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Choosing Our Future

Photo: Jean Boyle

Choosing our future means planning and taking actions that will result in the kind of community, the kind of Washington, that we want to live in and pass on to our children and grandchildren.

The Washington Biodiversity Council’s vision:

In our lifetimes, the native plants and animals, along with their air, water, and land habitats, are healthy and in harmony with our working landscapes and residential communities.

The vital importance of biodiversity conservation is recognized in principle and in practice.

Washington citizens see themselves as stewards of our natural resources diversity and accept a responsibility to pass the heritage along to their children and future generations in a healthy condition.

The Council is now working to chart a new and comprehensive approach to biodiversity conservation in Washington State—one that is strategic and forward-looking and that recognizes the importance of the state’s rich biological diversity to our health, our economy, and our quality of life.

Choosing our future involves all of us. Each of us has a role in articulating the future we want. We invite you to comment on the Council’s work. We invite you to become involved in planning and visioning efforts in your own community or on a larger scale.

Below are examples of selected initiatives at the local, regional, and international scale.  

> Local (Alternative Futures)
> Regional (Cascade Agenda)
> International (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment)

Alternative Futures: an example of local planning

The alternative futures approach involves a local government engaging the public to choose future land use zoning. It’s based on how land uses affect natural processes in a watershed.

Citizens and planning staff develop and test scenarios that look at how each alternative affects hydrology and habitat. The scenarios are based on science and land use planning principles.

Citizens then produce a community-based vision of the future. They select a land use plan that integrates land use needs with actions to protect natural resources.

Kitsap County’s Chico Creek Alternative Futures Project
State and federal agencies initiated and helped fund an alternative futures pilot project with Kitsap County and other local partners in the Chico Creek watershed from 2001 to 2003.

Chico Creek is home to Kitsap County’s largest salmon run, and the watershed is over 70% forested. The project included a “Watershed Academy” that educated people about local issues and tools for the planning process. Graduates of the academy formed a watershed advisory committee.

• Considered possibilities
• Evaluated impacts
• Identified issues
• Made recommendations

Six reports summarize key technical and planning aspects of the Chico Creek alternative futures project.

An overview slide show (6.5MB pdf) on this project was presented to the Washington Biodiversity Council in September 2005.

Agencies involved included the Puget Sound Action Team, Washington Department of Ecology, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

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The Cascade Agenda: an example of regional planning

The Cascade Agenda is a 100-year program focusing on Snohomish, King, Pierce, and Kittitas counties. It aims to conserve more than 1.26 million acres of land from Puget Sound to the Columbia River, to encourage wise development of homes and business in the region, and to foster a non-regulatory, market-based approach to cooperation between business and conservationists.

The Agenda grew out of discussion begun in early 2004 that asked these questions:

• How can we preserve the quality of life we have today 100 years from now, for our children's grandchildren?
• How can we preserve what we have, as the population of the region continues to grow, easily doubling in number over the next 100 years to more than 7.5 million residents?

They found that a 100-year view changed the debate because it looked beyond the next election cycle or the typical shorter-term planning horizons used by government and businesses.

Through the Cascade Dialogues, a process that included Town Halls, Insight Panels, and Forums, they found that the answers and the solutions are complex, but that they are also achievable:

Two futures seem to be laid out in front of us. In one—a future taken by some other regions of the country—unmanaged growth, sprawl, dependence on the car and the highway have defined a reality in which daily congestion, frustration, and the loss of green and open space leave people looking for a better place to live.

In the other future—one clearly still available in the Northwest—our streams, beaches, and estuaries are restored, functional, and accessible to all. Our farms, ranchlands, forests, and orchards are conserved and working, with their owners fairly compensated for taking care of them. Our urban neighborhoods and communities are lively, full of people, diverse, and within walking distance of jobs, stores, spectacular parks and trails.

It is a tall order to create a plan and strategies for the long term that are flexible enough to adapt to the rapid pace of change, yet focused enough to not lose sight of the vision. We believe we have done that. We know that without a plan to systematically and strategically save what we value, it will surely diminish or even disappear.

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The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: taking a global perspective

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is a global project to provide information about the consequences of ecosystem changes on human well-being, and options for responding to those changes.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was launched by U.N. Secretary- General Kofi Annan in June 2001 and completed in March 2005.

It focuses on ecosystem services (the functions of ecosystems that provide benefits to people), and it addresses:

• how changes in ecosystem services have affected human well-being
• how ecosystem changes may affect people in future decades
• what response options might be adopted at local, national, or global scales to improve ecosystem management and contribute to human well-being and poverty alleviation.

• provides tools for planning and management
• provides foresight about the consequences of decisions affecting ecosystems
• helps identify response options for achieving human development and sustainability goals
• has helped build individual and institutional capacity for undertaking integrated ecosystem assessments and for acting on their findings.

While the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment findings identify significant problems in ecosystems management, it views these problems in context: that the changes people have made to ecosystems have provided benefits for human well-being and economic development.

• growing costs from degradation of ecosystem services
• increased risks of catastrophic disruptions in climate or hydrologic cycles
• the exacerbation of poverty for some groups of people.

We are spending Earth’s natural capital, putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.

At the same time, the assessment shows that the future really is in our hands. We can reverse the degradation of many ecosystem services over the next 50 years, but the changes in policy and practice required are substantial and not currently underway.

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