Earth Doomed!

Not really. At least, we hope not. Along with all the bad news about humans trashing the environment, it's nice to know we're doing a few things right.

You've probably heard the news: Species everywhere are marching toward extinction; whole ecosystems are showing signs of stress and failure. Everything from Puget Sound harbor seals to human breast milk is contaminated by toxic chemicals; rivers are running dry and salmon are going belly-up. Our cars and industries are changing the planet's climate, perhaps even melting the glaciers on Mount Rainier.

Don't run away screaming. Gloom and doom about the environment are certainly fact-based, but they aren't the whole story. It's good to know there's some positive news, too: Many environmental conditions are improving, and a number of problems are getting fixed by that notoriously roughshod species, Homo sapiens.

For just one example of our ability to correct our mistakes, consider the history of one of Washington state's most charismatic species: the sea otter.

As early as 1741, explorers knew the endearing animal's pelts were marketable. But when Captain James Cook made a bundle selling them in China in 1778, the race was on. Russian, American and English merchants killed Northwest sea otters by the tens of thousands. By 1911, when the animals were finally given international protection, furriers had hunted them to extinction throughout Washington, Oregon and British Columbia.

Their disappearance was not just bad for the fur trade. Sea otters are what biologists call a "keystone species," animals whose presence is necessary for an ecosystem to maintain balance. When the sea otters disappeared from Washington's coast, some researchers believe their favorite food, the spiny sea urchin, indulged in a feeding frenzy on its favorite food, the big offshore kelp forests. Unchecked by sea otter predation, the urchins devoured those "forests," which had provided important habitat for young salmon and other sea creatures.

Washington's coasts remained otter-less and impoverished until the summer of 1969, when biologists relocated 29 sea otters from Alaska and 30 more the following year. By 1990, scientists counted 208 otters. By 2000, there were more than 500. Last year, officials counted 743, a tribute to nature's resilience.

Habitat studies show that Washington can support many more sea otters-between 1,400 and 2,700-and state officials plan to help them recolonize the remainder of their former range, which will expand their habitat from the Olympic coast to Dungeness Spit and the Columbia River. The return of the sea otter heralds the beginning of renewed ecological balance, as well as a return to the wild abundance of the Northwest's heritage.

The story of Washington's sea otter recovery suggests that, if otters were less busy doing somersaults and generally being adorable, they would slap environmental advocates upside the head. "It's the good news, stupid," they would say. And they would be right.

Good news may not be the main story about Washington's environment. (For example, according to biologists at the Nature Conservancy, nearly one-third of our 25 amphibian species are at risk of extinction. Amphibians do not have the good looks and popular appeal of sea otters, no small problem in conservation politics.) But the environmental movement has committed a colossal communications blunder by failing to broadcast the good news along with the bad. In the pressing need to sound the alarm-and the need truly is pressing-we have forgotten to notice, or at least to advertise, that some important things are getting better.

Not only do endless alarms lead people to feel only numbness and despair, the relentlessly negative messages erode the environmental movement's credibility. As Seattle-based Grist magazine editor Chip Giller memorably put the problem in a Boston Globe op-ed piece, "Environmentalism, long a movement accused of Chicken Little scare tactics and doomsday prophesying, recently reached new depths of gloominess when it announced the death of itself."

Giller was referring to a slick white paper, "The Death of Environmentalism," that has lately caused much undue hand-wringing among greens. The paper blunders headlong into several confusions, but the biggest is the premise itself. Far from needing a postmortem, the environmental movement has been astonishingly successful in the face of overwhelming and often systemic opposition.

Unfortunately, the movement has done a horrendous job of selling its considerable successes, preferring apocalyptic thundering in the style of 18th-century preacher Jonathan Edwards.

Read a selection from one of Edwards' sermons: "The earth would not bear you one moment; for you are a burden to it; the creation groans with you; the creature is made subject to the bondage of your corruption, not willingly; the sun does not willingly shine upon you..."

One wonders whether Edwards was an early environmentalist or whether environmentalism borrowed its marketing strategy from the Puritans. The truth is, we have made noteworthy progress, at least on some fronts, and there is good reason to believe that we will accomplish much more.

Thirty-five years ago-the year before the first Earth Day-many of the environmental problems of the day were so enormous that progress must have seemed impossible. More than 100 million highly polluting cars filled the highways. Tens of thousands of industrial and municipal facilities, from city sewer systems to factories, spewed pollution unchecked into air and water. Persistent and hazardous pesticides were the norm. And despite these obvious problems-observers likened breathing the air in Portland, Oregon, to smoking a pack of cigarettes each day-there was precious little political momentum to do anything systemic about them.

The landscape today is completely different. Big-picture trends in U.S. pollution are largely going in the right direction-slower, admittedly, than we'd like; but while many of the most hazardous substances-DDT, PCBs, leaded gasoline-have left a legacy of contamination, that legacy is gradually dying out. The solutions that might have seemed pie in the sky-say, shifting the entire U.S. auto fleet from leaded to unleaded gasoline-are now old news. Nowadays, superefficient cars such as hybrids are gaining ground. Plus, a veritable alphabet soup of laws gives teeth to environmental protection. 

The crippling effects of DDT, for instance-responsible for much of the bald eagle's precipitous decline during the 1960s and 1970s-are largely a bad memory. Nationally, the bird's numbers have increased fivefold; and, on a single winter day on the Skagit River, more than 400 can be seen feasting on chum salmon. So prolific is the bird that there are now at least 37 eagle nests in and around Seattle.

