Based on personal experience I can say that the Pacific Northwest is the best part of the United States and North America to live.  Washington and Oregon are “Blue States” and are progressive on issues that range across the political spectrum.  This is especially true on environmental issue however.  With California, the most stringent laws controlling motor vehicle emissions as well as pollution from industry exist here.  Northern California can be seen as part of the Pacific Northwest and the population south of the San Francisco Bay Area is greater than the population of the Bay Area and the urban areas to its North.  This includes the cities of Seattle and Portland as well as others in Canada and Alaska.  What is evident is that what we call Southern California has over half the population of the Western Coastal Region of the United States.  Southern California is different geographically as well as population density.

I worked for the State of Alaska during the 1980s and took the Alaska Marine Highway from Seattle to points in Southeast Alaska.  This is a 3 or 4 day journey and the route moves from Seattle through the Juan de Fuca Straits into the Inside Passage, which parallels the West Coast of British Columbia Northward.  Here one finds some of the most stunning and spectacular scenery found anywhere.  Seattle is one of the cities situated on Puget Sound.  The regional population around Seattle is around 4 million people and Boeing, one of the largest corporations in the world, has major aircraft assembly factories located there.   And because of its location on Puget Sound, Seattle is one of the major ports on the Pacific Ocean.    

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) defines Puget Sound as a bay with numerous channels and branches; more specifically, it is a fjord system of flooded glacial valleys. Puget Sound is part of a larger physiographical structure termed the Puget Trough, which is a physiographic section of the larger Pacific Border province, which in turn is part of the larger Pacific Mountain System.   Puget Sound is a very large salt water estuary, or system of many estuaries, fed by highly seasonal freshwater from the Olympic and Cascade Mountain watersheds. The northern boundary is Admiralty Inlet, between Point Partridge on Whidbey Island and Point Wilson on the Olympic Peninsula. A second entrance is Deception Pass, between West Point on Whidbey Island and Rosario Head on Fidalgo Island.

It is a very interesting place to live, work or visit and it is also home to various species of fish and marine mammals, most notably the Orca. 

As mentioned, the population around Puget Sound has historically had concern for the environment.  And this includes large corporations like Boeing.  So it might be a surprise to learn that there is an environmental crisis in Puget Sound.  This is an environmental crisis that is more related to land use and Stormwater Runoff.  

Based on actual sampling in the Puget Sound basin, we have estimated that the volume of oil that is carried into Puget Sound by stormwater runoff is equal to the oil spill in Prince William Sound, the Exxon Valdez spill. Every two years the stormwater in Puget Sound carries that volume of oil into Puget Sound.  Rain comes down, hits the road, starts moving sideways. It picks up whatever is on that road, and there is a lot of oil and lot of grease on every single roadway, on every single parking lot, every driveway. And as those molecules of water move across the pavement, they pick that oil up. … That water runs into a drainage ditch, into a small tributary, into a larger tributary, into Puget Sound.  We have seen video of underwater stormwater pipes during a storm -- scuba divers took the video -- and it's anything but invisible from underwater. It's incredibly nasty-looking, and if people could see that, they would know the problem that stormwater presents. But it's underwater; it's submerged; it's hidden.

Tests on the Orca population have resulted in their population being considered an Endangered Species in their habitat in Puget Sound.  And the reasons have serious consequences for humans as well. 

One of the issues facing Puget Sound is the presence of PCBs.  

PCBs are highly toxic and are a carcinogen. They were banned from all use in the United States in 1978 by EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], and yet we continue to find them in just about every place we look. They are incredibly persistent, which means chemically they are very stable. They don't break down. It takes decades if not centuries for PCBs to break down. They are toxic, and they build up in organisms, in you and me, in orcas in Puget Sound, Chinook.  The PCBs come with the fish or whatever it is you eat. There are trace levels of PCBs in milk you drink, and it gets into your system. And your liver and your kidneys do a really good job of filtering them out and putting them right into soft tissues in your body, and that's where it's going to reside for a good long time, and it's probably not going to do you any good there.

There are projects in progress here in the Pacific Northwest for not only Puget Sound but for a variety of other places where one might never have thought the environment might be challenged.  And unfortunately the problems are all imbedded in politics and the continuing debate over regulation.

It may come as a revelation that the Environmental Protection Agency was a creation of the Administration of Richard Nixon in the 1970s.   The first head of this Cabinet Level Agency was William Ruckelshaus.  He also headed the agency under President Reagan from 1983 through 1985.  We he returned to the agency in 1983, things had changed and were in disorder.  The Reagan Administration’s rhetoric about government being an enemy seems to have been taken seriously by Reagan’s first EPA appointment.

When I came back to EPA in April 1983, it was a real mess. The Reagan administration had appointed Anne Burford as the EPA administrator. She had been a state legislator in Colorado.  She had no experience administering a big agency like this, and she believed the rhetoric of the campaign that essentially the federal government is your enemy, that the people that are working in this agency are really working against what the Republicans believed and what they thought should happen. ... Well, if you go into a federal agency like that and you let everybody know -- and there are plenty of ways of doing that -- they are the enemy, within a week you'll be right. They will be the enemy. … So what we had was an agency really working against itself with political appointees sort of treating a lot of the people who were there as though they didn't know what they were doing and that they were instruments of illegitimate exercise of power. ...And so what I had to do is just get rid of all those presidential appointees, 13 of them. We only kept one. We kept one guy, a good guy. He was on an air program. The rest of them, gone, all 12. ...[The] first thing we do was have an all-hands meeting in the basement of EPA over in Waterside Mall. In the Washington area there are probably 1,000 people who work at EPA. We got them all together and said: "This agency is going to run the way it used to. It's going to do its job under the law. That is what our responsibilities are, and we have got to go to it." ... All you had to do is say, "We're going to do what we're supposed to do as public servants, so get on with it," and that lifted so much of the concern that people had about it.

Well it is now a worldwide problem and is closely connected to population growth, energy consumption and availability, agriculture and food production. Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River comprise another environmental cluster on the East Coast of the United States facing water pollution issues.  Agriculture and food production are the problems there.  For an excellent account of this, I would recommend the entire presentation Poisoned Waters, a 2 hour program on Frontline.