EARLIER THIS MONTH, I SAID goodbye after nearly three decades as a staff reporter at The Seattle Times, specializing in coverage of the environment, nature and Native American tribes. During this time I have seen so much change. Consider:
OURS IS A TIME of dam removal and river restoration. Elwha dam removal, once dismissed as “an economic and environmental disaster” by some and a “very dubious experiment” by U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton, today is history. Recovery has spread beyond the river, to the nearshore, and formed Washington’s newest beach.
I’ve seen fat Chinook splashing and jumping in this river. I’ve seen photos on wildlife cameras of a cougar catching a salmon in the Elwha, hauling it into the woods — nutrients from the sea feeding not only the big cat, but the forest, as the fishy feast decays. I’ve seen Lower Elwha Klallam tribal members with their children catching their first salmon from an undammed river in more than a century. I just went to a tribal high school graduation party where, in addition to the hamburgers and hot dogs, salmon from the Elwha was once again on the menu. Tribal diets are getting healthier, and cultural practices are being revived along with this river.
On the Elwha, the White Salmon, the Nooksack, and most recently the Klamath River in California, communities are using dam removal as a problem-solving tool.
Will Enloe Dam be next? I’ve stood with fish managers and tribal leaders from the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, watching the Similkameen River course over Enloe Dam — a complete blockage to Chinook and steelhead that walls off more than 300 miles of the Similkameen River, an important tributary of the Columbia. Yet this dam hasn’t made a kilowatt since 1958.
I’ll never forget watching the generators in the powerhouse at Elwha Dam go still and silent, for the first time in more a century. It was a historic moment that many thought would never come. Change is possible.
THE GREAT WHALES are back … and more. From barking harbor seals and lounging sea lions, to the quick fin of harbor porpoise, the Salish Sea is alive. The graceful arc of humpback flukes and knifing dorsal of Bigg’s killer whales today are a frequent thrill. This shows the profound power of public policy: These whales are back because we stopped killing them. Passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972 finally allowed these animals to rebuild their populations, rebalancing the web of life.
Lake Washington and Puget Sound also are cleaner. Public investment of hundreds of millions of dollars since our elders decided to tax themselves to clean up Lake Washington are making a difference. By every measure, our local waters are cleaner now than they have been in modern times. Consider that Namu, the world’s first captive performing killer whale, lived and died in a pen in Elliott Bay after only a little more than a year.
The cause was infection from waters polluted with untreated sewage. He died July 9, 1966, the same year Seattle’s first modern sewage treatment started up at West Point, ending the practice of dumping raw sewage in the bay. Today, since 1976, killer whale captures are illegal anywhere in Washington waters. And Elliott Bay, while it still has many environmental challenges, is now home to two wild populations of killer whales.
OURS IS A TIME of collaboration. This is a remarkable accomplishment in a region where overt racism ruled the waters and the woods until recent memory. It took longer than it should have and remains a stain on Washington’s history that it fell to a wise federal judge, 51 years ago, to honor the treaties, backed up by the U.S. Supreme Court, to set this right.
Washington is fortunate to be informed by the traditional knowledge and practices of its first people and the treaties are a benefit to all, securing clear title and a way forward together in this place we share. The treaties under the U.S. Constitution are the supreme law of the land, and among the most powerful ethical foundations securing the environmental future of this region. Their relevance today continues, not only in fisheries management, but in setting policy for salmon restoration, dam operations and maintaining and restoring salmon habitat to make the promise of salmon harvest real. A treaty promise still unkept. I was proud to be part of a team of Seattle Times journalists honored as finalists for the Pulitzer this year for local reporting in documenting how the state’s costly culvert program is protecting neither salmon nor treaty rights.
THERE ALSO IS unfinished work. The southern resident orcas are at grave risk of extinction. I’ve reported story after story in which scientists tell us the southern resident orcas need cleaner water, quieter water in which to hunt, and more salmon, especially Chinook, to eat. Today the population is also inbred, adding to their challenges.
I’ve been alongside scientists as they do their work, in the presence of these whales. I’ve heard orcas breathing just a few feet away, watched them scull along upside down, seemingly just for fun, spy hopping, tail slapping and diving right under our tiny boat. I’m pretty sure just to startle us. To watch them is to know these are some of the most powerful and intelligent animals on Earth, and the ocean’s top predator. An ancient society here long before us, the J, K and L pods can persist, but only, scientists warn us, if they have what they need to survive. It was a sharp contrast to travel with scientists in northern British Columbia waters, and encounter northern resident orcas and their young everywhere we went, even when we weren’t looking for them. It was a reminder of what normal should look like here, too, in the waters of the southern residents.
