Daily Score Blog

Stormwater -- the rainwater that streams off roofs, parking lots, roads, and yards, carrying with it toxic pollutants -- poses a costly, intractable problem for governments and businesses. In Washington, efforts to control stormwater have cost its cities hundreds of millions of dollars.

The problem with stormwater comes from its massive volume, which floods homes and blasts through streams, flushing salmon eggs, gravel, and everything else out to sea. And it comes from the pollutants that are picked up by the torrents of rain along the way, including copper, oil and grease, and pesticides.

Stormwater presents a daunting challenge considering the Northwest's rapid pace of development, and the fact that residential areas have three-times the rate of runoff compared to forests and fields (see page 12). Polluted stormwater kills salmon returning to urban streams to spawn before they can lay their eggs. It forces the closure of acres of shellfish beds made unsafe for human consumption. The rush of water causes erosion and fills basements with muddy water.

The good news is we already know some of the best, cheapest solutions for controlling runoff. The bad news is the solutions aren't being widely used. 

Puget Sound is in the big leagues with the EPA approving the state's "Action Agenda" for recovering Washington's inland sea. The approval "signifies the agency’s full commitment to helping carry out the Agenda to protect and restore Puget Sound," stated an agency press release from Wednesday.

With the EPA's blessing, the effort could get up to $20 million this year in federal funding for work to restore the Sound to health.

The 204-page Action Agenda, which was released in December by the state's Puget Sound Partnership and Gov. Chris Gregoire, is a "blueprint for recovery." It includes:

• Fixing and improving sewage and septic systems
• Increasing the use of development techniques that capture rainwater on site so that it doesn't flow as polluted runoff into the Sound
• Shoreline restoration work
  

This isn't the only pot of money coming to the Sound. The Northwest Straits Commission, a nonprofit working on Puget Sound projects, is getting $4.6 million of federal stimulus money to remove lost fishing nets that drown thousands of birds, fish, and marine mammals each year.

The money was awarded in June by the NOAA Fisheries Service to the Northwest Straits Marine Conservation Foundation. The commission's director, Ginny Broadhurst, said the 18 months of support could result in the removal of 90 percent of the abandoned nets in the Sound.

Steeple photo courtesy of Flickr user joiseyshowaa under the Creative Commons license.

One in which geothermal energy is heating greenhouses that help produce a pesticide-free application for strawberry patches, almond orchards and mint fields. The same hot water helps brew beer, raise tropical fish, melt snow off downtown sidewalks and sell homes in Klamath Falls' Hot Springs neighborhood. And renewable energy is just one plank of a plan to help right the rural area's economy by focusing on more sustainable business lines.

I don't know what Kool-Aid the region's newsrooms were serving this weekend, because it was one of several stories that reexamined iconic Northwest conflicts -- the timber wars and salmon recovery -- and found pretty constructive solutions.

That's not to suggest there hasn't been plenty of real fight to write about. And I'm no fan of self-serving "good news" stories pitched to make someone look good or mask actual problems. But as a journalist, it's also possible to get so bored with old narratives that you fail to see how the world has moved beyond them in interesting ways.

The Oregonian story isn't exactly a good news story anyway. It's about a place where unemployment hit 15 percent. Sure, there's a little positive spin about the "Sustainable Klamath" brand. But the story manages to offer a real - and surprising - portrait of a community that's thinking about its future and making investments so history doesn't repeat itself.

Check out the rest of the Northwest's top 10 sustainability headlines at Sightline Daily, or get the news delivered via email each morning by clicking here. All of today's news can be found here.

So I was really excited this week to tune into PBS to watch Frontline, a standout of investigative journalism, as it delved into what's ailing Puget Sound and the Chesapeake Bay in a special called "Poisoned Waters." All right! Nationally acclaimed, heavy hitting reporting brought to bear on our own Sound.

