It’s much harder to actually solve the problem than to just blame beavers and hope for the best. I mean you have to first study it’s origin, which takes precious resources and brain cells. Then you have to think about the solution and that might require actually changing your behavior which is never fun. You can see why blaming beavers is easier.

But Washington isn’t doing it.

In the Duwamish Watershed, Communities Respond as Coho Salmon Face a New Threat

Every year, salmon journey from the open waters of the North Pacific, pass through estuaries along the coast, and swim upriver to spawn in the freshwater streams and creeks in which they were born. Yet across the western coast of North America, coho salmon are dying in large numbers as they return to urban watersheds. In West Seattle, a team of citizen scientists are surveying salmon to understand how many are affected.

The study, which is coordinated by the environmental nonprofit Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, is modeled after similar publicly funded studies run by the City of Seattle and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration between 1999 and 2005. As Puget Soundkeeper Alliance’s Gillian Flippo explains, “The salmon are uniquely affected by the stormwater … causing them to die before they spawn.” It’s a phenomenon that researchers are calling “pre-spawn mortality” or “Urban Runoff Mortality Syndrome.” All told, the surveys show that each year between 50% and 80% of returning coho are dying from exposure to urban waters.

Wait what? Between fifty and 80% of salmon are dying from the runoff of cars and not because beavers make the dams too hard for their parents to jump over? Cars is a TERRIBLE answer to the question. Getting rid of cars is much, much harder than getting rid of beavers. Can we please go back to blaming beavers?

Imagined differently, after surviving for nearly 16 months in freshwater streams and another 16–18 months in the open ocean, and having traveled as far as the Gulf of Alaska and back, over half the coho salmon that return die within hours of contact with these polluted watersheds and before they get a chance to lay their eggs.

Oh my. No wonder people reflexively blame beavers over and over again as they drive past in horror, Every year there seem to be MORE of them. And all the while what we’re not thinking that there are MORE of too is CARS. As we pollute the groundwater with our chemical runoff from  the rubber of tires and whatever else we inflict.

Despite grim results, this work and complementary efforts by volunteer and professional scientists across Puget Sound have begun to bear fruit. While it was first observed in the 1980s, a team of University of Washington and Washington State University researchers recently discovered that a single chemical, 6PPD-quinone, seems to be the cause of this alarming death rate. A by-product of a chemical commonly found in car tires, 6PPD-quinone enters the blood and then the brain of coho salmon. They soon lose their sense of direction, swim to the surface, spasm, and die within hours.

The Tires are killing the salmon. How on God’s green earth are you going to get rid of that?

How do you solve a problem caused by a chemical found in nearly every car on the road that can kill over half the returning coho salmon each year? Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) — or systems of plants and soil that filter stormwater along roads and waterways — could be part of the answer. Gillian says that “it’s been shown that this bioinfiltration prevents lethal stormwater impacts.” She adds that we could “[implement] this infrastructure right now while working on larger scale solutions to lessen this pollution in the first place.”

You mean PLANTS can fix this? Like the bottle brush that used to be all over our freeways and now is replaced by attractive concrete barriers?

On a wet Friday in November, the Emerald joined a crew of volunteers conducting a survey along Longfellow Creek near Dragonfly Pavilion in Delridge. The creek’s path has been extensively modified. Beginning just downstream of where we were, it is channeled into a half-mile-long underground pipeline before opening into the Duwamish River through a grated outlet. Any salmon that we would see had to swim through this daunting passageway. Yet despite these confinements, the creek still hosts a surprising amount of life. We startled the resident blue heron on our way to the stream, passed an overflowing beaver dam and pond, and spotted a number of chewed logs, telltale signs of more riverine construction in the works. The same kind of uncanny resilience is matched by the human communities that live, work, and sustain themselves along the watershed and who continue to protect the area.

A few blocks north, at 23rd Avenue Southwest and Southwest Findlay Street, the Delridge Neighborhood Development Association (DNDA) has led a project to improve water quality in Longfellow Creek by restoring a wetland at the site of an old electrical substation previously operated by Seattle City Light. Not only does the wetland solve a local flooding issue, filter water, and protect salmon, but it creates outdoor green space for the underserved and historically redlined Roxhill-Delridge community. Bri Castilleja, who works as an environmental educator with DNDA, serves on Seattle’s environmental justice committee, and is a member of the Samish Tribe, uses this wetland space to run youth programs and community workshops for neighborhood residents. Through classes on environmental justice and native plants, she works to highlight how Black and Indigenous knowledge frames connections to land and liberation.

Greening the roads. Planting our way through the runoff. If we’re going to continue to drive these death machines rolling along our salmon poisoners we are just going to have to increase the green spaces that border our waterways. Hey I know what can help with that.

Experts agree that true environmental justice requires meeting the community where it is at and recognizing that issues intersect. By all accounts, efforts to remove 6PPD-quinone and restore the waterways will require this type of empowerment and a massive mobilization of the communities that depend on the watershed and that have constantly fought to protect it.