Regional Environmental Baseline
The central Puget Sound region is highly valued as a major metropolitan area in which to live, work, and recreate. It is known as a clean, healthy, safe, and diverse place with a vibrant economy and temperate climate. The region has a remarkably beautiful natural setting, including snowcapped peaks, abundant waterways and shorelines, and lush forests and greenery. The natural environment provides habitat that sustains a wide variety of fish and wildlife, and at the same time creates economic opportunity through industries such as fishing and timber harvest, and provides numerous recreational and tourism opportunities. These features have all made the region a magnet for growth.
Growth has been steady and the forecast is for continued growth (see population growth chart). Environmental protection in the face of continued population growth is what drives regional environmental planning. The primary question is: “How can the region absorb another 1.6 million people and 1.1 million new jobs by 2040 while protecting the environment and our overall quality of life?”
There is a growing understanding of the role the environment plays in quality of life, economic prosperity, food production, water quality, recreational opportunities, visual and aesthetics pleasures, sense of place, biodiversity, and our future overall.
The Growth Management Act and the VISION’s holistic and balanced approach – focusing on land use, transportation, economic development, and the environment – is central to securing the region’s high quality of life and environmental health.
Figure 2-1: Population History, Trends, and Forecasts
Source: Puget Sound Regional Council 2005
This "baseline" attempts to make sense of where we have been, where we are and what we have learned, and where we may be going. It does not address future impacts, but instead focuses on what we know today.
Over the past decade and a half since the Puget Sound Regional Council first adopted VISION 2020, the number of agencies, research institutions and organizations working in the environmental field has grown. Some of these stakeholders have responsibility to administer laws related to specific issues such as clean air, water quality, flood protection, and ecosystems, or wildlife protection. Others are resource managers, environmental interest groups, and researchers. Through their efforts we have learned a great deal about how the environment functions, and we are now increasingly working in interdisciplinary ways that more fully recognize the interconnections between these issues.
The baseline takes a first step at drawing together what these stakeholders are doing in order to make sense of the new information at a regional scale. Ultimately, as the region looks forward to the year 2040 and the challenges of accommodating population and employment growth, the baseline is about choices and opportunities- in short, the consequences of our actions.
The baseline can be a call to action - a positive call that recognizes that many if not all of the tools needed to protect, conserve, and restore the environment already exist. These tools may be expensive or difficult to implement, but over the course of the 35-year horizon of the regional VISION, the region can likely implement a large number of these tools and make substantial progress toward creating a sustainable environment. And, as has been said before,
No place on Earth has a better shot at reconciling people and nature than the Pacific Northwest, the greenest corner of history's richest civilization. And with most of the planet's people aspiring to our North American standard of living, no one has a greater responsibility to set new standards for an ecologically endangered world.
- Northwest Environment Watch, 2004
The environmental baseline discussion is organized in the following manner:
- What is the nature of the region? This section describes the ecology of the region, and the larger ecological setting in which the region resides, to give readers more context for understanding the impacts of growth and land use choices on the natural environment.
- What has been happening to the region's environment over the past 150 years? This section provides a high-level overview of human impacts on the region's environment.
- Who are the region's environmental actors and what are they doing? This section summarizes some efforts and initiatives currently underway, discusses new environmental planning information, and summarizes the environmental priorities as identified by these stakeholders.
- What can VISION 2020+20 contribute? This section describes how the VISION, the preferred growth alternative, and the multicounty planning policies can help improve regional environment planning and implement environmental safeguards.
