There may be 20 bears in the Cascades. There may be two. At times, if you assume that they wander back and forth across the Canadian border, there may be none. But the habitat remains. The recovery plan calls for restoring a population in a place where bears can obviously live.
Bill Ruckelshaus made the nearby residents of Tacoma's ASARCO smelter face the choice: kill a few people a year from arsenic, or gamble to save 575 jobs?
“Lynx are good sentinel species for climate change,” says Dan Thornton, an assistant professor in Washington State University's School of the Environment.. “They are like an early warning system for what’s going to happen to other climate sensitive species.”
Here in the Pacific Northwest -- at least the dank western part of the region -- planting trees seems a natural. If there's one thing we can do here, it's grow trees. And we should. But not every place is Western Washington or Oregon. And even here, there are caveats.
Can Washington manage its vast forests in part to, say, slow climate change or protect drinking water, or must it manage them exclusively to generate money for public school construction and the budgets of cash-strapped counties? This question is not merely rhetorical.
"Fishery managers and NOAA could resolve this by moving Southeast Alaska’s Chinook fishery in or near the Alaskan rivers where their Chinook were born, allowing Chinook from down the coast to migrate back to their home rivers along the coast, and giving Southern Resident killer whales a chance to feed.”
Forecasts for the Columbia Basin aren’t encouraging. Over the coming century, “a lot of the lower Columbia will become unsuitable” for salmon, one expert says.