Summary

Ocean and aquatic systems generate more than 60% of the world’s ecosystem services. Our quality of life depends on designing healthy coastal ecosystems.Photo: J. Gaydos

The issues people face in designing a healthy Salish Sea are not unique. Human communities worldwide gather in ever increasing numbers at the coast, adding pressure on the ecosystem’s goods and services.

Human use threatens the sustainability of the natural, social, and economic values that attracted them to the coast in the first place. Ocean and aquatic systems generate more than 60% of the world’s ecosystem services. Human communities ignore or degrade these services and their value at their own peril.

These ten ecological principles can guide people in designing local actions that will have persistent global impacts on environmental quality and human health and well-being. These science-based principles will be most effective in informing political processes if they are communicated to citizens and policy makers in ways that are both tangible and memorable. Societies around the world that have cultural, religious, and economic differences are working to design healthy ecosystems. Expressing ecological principles in ways that might capture the attention and interest of local communities will benefit place-based education and conservation efforts.

In summary, issues at political boundaries can be resolved with cooperation, while nature’s boundaries are immutable dynamic connections that cannot be negotiated or changed by policy; think ecosystem.

Great thinkers and philosophers from Henry David Thoreau to Edward O. Wilson have espoused the global interdependence of people and other parts of nature that is inescapable in designing sustainable communities; account for ecosystem connectivity.

Knowing how plants and animals are related to each other by their diets is a practical way to visualize connectivity, interdependence, and system integrity and helps predict how nature will respond to stresses; understand your food web.

Habitats of adequate size and quality to support high levels of biodiversity are critical characteristics of healthy ecosystems; avoid fragmentation.

Loss of integrity threatens nature’s stability, beauty, and capacity for self-renewal, but integrity can be rebuilt and sustained by design; respect ecosystem integrity.

While healthy ecosystems have tremendous capacity for self-renewal, resilience can be overwhelmed by collective human activities. Again, resilience can be restored by people, by design.

Healthy ecosystems are money in your pocket because they save on repair costs and deliver essential goods and services; value nature.

Diseases in marine animals are closely linked to human health and can provide early warnings as sentinels of ecosystem stress; watch wildlife health.

Nature is variable and rarely average and remember, extreme natural events test fitness, mediate competition, and assure diverse opportunities; plan for extremes.

Finally, people matter from grassroots to government and little will happen without educating and incorporating humans at every level into designing a healthy ecosystem for the future; share the knowledge.