I documented Mother Orca Tahlequah carrying her dead calf through the Salish Sea, and watched her labor, carrying that 300-pound calf. As the light faded at day’s end, Seattle Times photographer Steve Ringman snapped what would become the iconic photo of that story. Today there are only 73 southern residents left. Fewer than when they were listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act. And their risk of extinction is accelerating.
CLIMATE CHANGE HAS become an urgent local story. I’ve been on the decks of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s Shimada, the agency’s premier research vessel, and watched scientists pull up nets full of species not seen before in our coastal waters, including pompano, a warm-water fish. I’ve walked the blackened stands of one of the nation’s premier research forests, the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, in Blue River, Ore., parts of which had not burned in 500 years. Most of the forest burned in 2023 — including many ancient trees. Over the span of my career, climate change has moved from a debate cooked up by industry to an acknowledged reality directly present in all of our lives. Yet our own president is taking the country rapidly backward on this urgent threat. President Donald Trump is defunding climate research, canceling clean energy grants and promoting development of fossil fuels — oil, natural gas and coal — the burning of which accelerate climate change, all in the name of “American energy dominance.”
FOREST FEUDS are back. I started reporting on forestry issues in the Northwest right before the adoption of the Northwest Forest Plan in 1994. This multispecies conservation plan saved old-growth forests on millions of acres of federal lands in three states, after decades of conflict over rampant clear cutting. Now forest feuds are back.
On federal lands, the Northwest Forest Plan is under review by the Trump Administration, which has called for increasing the cut on national forests across the country by 25%.
On state lands, for our October 2024 Forest Feud report, I watched retirees bushwhack off-trail through Olympic Peninsula woods — not easy — to rip flagging off a state timber sale, and listened as workers in an Elma plywood mill talked about jobs and a rural lifestyle they cherish, built on logging the state’s older trees. This fight is intensifying, as even rural county commissioners join in the opposition to cutting legacy forests, and tree-sitters take to the woods.
THE COLUMBIA RIVER, the Great River of the West, is in trouble. The Columbia is at a crossroads. Some salmon and steelhead runs have improved while I’ve been on the beat, but mostly it’s the same story of fish struggling to hang on in a river remade to hundreds of miles of slack water. I’ve watched shad surge up the fish ladders at the mainstem Columbia River dams by the thousands — a nonnative species now far more numerous than salmon or steelhead in this river. I’ve listened as sport-fishing guides told me their best and most reliable Columbia River action now is walleye, another invasive fish that preys on baby salmon. I’ve watched the Salmon People movement grow, and merge forces with orca defenders, with both pushing for dam removal on the Lower Snake River — a debate grinding along in the Northwest since I got here in 1992 and just sent back to the drawing board by Trump, who canceled Biden-era agreements that had brought peace in the courts. What happens now is yet to be seen.
Don’t get me started on cormorants. I wrote a story about colonies of this native fish-eating bird now roosting on the Astoria-Megler Bridge after they were shooed by the Corps of Engineers off dredge spoil piles in the lower river (created by the Corps). As one bird expert said to me at the time, “how could it come out any worse?”
Which kind of reminded me of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service deciding to gun down barred owls to save spotted owls — a policy still on the books, but not yet implemented — in this, our time of seemingly everything in all the wrong places, for all the wrong reasons, in a natural world badly out of balance.
And yet. This is still one of the most beautiful places I know, replete with wild species we cherish. Over the years some of my best-read stories were about the simple joys of living here: that first juicy fall rain, the grace of a lowland Puget Sound snowfall, the song of a winter wren, a walk in Seward Park in deep winter. Ours is a four-season wonderland, even right close to home. Enjoy it, appreciate it, savor it, share it. Daily.
It’s been an immense pleasure and privilege to cover the news of this region for The Seattle Times, one of the last independent, family-owned, locally owned newspapers in the country. As I depart, I see a newsroom full of avid, driven, smart young journalists coming up all around me, growing into their best years in this vital work.
Local journalism at The Seattle Times has a strong and bright future. I am grateful for that. I’m grateful too, for Times readers who have cheered me on, checked my facts, celebrated and bemoaned events good and bad with me over the years, and helped me understand so much. Each story has been an opportunity to learn more about one another and our world, to build the community that sustains us. That’s the daily miracle we call the daily paper.
I know I’ve said it in answer to so many emails for so many years. But allow me to say it one last time. Thank you for reading, and for writing. And please, keep in touch: lyndamapes@gmail.com; lyndavmapes.com.
