Once And Future

We have embraced sustainability. We’re spending lots of effort and attention on how we can live well with our planet and leave it able to support our great-grandchildren. Our area has an admirable history of environmental action, starting with the campaigns to establish our National Parks (Rainier, 1899, Olympic, 1938, North Cascades, 1968) and Wilderness Areas.

By 1955 it had become obvious to everyone in the area that the old way of treating our sewage- just dumping it straight in the water- was unsustainable. Nobody used that term at the time, of course, but Lake Washington was becoming a cesspool. Scientists saw disturbing evidence of pollution and its downstream effects, studied it to be certain, and presented the facts to elected officials. What happened next, though, had never happened before. We fixed it.  

Those officials acted upon that best available science and when presented with the case the voters said yes to paying for it- a 58% margin in Seattle and 67% in the suburbs. It was the most expensive pollution control program in the nation at the time, and was 96% locally funded, using almost no state or federal money. We did this, and pointed the way for every other jurisdiction in the US and the rest of the world.

Washington passed a law allowing formation of a local jurisdiction to tackle the multicity problems of sewage, garbage, transportation, comprehensive planning, and parks. That became The Municipality of Metropolitan Seattle, or “Metro”,  and its first job was to eliminate all direct dumping into the lake and divert the waste to a new, first of its kind secondary treatment plant at West Point.

What happened back then? It wasn’t an Age of Miracles. These weren’t larger than life historical figures or superheroes or mythical characters, just conscientious citizens doing what was right. Now it’s our turn. We are facing global warming/climate change and our descendants will judge us by what we do.

The Washington State Department of Ecology  says,  “We have long known that the societal threat that climate change presents is of a nature and magnitude unlike any other we have faced.”

And it’s poised to hit all of us. “This increase in greenhouse gases is resulting in an unpredictable climate that is changing rapidly. Our state is particularly vulnerable to a warming climate — especially our snow-fed water supplies that provide our drinking water, irrigation for agriculture- and nearly three-fourth of the electrical power we produce. Close to 40 communities – including some of the state’s largest population centers — along our 2,300 miles of shoreline are threatened by rising sea levels. Ocean acidification, which is created when carbon dioxide reacts with seawater and reduces the water’s pH, threatens our abundant shellfish.”

What does that mean for Shoreline? We have little actual shoreline and no port facilities, so you might think a rising sea level wouldn’t initially impact us, but as the sea rises it will eat away at the shore more quickly, increasing the likelihood of mudslides and endangering houses and railroad tracks.  The additional winter rain may increase mudslides in upland Shoreline and Lake Forest Park because of all the extra water filtering through the soil. The lower water supply, lower hydroelectric supply, higher summer cooling demand, higher winter heating demand and other effects will change a lot of what we do.

I infer we will do best to dramatically increase water storage and power generation (wind and solar) within the city, increase the area of pervious paving while reducing the built area, and finish daylighting our creeks and restoring our wetlands. These measures should help our situation. In short, it’s time for us to step up and do our jobs.