Is Puget Sound in peril? - environmental change

American Forests, Wntr, 1999 by William Dietrich

An alluring mix of beauty and business is putting the squeeze on the nation's largest estuary.

Beauty is the Puget Sound basin's blessing - and its curse. With a mosaic of forest, mountain, harbor, and skyscraper almost too alluring for its own good, the region today is recoiling from a mix of logging and development that's brought its greatest environmental transformation since the Ice Age.

Meanwhile, the region's forest industry is reeling from a challenge to traditional clear-cutting. Trees remain the basin's biggest crop, even though the total annual harvest in western Washington has dropped about a third over the last decade. That forestry turmoil has resulted in land exchanges, ownership changes, and new crops and technologies.

Environmentally, this is still good news. Pollution control, growth management, land preservation, and new forestry techniques give the Puget Sound basin a fighting chance.

The bad news: population. The basin's grows by 50,000 to 70,000 each year. Where does Puget Sound proper begin and end? For these purposes, the broader basin extends nearly 200 miles from the state capital of Olympia at the Sound's southern end to the Canadian border, including the archipelago of the San Juan Islands. The waterway is named for Peter Puget, a lieutenant of British explorer George Vancouver who charted the area in 1792. Population grew with the transcontinental railroad, which arrived in the 1880s.

Covering about 16,000 square miles, this basin is part of a Pacific Northwest green trough of lowlands that extend from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Eugene, Oregon. Moist, moderate in climate, and with strong trading ties to Asia, development in this corridor has exploded since World War II.

Tumultuous change is nothing new to Puget Sound, which is bounded by the Olympic Mountains to the west and Cascade Mountains to the east. Fourteen thousand years ago the inland sea was covered by an Ice Age glacier up to a mile thick, gouging out the future Sound to depths as much as 900 feet. The intricate mosaic of islands, peninsulas, and bays that resulted boast a combined shoreline of 2,000 miles.

When the glaciers retreated and the sea invaded to form Puget Sound, the surrounding vegetation took over, climaxing into a coniferous forest of titanic and intimidating dimensions. Pioneers found a dark, glorious, and almost impenetrable temperate jungle, thick groves of trees that soared more than 200 feet, with trunks so thick early homesteaders made cabins of their hollow stumps.

Their impressive statistics - some were more than 1,000 years old - belied an unstable landscape. Mount St. Helens' 1980 blast blew away 150,000 acres of forest. Earthquakes from past centuries spilled forest groves into Seattle's Lake Washington, uplifted nearby Bainbridge Island, and sent tsunami waves roaring across Puget Sound. Mudslides from Mount Rainier stretched for 30 miles, reaching tidewater at Tacoma - future site of Seattle's industrial suburbs.

Forest fires from centuries past left their mark, scorching much of western Washington and setting the stage for the domination of Douglas-fir that drew timber tycoons to the Pacific Northwest.

These natural disturbances have been dwarfed by human change. In the past 100 years the biggest trees have been cut, rivers dammed, fish runs imperiled, wetlands filled, fields plowed, and roads paved. This has resulted in two historic transformations.

The first requires a look to the past: removal of most of the basin's old-growth forest, timber now called "late-successional" by forest managers. Starting at the shores of Puget Sound, loggers cut their way toward the crest of the surrounding mountains. They left in their wake 5,000 miles of logging roads in Olympic and Mount Baker-Snoqualmie national forests alone. That's enough roadway to reach across the U.S. twice.

More than three-quarters of Olympic National Forest's old-growth is gone, as is two-thirds in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie. Virtually all the old-growth has been harvested on the private and state land that makes up 74 percent of the Puget Sound basin.

The ghosts of these great trees rise from huge stumps notched with springboard holes where loggers once balanced. On private and state land, the new forest is businesslike tree farms of Douglas-fir, hemlock, cedar, and alder. Unlike their predecessors, these trees may stand for as little as 40 years.

Thirty years ago a single trunk could fill a logging truck. Those days are no more. Today's harvested trees are matchsticks in comparison.

Federal land makes up 26 percent of the Puget Sound basin, most of what's left of the old-growth protected after the fierce battles that swirled around protection of the northern spotted owl. Only about 8 percent of the 632,324 acre Olympic National Forest and 11 percent of the 1.7 million acre Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest remain open to logging, with any harvest confined largely to second-growth or salvage of burned or wind-toppled trees.

In those two forests logging has plummeted nearly 98 percent from its peak of 400 million board-feet each year in the 1970s and 1980s. The cut during 1997 was just 10 million board-feet in the Olympic and 8 million in Mount Baker-Snoqualmie. The number of full-time federal employees in the latter forest has dropped from 550 in 1981 to 185 today, concentrating on recreation, maintenance, and biological evaluation.