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Kathy Fletcher and People for Puget Sound by Wenda Reed

Clouds are layered above our heads in 10 shades of gray, silvery on the horizon and gunmetal on top. We know we’re going to get wet. Still, 150 of us fan out along both banks of Union Slough north of Everett, shovels and yellow bags in hand, to weed out invasive plants and mulch around new native plantings we’re trying to encourage.

We’re participating in one of People for Puget Sound’s many restoration events, this one close to Earth Day. I’m directed by Sandra and Amy, a mother and daughter who are Sound Stewards, trained volunteers who work 40 hours a year or more on shoreline restoration projects. This is their family time, spent happily in boots and stocking caps in the wind and drizzle.

On the way back at the end of the event, I ask another Sound Steward how this restoration project — quite a few feet back from the water’s edge on a Snohomish River estuary — helps Puget Sound. The trees will grow up to shade the water so that it’s hospitable to returning salmon, she explains. The vegetation will encourage insects that will fall into the water and add to the food chain. It’s all part of the vast, many-stranded water-web that is the Sound.

As we pile up our shovels and turn in our sodden gloves, we’re given stickers to take home. They say, “Puget Sound Starts Here.”

Indeed, the philosophy of People for Puget Sound is that the health of this 100-mile-long ecosystem starts with each one of us, the people who live around it. And that vision starts with Kathy Fletcher, who founded the organization in 1991 and has been its director for 19 years.

I talk with Fletcher at Alki Beach on the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day. We turn our faces gratefully up to the emerging spring sunshine and listen to the shrieks of seagulls and a few small children dabbling at the shoreline. When she looks out over the water to the outlines of mountains beyond, Fletcher says how beautiful it is and how much she loves the Sound.
But there’s a shadow of sadness on her face when she thinks of the organization’s first two decades. Despite many accomplishments, “I’d hoped we’d be further along by now,” she says. “I wanted to have seen a turnaround in animal and bird populations; I’d hoped we would have found a way to restore shellfish beds.”

“The condition of Puget Sound is extremely precarious — salmon, orca, bird populations are all going down.”

Still, she sees signs of hope in each bill that is passed or project that is funded to restore clean water; in each person who is educated to love the Sound more; and in each little area that is restored. On one hand, she says, “I wonder if certain things have changed beyond repair.” On the other hand, “There’s still so much life out there.”

THE SOUL OF AN ENVIRONMENTALIST

Fletcher is a fifth-generation Washingtonian. She grew up in the Laurelhurst neighborhood of Seattle and graduated from Roosevelt High School. Her favorite memories were times spent on the beach at her grandparents’ home north of Tacoma and hiking with her family in the Olympics and Cascades. “I loved mountains, beaches, boats,” she says.

She hadn’t connected her love of the outdoors with the study of science until she took a freshman biology class at Harvard in 1967 and was hooked. She attended the first Earth Day rally April 22, 1970 in Boston. “It was small compared to the anti-Vietnam War protests,” she remembers. “We had headbands and armbands with the green ecology sign on them. It all came together for me — my personal feelings for the environment and my science background. I decided to put biology and activism together and become an environmentalist.”

Fletcher cut her teeth in environmental activism after she graduated from Harvard in 1971 and got a job in Washington, D.C., lobbying for a bill to put a tax on sulfur dioxide pollution as an incentive for companies to cut back. “It was an idea before its time,” she says.

From there, she spent five years working as a staff scientist for three different environmental organizations in Colorado, challenging the Department of the Interior’s policies on mining, water issues and, especially, oil shale development. Her familiarity with the Department of the Interior — which she called “a major bad actor” — got her a position preparing briefs on departmental issues for presidential candidate Jimmy Carter. After he was elected, Fletcher went to work on the White House’s domestic policy staff with a portfolio of Interior Department issues, including water policies and dam construction.

She contributed to decisions on how to preserve public lands in Alaska as the Alaska Pipeline construction wound down. “What would be parks and wilderness? What would be developed? What would go to the native tribes?” she asked. In the end, Carter used his executive power to set aside land in national monuments until Congress acted to pass the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, protecting nearly 80 million acres, a third as wilderness.

When it looked unlikely that Carter would be reelected, Fletcher says she felt pulled back to Washington State and to Puget Sound. She and her husband, environmental attorney Ken Weiner, moved back in 1980, and their son, Josh, was born in 1984. The couple now live on the top of Queen Anne.

“When I came back, I hadn’t realized how much the health of Puget Sound had been compromised — by the ASARCO smelter, lumber mills and more,” Fletcher remembers. She worked for Seattle City Light for five years, heading environmental, energy conservation and other programs. In 1983, she was tapped by Gov. John Spellman to head an advisory commission called the Puget Sound Water Quality Authority. Two years later, when the authority became a government agency, she left City Light to serve as full-time chairperson. She and her staff drafted a Puget Sound management plan calling for, among other things, stepped-up enforcement of rules on toxic chemicals spilled into waterways, cleanup of contaminated sediments and monitoring and limiting stormwater pollution. Industrial and business lobbyists fought back. The agency was essentially “de-fanged,” in Fletcher’s words, when it was folded into the Department of Ecology. She resigned.

PEOPLE FOR PUGET SOUND: EDUCATION, RESTORATION, ADVOCACY

“I thought, ‘What we’re really missing is a citizen organization for Puget Sound’,” Fletcher says, mentioning similar citizen groups for Chesapeake Bay, San Francisco Bay and other water systems. “Puget Sound needed an advocate.”

