Earth Day 2026

We are named for water. It seemed right, on this Earth Day, to think seriously about ours. From the Salish Sea to the Duwamish and Cedar River Watershed to the mighty Columbia, water is our life.

Puget Sound is one of the largest and most ecologically complex estuaries in North America. It is also in serious trouble and the trouble brews not because of forces beyond our control, but because of decisions that have been made, systems that have been built, and obligations that have been ignored. What follows is not a comprehensive account of everything wrong, or everything being done to fix it. It is a snapshot: the people, the science, and the stakes, as we understand them in April 2026.

WHAT HUMAN CHOICES HAVE COST THE SOUND

Over the past 20 years, only one August in the Puget Sound region has fallen below the long-term temperature average. The Pacific Northwest has warmed approximately 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895, driven by greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel use and deforestation (Puget Sound Institute and the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound). Warmer water means lower dissolved oxygen, increased harmful algal blooms, and salmon that cannot survive the journey from the ocean to their spawning grounds.

Polluted stormwater runoff which is the direct result of how we have built our cities, roads, and suburbs, is "the number one toxic threat to Puget Sound" (Puget Soundkeeper Alliance). Every time it rains in the greater Seattle area, water carries chemicals, fertilizers, oil, tire rubber compounds, and pharmaceutical residue off roads, rooftops, and parking lots directly into our waterways, almost entirely untreated. Researchers have identified a chemical called 6PPD-quinone, produced as car tires wear on pavement, as a primary cause of coho salmon die-offs in urban streams (Tian, Z. et al. (2021) as cited in Science. Urban runoff can be so toxic that it kills fish in less than three hours.

According to NOAA Fisheries, more than 95 percent of the most valuable nearshore habitat in South and Central Puget Sound has been lost in the past 125 years, based on analysis by the Puget Sound Nearshore Ecosystem Restoration Project. Salt marshes, eelgrass beds, and estuaries have been damaged or completely lost to development. These are the nurseries of the Sound and without them, juvenile salmon have nowhere to grow. This loss is not an accident of geography. It is the direct consequence of urban expansion, shoreline modification, and land use decisions made with little regard for what was already living there.

The Southern Resident orca, which feed almost exclusively on Chinook salmon, is one of the most contaminated mammals on the planet (Washington State Department of Ecology). Their bodies carry the accumulated toxic burden of decades of industrial pollution. PCBs and other persistent chemicals, many of them long since banned but still present in sediment and in the food web, impair their reproduction and immune function (NOAA Fisheries). As of July 2025, only 74 Southern Resident orca remain across three pods. K pod, at just 14 whales, is at its lowest point since monitoring began 50 years ago. Researchers say at least one pod could disappear within 50 years (Center for Whale Research).

We know all of this because a small, dedicated community of researchers decided, starting in 1976, that these whales were worth counting. So they started counting and have kept counting. At the center of that work was Dr. Kenneth Balcomb III and the organization he founded, the Center for Whale Research, which has built alongside its team one of the most complete long-term datasets of any wild mammal population in the world: a 50-year record of every birth, death, and individual whale across all three pods. Balcomb, who died in December 2022 at age 82, spent his career working to shift public and political understanding of Southern Resident orcas from nuisance to endangered, and his message never wavered: no Chinook salmon, no orcas. He once said he was "not going to count them to zero, at least not quietly." The Center continues his work under Research Director Dr. Michael Weiss, with Balcomb's stated wish that the research endure for more than 100 years, longer than the lifetime of a single Southern Resident whale.

The orca are the indicator species. What happens to them tells us what we have done to everything below them in the food web.

WHO IS DEMANDING ACCOUNTABILITY AND DOING THE WORK

Indigenous Nations

The Coast Salish peoples have stewarded these waters since time immemorial. Their treaty rights are not historical relics, they are legal obligations that the federal government has repeatedly failed to uphold and that tribal nations have repeatedly been forced to defend, in court and in policy, against the industries and agencies that violated them. The fight for Puget Sound is inseparable from the fight for Indigenous sovereignty.

The Tulalip Tribes operate one of the most comprehensive tribal natural resources programs in the region, focused on salmon habitat recovery across the Snohomish and Stillaguamish watersheds. Their work includes dam removal, floodplain restoration, estuary reconnection, and a collaborative marine survival study involving more than 60 agencies across the US and Canada. For the Tulalip, the collapse of salmon populations is not primarily an environmental problem. It is a cultural and spiritual crisis produced by extraction, colonization, and broken promises. Preston Hardison, Tulalip Watershed Policy Analyst noted, "The tribes are fixed by treaty, by their ancestors, and by their relationships to the land. They can't move. If species move away from tribal territories, they're lost to the tribe. This is why we have to act quickly to restore the health of the ecosystems, to keep as many species at home as possible."

"We've lost 90 percent of the salmon population," said Terry Williams, the Tribe's Fisheries and Natural Resources Commissioner.

That loss did not happen in a vacuum.

