Joe Gaydos's blog

Note: this was adapted from a presentation Joe Gaydos made to the 2008 Leadership San Juan Islands class in May 2008.

Over the past 7 years the SeaDoc Society has put millions of dollars into studying fish and wildlife. Why?

Why are we so preoccupied with “saving” the Sonics and so unmoved about saving Puget Sound? Art Thiel, Dwight Perry, Percy Allen, letters to the editor; it seemed like most of Sunday's Seattle Times was about the Seattle Sonics. Thank goodness for William Dietrich’s excellent “love poem, indictment and call to arms” in the Time’s new Footprint magazine or most readers of Sunday’s Times wouldn’t even have thought of Puget Sound. As Dietrich put it, Puget Sound is an ecological showcase responsible for the quality of life that draws software geniuses to Microsoft. I don’t know of any software geniuses, engineers or physicians that came to Microsoft, Boeing or Children’s Hospital because of the Sonics, yet while the health of Puget Sound and its fish and wildlife sit on the brink of ecological collapse, we discuss the Sonics move to Oklahoma. It’s not just the Times. In a study commissioned by Governor Gregoire's Puget Sound Partnership only 8% of people questioned even mentioned the environment when asked what most concerned about the region.

It is not that people don’t care or don’t understand the value of Puget Sound. In that same survey, 90% of the people asked believed that the health of the Sound is critical to the State’s economy. I don’t know what percentage of those same people would say that the Sonics are critical to the State’s economy, but I doubt it is as high. Bill Dietrich suggested that Puget Sound is going to be saved because it has to be, but without improved media coverage, better education, and more science to understand what the right thing to do is, we're not going to save Puget Sound. We need a regional wake up call. We need the citizens and newspapers of the region to get as excited about Puget Sound, the jewel of the Pacific Northwest, as they are about a basketball team with a losing record. In honor of the region’s great music legends like Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, we need to Rock the Sound!