She founded People for Puget Sound in 1991, working for nothing until she and her colleagues were able to get a grant to pay salaries. Under her direction, the organization has grown to 25 staff members based in Seattle and Olympia, and about 9,000 member households — with a goal of 10,000 member households at the end of this month. Thousands of people volunteer in various capacities.

Education and outreach were the first priorities for the fledgling organization. “We need to reach a broad spectrum of people. You can’t expect them to flock to advocacy if they don’t have some affinity for the Sound,” Fletcher explains.

Nineteen years later, education is still a priority. Armed with flashlights, scoops and buckets, groups of excited children and adults examine jellyfish, marine worms, nudibranchs and other sea creatures on nighttime “Pier Peer” events and beach walks. “Low tides at night are my favorite,” Fletcher says, eyes sparkling. “I go out on the Pier Peers and lead beach walks whenever I can.”

People for Puget Sound partners with other organizations to offer youth and family programs at Seahurst Park in Burien, Carkeek Park in Seattle and on Bainbridge and Vashon Islands. Staff lead “Storming the Sound” educator workshops every year and provide curriculum materials for teachers and parents on the website. The group sponsors a variety of speakers and presents its message at fairs and community events.

In 1994, People for Puget Sound began delving into hands-on restoration work and now dispatches armies of Sound Stewards and volunteers to Jetty Island in Everett, the Duwamish River in Seattle and a host of sites in San Juan, Snohomish, King, Pierce and Thurston counties.

“It’s tremendously satisfying to help heal a place,” Fletcher says. “Once, after we’d restored a shoreline and mouth of a creek, the next week there were little salmon using the area we’d fixed.”

The restoration work goes hand in hand with scientific inquiry. Under the direction of its science director Doug Myers, People for Puget Sound produces reports on threatened species and other topics. Scholarly white papers like “Carbon Sequestration and Tidal Salt Marsh Restoration” and “The Cumulative Impacts of Watershed Urbanization on Stream-Riparian Ecosystems” form the basis for People for Puget Sound’s advocacy efforts.

On the policy front, People for Puget Sound is pushing NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to take more action to protect Puget Sound orcas, and was a leading plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the Army Corps of Engineers’ approval of a barge-loading facility for a gravel mine on Maury Island. Other issues they have worked on include finding a funding formula to maintain Neah Bay’s year-round emergency response tug, which helps prevent oil spills by rescuing ships in distress; establishing aquatic reserves; reducing toxic chemicals that endanger orcas; and stemming stormwater pollution.

The organization’s work is never done in a vacuum and usually involves collaboration with like-minded groups. For example, People for Puget Sound joined with the Trust for Public Lands and the Nature Conservancy to form the Alliance for Puget Sound Shorelines. The Alliance has been able to acquire and set aside 10 new shoreline parks and natural areas from Point Roberts north of Bellingham to Taylor Bay near Tacoma. People for Puget Sound is also a strong supporter of the Puget Sound Partnership’s “Action Agenda” to bring Puget Sound back to health by 2020.

Many of the causes involve annual lobbying in Olympia. At the end of the 2010 legislative session, Fletcher thanked People for Puget Sound activists for helping the organization advocate successfully for bills to phase out copper in brake pads and toxic bisphenol (BPA) in baby bottles and other consumer products. The legislature passed a Marine Spatial Planning bill to begin providing “zoning” for marine areas, similar to land use zoning.

People for Puget Sound and its allies were able to persuade legislators to restore almost all of the funding for core environmental priority programs that were slated to be cut from the governor’s supplemental budget and to keep $122 million in the capital budget for cleanup projects in Puget Sound, including $50 million for stormwater programs. However, the so-called “Clean Water Act of 2010” to raise taxes on toxic chemicals to pay for stormwater pollution cleanup died in the legislative session.

Small victories sometimes only magnify the size of the problem. For example, People for Puget Sound has long asked for more protection for rockfish that feed in the murky depths of the Sound. Two species of rockfish have just been listed as “threatened” and another as “endangered” and on the brink of extinction, which will probably lead to restrictions on fishing and habitat protection.

“I’m glad that the plight of Puget Sound’s rockfish is finally recognized officially,” Fletcher comments. “But ‘glad’ isn’t really a good word for talking about how close we’ve come to wiping out the bounty of the Sound. Consider how many of Puget Sound’s species are on the brink of extinction -— orcas, salmon, now rockfish, not to mention herring, marbled murrelets and about 40 other species in deep trouble. Quite simply, we are running out of time. I only hope that we can save the Sound before it’s too late for us humans, as well as the critters.”

Fletcher has spent the last 10 years of her tenure at People for Puget Sound putting the organization on a strong footing to continue the long-term fight. She plans to retire next year and to spend more time at her family home in British Columbia, swimming, sailing and kayaking.

The effort to restore and save Puget Sound is “never a job you’d do and be finished with,” she says. “Maintaining the health of the Sound is an ongoing need.”

“The bulk of the work remains to be done.”

Wenda Reed is a Bothell writer and nature-lover and a frequent contributor to Seattle Woman.

For more information on People for Puget Sound, as well as events and a slew of fascinating nature facts, call 206-382-7007 or visit www.pugetsound.org.

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