Budd Inlet lies at the southernmost end of Puget Sound. The estuary of the Deschutes River, the bay was once teeming with many thousands of birds and endless swarms of forage fish. Salmon smolts from throughout South Sound utilized its brackish waters for transition. Humans once fit in.
Then in the middle of the 19th century Americans arrived with machines capable of dominating natural systems. To be fair, many involved early on didn’t know the full impact of what they were doing. As time has passed, we do know what we’re doing. Sometimes we choose not to abide by what we know.
The Port of Olympia which governs the inlet’s central peninsula claims to be “a vital economic engine and community partner, responsible for owning and operating a marine terminal, Swantown Marina & Boatworks, Olympia Regional Airport, and real estate properties throughout Thurston County. The Port is committed to sustainable practices, economic growth, and community engagement, ensuring a prosperous future for all of Thurston County.”
Sustainable practices? What activity are we wanting to sustain? Sustainability is often presented as an environmental goal. Or sometimes mitigation, trading damage here for no damage there.
Salmon are heading up the Deschutes River. People gather at the dam to watch the spectacle. Things must be OK, just look at all the fish. Problem is, they’re a combination of strays and hatchery fish. A native population was never established because of the waterfall at the base of the river. Hatchery fish can spawn and temporarily establish naturalized or repeating runs but they typically fail to form a self-sustaining wild population over time.
And they can have a negative impact. Hatchery raised salmon interbreed with wild fish. Captive breeding environments reduce natural instincts and genetic fitness. Hatchery fish compete with wild fish for food and space which can suppress native population numbers. There are wild populations at Schneider Creek, Moxlie/Indian Creek. Money has its eye on these are places for development.
The Public Trust Doctrine has been blatantly violated. Is this inevitable? It might be that cognizance can only progress to a point and must then cash in — a universal law. Being inevitable, extinction is no big deal. Or maybe another universal law will come into play.
What would be a violation of the public trust doctrine? It’s a vey basic question taking us back to Roman Civil Law, to principles like “res communes” (things common to all), which declared that air, running water, the sea, and the shores of the sea were by natural law common to everyone. How would such a case be brought before which court? Of what would a decision be comprised?
But not to lose heart. It’s becoming more apparent, day by day to one and all, that we have really screwed things up. People are sick of the dominant paradigm. And there’s a clearly defined pathway out.
Deep Ecology is an emerging belief that all living things have intrinsic value regardless of their usefulness to humans: a diversity of life forms contributes to the realization of these values and is a value in itself; it’s foolish for humans to reduce this diversity; and recognizing the ecological self, one’s true self, involves moving past an isolated ego to realize that we are deeply interconnected with the entire natural world.
These ideas took form during the beatnik mid 20th century but they are nothing new. The ideas presented in Deep Ecology are consistent with indigenous cultures in which spiritual beliefs center on a deep respect for nature. All living things as well as those of land and water possess consciousness. The funny thing is, none of these ideas run contrary to what we’re learning, the deeper we look into our crystal ball at dark energy and quantum entanglement.
The Northwest Coast was densely populated when Europeans first made landfall in the 18th century. There were the Tlingit in British Columbia and Southeast Alaska, the Haida centered in the Queen Charlotte Islands or more correctly Haida Gwaii and the Salish into Central Washington. These groupings are arbitrary. There is tremendous overlap in culture and language and sub-groups within each.
The Haida term Haa Aaní (Our Land) is the belief that the land is alive and connected to the people. Humans are caretakers, using the land while respecting its spirit. A central figure in oral traditions, the raven is a trickster, creator and cultural hero who brought light to the world and shaped the environment. And there are primordial ancestresses, powerful figures like SGuuluu Jaad (Foam Woman) and Jiila Kuns (Creek Woman) tied to matrilineages. Matrilineal society is symbolized by the Eagle (or Wolf, depending on the region) and the Raven.
Painting by Berselalau
The term “Coast Salish” refers to a language family, including two dozen distinct languages. The Coast Salish-speaking peoples have lived in what is present-day western Washington and southwestern British Columbia for more than 10,000 years. Their geographic territory includes the lands bordering the Salish Sea—Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands, Gulf Islands, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Strait of Georgia—as well as the Pacific coast of Washington and northern Oregon, including what we now call Olympia.
The Tlingit, like their neighbors, have a rich culture based on fishing and art and a family system passed down through women. They believe that all living things have a spirit and are connected through universal consciousness. Their name means “People of the Tides”. They understand the importance of the tides, the mixing of salt and fresh waters, the estuaries and the richness of life.