To be sure, today's worst environmental problems-climate change and energy consumption, to name just two-are deeply complicated global challenges. It would be disingenuous to argue that these big problems will be easily solved. They won't be.

But even the smallest success story-salmon once again splashing up Piper's Creek in North Seattle-can give us hope and, more important, reason to continue the hard work ahead.

Once you go looking for it, good news abounds. Take global warming, arguably the biggest environmental threat facing the world, perhaps in human history. Scientific consensus warns that greenhouse gas emissions may have severe effects on the planet's ecosystems, not to mention its economies. Worse, blinkered federal leadership is refusing to seriously consider reducing climate-changing emissions.

Even with this issue, there is reason for at least cautious optimism. The Evergreen State is filling the national leadership vacuum with several meaningful climate change initiatives. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels is behind the most important global warming initiative in the nation: the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. In 2005 Nickels convinced at least 175 mayors from 37 states to join him in reaching compliance with the Kyoto Protocol in their communities. Among the signatories are a few small towns like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Miami, and San Francisco. Counting only Nickels' initiative, nearly 39 million Americans live in places that have pledged to meet the Kyoto Protocol's targets.

More than a dozen Washington cities have signed on, including Tacoma, Olympia, Bellingham and Vancouver. Moreover, the state joined California and Oregon in the West Coast Governors Global Warming Initiative, a serious pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If you need more proof that Washington is taking climate change seriously, consider that with bipartisan support, the state recently adopted California's tough emissions standards for vehicles, the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the Northwest.

There is certainly no guarantee that we will arrest human-made climate change, but we are starting to put up a real fight. Washington is not waiting for the feds or for futuristic silver-bullet technologies. Our worries about the impacts of global warming-floods, droughts, rising sea levels-should be leavened with the good news that we humans are a capable bunch.

Consider another thorny challenge: energy consumption, which is a prime agent of global warming, air and water pollution, wilderness destruction and, in the Northwest, salmon-blocking dams. At times, our energy appetites seem insatiable as we supersize to ever bigger cars, houses and appliances. So it may come as a surprise to find out that, on a per capita basis, our energy use has not grown for decades. Even Washington's vehicle fleet, chock full of SUVs, is no less fuel-efficient than it was in 1970. So technological innovation and efficiency have kept pace with our growing energy demands.

The challenge now is to reduce our energy consumption by choice before conservation is forced upon us by waning supplies.

Already the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland is developing a "smart grid" technology to improve the efficiency of our electrical system, reducing our need for new power stations. The Stateline Wind Energy Center in eastern Washington and Oregon will soon produce enough clean renewable power to supply 72,000 homes. And energy experts agree that Washington can meet much of its future energy demand with efficiency improvements.

Another less obvious but perhaps more effective way to reduce our energy guzzling is already at work: growth management. The connection between suburban sprawl and energy use may not be intuitive, but it is strong. On average, city dwellers use only one-third of the energy that suburbanites do, because far-flung, low-density development requires long-distance driving and extra power for generally larger and more dispersed buildings.

In Washington, growth management, together with promising new city infill development, is creating vibrant communities where tennis shoes, not internal combustion, will get kids to school. In fact, the percentage of residents living in compact communities (read: low energy-consuming communities) is increasing in every large metropolitan area in the Northwest. There may yet be a future in which energy-efficient cities and good neighborhoods will not be distant from forests, salmon-filled streams and working farms.

The next time you pick up a newspaper and feel besieged by more environmental bad news than you can stomach, go looking for the orcas in Puget Sound. The region's largest and most popular marine mammals are gradually increasing in number, even though the health of the Sound remains shaky. Where just 30 years ago we were capturing and even shooting killer whales, we're now reuniting wayward orcas with their pods.

The Sound is hardly a pristine home for the orcas. They still face pernicious threats, especially toxic contamination and insufficient salmon for food. So what's the good news? The whales are hanging on, even increasing in numbers, despite the odds. Scientists and activists agree that the worst problems afflicting the orcas can be solved: We can clean up toxins and restore salmon runs.

Better still, Washington's leaders are getting aggressive about solving them. Gov. Christine Gregoire recently announced that a Puget Sound cleanup initiative will benefit from the political muscle of Bill Ruckelshaus, a Republican and former head of the Environmental Protection Agency. To fund the effort, Washington's leaders are pushing for big federal restoration dollars, like those that flow to the Great Lakes, the Everglades and Chesapeake Bay.

Ruckelshaus also recently helped develop the Shared Salmon Strategy, a far-reaching effort to restore salmon stocks, the resident orcas' main food, in Puget Sound-area rivers. Two dams on the Olympic Peninsula's Elwha River are slated for removal in 2008, which will open up 70 miles of pristine salmon-spawning grounds.

So when those dams come down, and when big chinook salmon once again struggle up the clear waters of the Elwha into Olympic National Park, what will be our news story? That there is more to do? That salmon are still threatened elsewhere? True enough; but we should also acknowledge-indeed, we should trumpet the fact-that by removing those dams, we are leaving our children a renewed legacy of abundance and wildness.

To me, the dams on the Elwha are an important reminder that, while there is much to do to restore Washington's natural heritage, there is plenty of evidence that we can do it.  L&P

-Eric dePlace is senior research associate at Northwest Environment Watch, a Seattle-based research and communications center.

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