News from People for Puget Sound

By Robert Franco-Tayar

As a new member of People for Puget Sound (new to the world of advocacy as well), Environmental Lobby Day was an exciting experience. There was something special about meeting the legislators that represent my neighborhood, and without Lobby Day I likely never would have taken the opportunity to do it. Putting a legislator’s face behind the name and stump speech that appears in the annual voter’s pamphlet was also illuminating. The handouts covering some of the environmental legislation making its way through the State Congress were comprehensible, concise, and skillfully compiled, and I was impressed with the efficiency with which the day proceeded.

More importantly, Lobby Day presents a very important (to me, at least) example of effective outreach. “Outreach” is more than emails, booths, and marketing, though these are also important components. These are the means to a crucial end, which I believe to be “enablement”. The degree to which someone has been enabled to affect change is truly the most accurate measure of a good outreach effort.

“Enablement” through outreach is also about meeting people more than halfway. We, in the Puget Sound region, live in a particularly well-educated and conscientious environment. We care about the ecosystem in which we live and our natural surroundings uniquely define us. However, most people simply cannot be as active or involved as they would like ordinarily, and one of our jobs at People For Puget Soundis to provide the opportunity to maintain and restore the Puget Sound to anyone who wants to. We try to accomplish this on an individual as well as institutional level. Sometimes this involves updating a listserv with our restoration events or setting up an informational booth at an Earth Day festival. On January 25th, People For Puget Sound, along with its sponsoring partners, organized Lobby Day.

Robert Franco-Tayar is the Outreach Coordinator  or People For Puget Sound

By Katrina Beach

If you have ever been to a habitat restoration event with People For Puget Sound, you know we are always tackling those pesky invasives, digging out blackberry to make room to plant a variety of native plants in their place.  But what’s so bad about those blackberries?  They provide food, shelter and organic matter for the soil don’t they?  And why are native plants so great?  Two intertwining concepts set native plants above the invasive ones, diversity and timing.

Diversity-

Invasive plants like blackberry and scotch broom create big stands of only blackberry and scotch broom.  This doesn’t provide a whole lot of options for a varied group of animals, birds and insects.  Low diversity in vegetation results in low diversity of animals.

Timing:

This also ties into the timing factor.  Within a huge stand of blackberry, the plants all flower and fruit at about the same time.  There is abundant food for birds and critters at that time, but pickings are pretty slim otherwise.  Timing is where native plants really shine.  The plants and animals here in the Northwest, and in other areas of the world, have been growing and living together for thousands of years.  They have had time to work out pretty intricate relationships.  Bird migrations are often timed to coincide with the flowering and fruiting of a particular plant.  Even garden cultivars of that native plant, bred for color or ease of maintenance, may flower and fruit at a slightly different time and the migrating birds are too late or too early to benefit.  Also, a diverse stand of native plants provides a continuous source of food as each species flowers and fruits at different times throughout the season.  Even insects have developed attractions to certain plants over the years, and when those plants are next to a stream, and the wind blows the insects into the water, they become food for the fish in the stream, which have developed instincts toward eating just those insects that those native plants attract.

So that’s a quick look at why we plant native plants on our restoration sites and spend so much time and energy, with all our fabulous volunteers, pulling out blackberry roots and yanking out scotch broom.

Katrina Beach is a Sound Steward who works on restoration ecology projects with People For Puget Sound.