Central values require individuals to honor elders and maintain balance and respect for family, clan and tradition. Traditional practices like the Potlatch serve as social systems for validating these beliefs. Every stream of any size was the site of a village. Although each was autonomous and sovereign by gathering regularly to celebrate and exchange gifts peace and harmony generally prevailed. These traditions extend down into Mexico where, for example, Bucerias and La Cruz celebrate Nuestra Señora de la Paz from January 16 to 24 every year, as they have since time immemorial.
Around 1857 there was a war of sorts with some newcomers and the First People were gathered up by the Americans and imprisoned in concentration camps on Squaxin and Fox Islands. They were soon given reservation land to the west but some people returned to their homeland. Ron Seacrest, who grew up at the mouth of Schneider Creek in the 1930s, told in an interview of a native family living in Schneider Creek valley into the 20th century. They moved out when a baby was eaten by a settler’s pig.
Winter villages, typically located at the mouth of a stream, had in some cases hundreds of citizens. Each tribal group has its own name for themselves. Many tribal names today, such as Tulalip and Muckleshoot, refer to reservations where people from different tribal groups have come together to live.
The predominant watershed in East Olympia is Indian Creek. The origin of the name? There’s a good chance it was a sizable native village continuing well into American settlement. Indian Creek has ecological and social significance. Since the streams merge, the estuary of Indian Creek is Moxlie Creek and East Bay.
Crows, ravens and jays will make friends with you. And black bears too. Not to mention marine mammals. Nature can be a friendly place.
Photo by Kelli Williams and Connie Wagoner.
Humans should only reduce biodiversity in an existential crisis. Current excessive interference in the natural world is worsening and needs to be reversed. Fundamental economic, material and ideological structures must change. Focus should shift from standard of living to quality of life. Strive to implement these changes.
Settlers believed they could own the land. They built fences around what they owned. The two systems simply couldn’t co-exist. That doesn’t mean they were or are intent on destroying the earth’s ability to support human life.
October 4th of 2026 is Francis of Assisi’s 800th birthday. Francis believed that the world was created good and beautiful but suffers because of human sin. In the Canticle of the Sun, he gives God thanks for Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Water, Fire and Earth. Accounts of Francis’ life reflect great love for animals and the environment.
In November of 1979 Pope John Paul II declared Francis the patron saint of ecology. On 28 March 1982, John Paul II stated that Francis’ love and care for nature is a reminder “not to behave like dissident predators where nature is concerned, but to assume responsibility for it, taking all care so that everything stays healthy and integrated, so as to offer a welcoming and friendly environment even to those who succeed us.”
In 2015, Pope Francis published his encyclical letter Laudato si’, about the ecological crisis and “care for our common home”, which takes its name from the Canticle of the Sun, which Francis of Assisi composed. It presents Francis as “the example par excellence of care for the vulnerable and of an integral ecology lived out joyfully and authentically”.
The Vatican has officially declared environmental destruction a ”sin against creation and the Creator” in a major new doctrinal text. The 29,000-word document, titled Caring for Our Common Home, elevates ecological concern from a merely political or scientific issue into a matter of personal faith. Authorized under Pope Leo XIV, the text declares that destroying natural habitats, polluting, and exploiting resources are not just civic failures, but a ‘sin against creation and against the Creator’ that directly violates God’s plan.
This shift from Pope Francis’ earlier concept of ‘ecological sin’ to a more explicit ‘sin against the Creator’ is designed to reshape how believers view their daily environmental impact. The Vatican emphasizes that failing to safeguard the planet severely harms the poorest populations and future generations, distorting the core relationships that define humanity. By placing ecological action squarely in the realm of moral responsibility, the Church is challenging millions of people to treat environmental care as a fundamental requirement of their faith.
Under Belgian law, as of September of 2026, ecocide is now treated with the same gravity as genocide and warcrimes, thanks to an overhaul of the country’s Criminal Code. Mass environmental destruction (ecocide) is placed among the code’s gravest crimes. When environmental damage is serious, widespread and long-term, we are approaching the gravity associated with crimes against humanity. It follows the same logic as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes”
In the 1960s California’s Marin County was facing projects such as the planned Marincello development, originally conceived to house 20,000–30,000 people in 50 apartment towers, as well as hundreds of homes and townhouses. There would be a mall and a grand hotel at the highest point of the headlands overlooking the Golden Gate.