If you've got some time to kill this afternoon, I'd encourage you to take a look at this nifty tool that just came across my inbox. It's an online, interactive "State of the Salmon" tool that depicts the health of Pacific salmon populations through some pretty extensive hydrography maps. It's put together by Wild Salmon Center and Ecotrust in Portland. Take a look!

Last week, when I wrote that the costs of doing nothing about climate change outstrip the costs of fixing the problem, one person wrote asking for hard numbers. How do we know for certain which is more expensive? Maybe it will be cheaper to abandon ship, so to speak: move everyone (and everything) out of flood-prone areas and forget about reducing emissions.

Fair enough, I suppose. It would be interesting to see someone crunch those numbers. Plus, whether we reduce our emissions or not, we'll likely need to undertake some expense for "adaptation" -- the costs of managing the climate impacts that are already unavoidable.

More precisely though, it's a fair enough question only for those of us who don't have our livelihoods and heritage bound up in the Northwest's rivers and lowlands. Not everyone really has the option of leaving. Consider the tribes.

Update 10/20: Crosscut has a version of this post.

What happened to the Olympic Peninsula after its wolves were hunted to extinction in the 1920s? There's a fascinating new study (pdf) out on this question -- the first of its kind as far as I know. As it turns out, eliminating this one keystone species sent shockwaves through the whole ecosystem. Some of the effects were felt almost immediately after wolves were extirpated and some are only just now becoming clear.

It's a shame that reading articles like means hacking through verbiage that can feel as dense as an Olympic rainforest -- it's all "flow-induced shear stresses," "fluvial erosion," and "ungulate exclusion" -- because the study's content is incredibly important for lay people to understand. (Good ordinary language articles are here and here.) The upshot is that researchers have determined that the Olympic wolves were river-keepers, in an indirect but very real sense.

Here's how it worked. Once upon a time, healthy wolf populations kept the native elk herds lean. But when the wolves were killed off, the elk populations spiked (with a colossal and much-noticed-at-the-time boom in the 1930s). The booming elk herds spent much of their time in the lush river bottoms, cropping the living heck out of new tree growth and hammering the seedlings of cottonwood, bigleaf maple, and even some conifers. Those young trees had stabilized the banks along the region's fast-flowing rivers. And without new saplings and their fortifying root-systems, the rivers began to erode their banks, eventually channelizing and "braiding" as they spread out along the newly-unstable valley floors.

Big three-day series in the Seattle Times on Puget Sound launches today. Day one is great.

If you're time-pressed, here it is, shorter: Sprawl is the real killer of the sound. Cities--complete, compact communities--are the solution.

Fortuitously, that's exactly what Cascadia needs for jobs, health, energy independence, and climate security too.

Four tribes broke rank with conservationists yesterday and cut a deal with the federal government to end their longstanding opposition to dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers. In return, the Yakama, Colville, Umatilla and Warm Springs tribes will receive $900 million for restoring salmon habitat. The tribes see this as a solution to the enduring legal wars over salmon. "It's moving our energy from courtrooms to streambeds," John Ogan, attorney for the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, told the Portland Oregonian.

Conservationists, on the other hand, are devastated at losing their key allies. But they’re not changing course. “(W)hat does the Endangered Species Act say needs to be done?” Todd True, a lawyer for Earthjustice, said in the New York Times. “And what does the science say needs to be done?” 

The Oregonian has the definitive report, although the story is covered in most of the big regional media outlets. The Boise Idaho Statesman, meanwhile, focuses on the Nez Perce’s position. They are the only tribe out of the five involved in the lawsuits to reject the deal.

In other news, see a great op-ed in the Juneau Empire by a 100-year-old Tlingit elder who was born the same year Alaska’s Tongass National Forest was established. He compares the history of the Tongass (the traditional territory of the Tlingit) to his own journey through life – and the struggles of his people for equal rights. 

(The accompanying photo was taken at a Portland demonstration to remove dams from the Klamath River, which flows through Southern Oregon and Northern California. Thanks to Patrick McCully, via flickr.)