The Suquamish Tribe leads salmon recovery planning across their Usual and Accustomed fishing areas on the Kitsap Peninsula and surrounding waters, holding the line on treaty rights and water quality protections that benefit the entire region, not just tribal members. In the wake of a landmark settlement process with Washington State and the United States on the Gardener Bay, Suquamish Tribe Chairman, Leonard Forsman remarked, "the process that resulted in this agreement is a model for the sort of collaboration that can restore the health of Puget Sound. We look forward to continuing this work for the benefit of all of us who rely on the Salish Sea for economic and cultural sustenance."

The Muckleshoot Indian Tribe operates the White River Hatchery and Keta Creek Complex, fertilizing over 11 million salmon eggs annually which compensates, in part, for habitat destruction that should never have been permitted. Their Fisheries Division is currently co-leading a landmark restoration of 170 acres of floodplain and wetland habitat along the Lower White River, one of the largest investments of its kind in south King County. They also co-led a $3.9 million Duwamish River settlement, holding the City of Seattle accountable for environmental damages in one of the most contaminated urban waterways in the Pacific Northwest.

The Snoqualmie Indian Tribe's Environmental and Natural Resources Department has spent more than a decade restoring degraded salmon habitat along the Lower Tolt River near Carnation. This habitat has been degraded by logging, agriculture, and flood control infrastructure built during centuries in which the Tribe was excluded from management decisions over its own ancestral lands. They partnered with the EPA to model how floodplain and forest restoration can cool water temperatures and improve salmon survival across the entire Snoqualmie River system. Their Upper Snoqualmie Resilient River Corridor Management Plan makes an explicitly political argument: tribal community access and spiritual connection to the river are not separate from ecological resilience. The Tribe also successfully advocated for a statewide ban on suction dredge mining across 11,000 miles of critical salmon and trout habitat in Washington, fighting what their own chairman, Robert de los Angeles, called "this outdated practice that destroys sensitive habitat," and one that Washington had allowed to continue long after every neighboring state had acted.

The Sauk-Suiattle Tribe is pursuing something more structurally radical. In a series of Tribal court filings, they have asserted that salmon hold fundamental legal status, what the Tribe described in court as "inherent rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve." The argument is a direct challenge to the legal frameworks that have allowed rivers and fish populations to be treated as resources to be managed rather than living systems with standing. If policy has failed the salmon, perhaps justice can protect them. It is an argument that recognizes what Indigenous communities have always insisted: a river is not a resource, it is a relative.

Environmental Organizations

Puget Soundkeeper Alliance monitors water quality, enforces clean water permits, and takes legal action against the industries and municipalities that violate them. They name polluted stormwater for what it is: the number one toxic threat to the Sound, produced by the way we have designed our built environment. Puget Soundkeeper Alliance works to hold the responsible parties accountable for it.

Washington Conservation Action works statewide to center Indigenous sovereignty and environmental justice in cleanup and restoration policy, advocating for green stormwater infrastructure, stronger clean water regulations, and the removal of four Lower Snake River dams whose continued existence blocks the Chinook salmon runs that Southern Resident orca depend on for survival.

Artists and Culture Workers

Art has always known what science is still trying to prove, industry trying to ignore, and politicians beholden to interests with direct conflicts: that we are not separate from the water, and that the systems destroying it are the same systems that displace, silence, and exhaust the communities living closest to the harm.

350 Seattle's Artful Activism team uses visual art, music, dance, and interactive installations to make the climate crisis impossible to look away from by taking the discussion anf themes out of policy documents and into the public space, where it belongs.

Mini Mart City Park runs an Environmental Justice Artivism Series in Seattle's Duwamish Valley. This is a free summer program for BIPOC youth that integrates environmental education with creative expression. The Duwamish River is one of the most contaminated Superfund sites in the country. The young people living near it deserve both the truth and the tools to demand better.

Wa Na Wari, in Seattle's Central District, hosts BLOOM - a Black and Indigenous-led program rooted in soil remediation, food sovereignty, and land stewardship. It refuses the separation between cultural preservation and ecological restoration, treating them as the same act of resistance against the same forces of displacement and extraction.

WHY THIS ALL MATTERS TO US

Rising Waters Collective makes immersive chamber opera in the Pacific Northwest. We center women composers, regional artists, and community-resonant stories that explore themes of social, economic, and environmental justice. This summer we are co-producing disPLACE - a work about displacement, belonging, and the cost of losing the place that made you - in Seattle's International District, in partnership with Theatre Off Jackson and community organizations working on housing affordability. We will also be producing the world premiere of Songs of Resilience, a new song cycle by award-winning composer Sheila Silver. The cycle of 7 songs moves through themes of displacement, free speech, and justice. The final song is a work of devotiuon to harmony with Nature itself.

We are not an environmental organization. But we are an advocacy organization, in a sense. We work in the same tradition as the artists and advocates above: believing that story, voice, and witness are not decorative additions to the work of accountabity but a big part of the work itself.

The Sound is in trouble because of choices that were made and it can be restored by choices we make today and going forward.

Happy Earth Day. 🌊

Rising Waters Collective is a Seattle-based immersive chamber opera company.

Learn more about our 2026 Currents Festival at risingwaterscollective.org.