There was a planned freeway from the Golden Gate Bridge to West Marin and up the Sonoma Coast. The freeway would destroy Bolinas Lagoon and Tomales Bay. A coalition of local organizations including the Marin Conservation League formed in resistance. Legislative efforts of cosponsors Congressman William S. Mailliard (R-San Francisco) and Congressman Phillip Burton (D-San Francisco) helped. In 1972, President Richard Nixon signed into law “An Act to Establish the Golden Gate National Recreation Area”. The bill allocated $120 million for land acquisition. To complete the project the Nature Conservancy purchased the land in the Marin headlands that made up the forthcoming Marincello development from the Gulf Oil Corporation and transferred the land to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
Green Gulch is a beautiful valley near Muir Beach. The Coast Miwok referred to it as Big Lagoon. That’s an English translation. A lagoon is a form of estuary in which littoral drift of sand typically closes the mouth in summer and rains open it in winter. The land evolved over time to a 19th-century dairy ranch and farm in a valley in West Marin.
Few people driving by on the road above knew any of this. A bigger concern at the time was the Vietnam war. There was a sense of urgency. Of unpredictability. Green Gulch was a beautiful vale below on the commute from Stinson Beach.
In 1972 the Green Gulch Farm was purchased from rancher and Polaroid co-founder George Wheelwright in a below-market arrangement with the help of The Nature Conservancy and the Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center was established. That same year, 1972, Deep Ecology was invented by Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss. Deep Ecology argues that all living things have inherent worth regardless of their use to humans. It asks society to move away from a human-centered view and adopt a lifestyle that respects the whole natural world.
The name Deep Ecology gets some push back. Perhaps an acronym would be preferable, something like EAIN Ecology — Enduring, Ancient, Indigenous, Native, Ecology,
Gary Snyder has longstanding ties to the San Francisco Zen Center and its branch, Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County, California. As a figure bridging beat poetry, American Zen, and ecological awareness, Snyder has frequently participated in teachings, readings, and community gatherings at Green Gulch. Green Gulch’s emphasis on watershed restoration, organic agriculture and living in place, mirrors the bioregional and nature-centered philosophy that defines Snyder’s poetry and essays.
Gary Snyder, born in 1930, in San Francisco, has published numerous books of poetry and prose. He’s won many prizes and awards including the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for the book Turtle Island in 1974. Snyder was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2003. He was the recipient of the 2012 Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement by the Academy of American Poets. He spent summers in a fire lookout.
Alan Watts came to Green Gulch in 1973 in good health to talk about his funeral. Late in the year he died in his sleep of heart failure, having predicted his own death. His ashes were scattered there.
Alan Watts (1915–1973) was a British philosopher and writer who popularized Eastern philosophy—especially Zen Buddhism—in the West during the 1950s and 1960s. His 1957 book, The Way of Zen, became a classic guide that introduced the history and practice of Zen to a broad American audience.
Actor and author Peter Coyote has a long-standing association with the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin. He began formal Zen practice in the mid-1970s, was ordained as a lay/Zen priest, and frequently gives dharma talks and teaches at Green Gulch Farm. He’s a “lost prophet of the wilderness”, whose poetry and spirituality draws from Zen, the 60s counterculture, Native America, and deep ecology
Peter Coyote was a key founding member of the Diggers, a radical anarchist and theatrical counterculture collective active in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood from 1967 to 1975. Named after the original 17th-century English Diggers, the group sought to create a society free of capitalism.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Northwest-Coast-Indian
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/coastal-salish
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tlingit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_and_religion_of_the_Tlingit
https://www.redbubble.com/i/art-print/Haida-Tlingit-Native-by-Berselalau/90198577/wqnt
(footnote) Northwest Coast groups can also be classified into four units or “provinces.” The northern province included speakers of Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and the Tsimshian-influenced Haisla (northernmost Heiltsuq or Kwakiutl). The Wakashan province included all other Kwakiutl, the Bella Coola, and the Nuu-chah-nulth. The Coast Salish–Chinook province extended south to the central coast of Oregon and included the Makah, Chinook, Tillamook, Siuslaw, and others. The northwestern California province included the Athabaskan-speaking Tututni-Tolowa as well as the Karok, Yurok, Wiyot, and Hupa.
The Kwakiutl, or Kwakwaka’wakw, are an Indigenous First Nations people of the Pacific Northwest Coast (Desolation Sound). They traditionally inhabit the northeastern region of Vancouver Island, adjacent British Columbia mainland areas, and surrounding islands. The name “Kwakiutl” originally referred to a single specific band, but historically was used by outsiders to describe the broader group of Kwak’wala-speaking tribes
Long stretches of coast consist of uninhabitable cliffs rising from the sea.
