today, changes in the global climate would fundamentally alter the conditions of life and society.

OK. But...the scale of ecological changes we will experience with a ruined Sound are beyond anything in our regional experience. And the geographic scope of the impacts unites us in a way that few other regional environmental issues do.

Global warming is a good approximation of the type of ecological crisis at hand. And, an indicator of the scale of human response needed to bring the needle out of the red zone. I'm thinking the $599 million considered by the Puget Sound Partnership may be just the beginning.

But Puget Sound recovery can't just be about spending money. You can't spend your way out of an ecological crisis! Behavior has to change. That means enforcing environmental laws that are on the books, and creating positive incentives for doing things the right way.

Yes, there is a crisis here, but there's opportunity in crisis. Much like the stores making money today selling tire chains, or the uptick in the towing business.

Comments

[One of the Carrel Daughters]

I like snow!!

Snow is awesome!!

It's also white!!