Being Frank
by Ed Johnstone
Treaty tribes and our state co-managers have begun a new era of cooperation to better manage the impacts of outdoor activities that can be harmful to public lands and waters.
Ed Johnstone
We hope our recreational impacts initiative can be a model for future collaboration to respond to environmental threats to our natural resources from the ever-increasing human population.
In recent years, Washington’s population has grown faster than most states. We added a 10th congressional district after the 2010 census. While the expansion has slowed from the previous decade, it’s still growing by about 80,000 people per year.
We need to change the perception that recreational areas are an unlimited resource.
The tribes called for this initiative one year into the Covid-19 pandemic, in response to a surge in outdoor activities harmful to our treaty-protected resources. We’ve continued to see cultural sites vandalized, forest lands trampled by ATVs, salmon redds scoured by inner tubes and riverbanks littered with human waste.
These outdoor activities can violate our treaty rights, for example, when recreational boating interferes with treaty fishing. Or when tribal members attempting to gather on traditional lands find berry patches and mushroom foraging areas picked clean before they get there.
Unchecked, these recreational impacts degrade the once pristine forests, mountains, rivers and marine waters that make the Pacific Northwest an alluring place for tourists and transplants. The tribes have always lived here and always will. It is not acceptable for outdoor recreation to take priority over environmental protection.
Tribes and state agencies have formalized a working charter for a State-Tribal Recreation Impacts Initiative, making it part of official government-to-government processes. The charter will guide adaptive management as we cooperatively steward natural and cultural resources, while preserving our treaty-protected rights on state lands and waters.
Our intention is to create more sustainable, less harmful and more culturally sensitive management of outdoor recreation by:
- Improving the condition and ongoing protection of natural and cultural resources.
- Protecting tribal rights and interests.
- Ensuring high-quality, sustainable recreational opportunities and experiences available to the public.
- Improving cooperation and working relationship among state agencies and tribes.
- Making defensible recreation management decisions.
As a foundation of this work, state agencies must respect the tribes as subject matter experts based on our traditional ecological knowledge dating back thousands of years.
Using that traditional knowledge along with best available modern science, a technical work group is developing a framework to address recreation impacts across state managed lands and waters. The framework will use ecological data, onsite conditions and traditional knowledge to evaluate where existing recreational activity overlaps with sensitive cultural and ecological sites, as well as species of concern such as huckleberries, mountain goats and elk.
Our hope is that this initiative will better connect residents and visitors to the importance of protecting these lands and waters, which will encourage compliance with the rules, regulation and land management controls we establish. The state has acknowledged its obligation to work with tribes to manage recreation and support collaborative stewardship.
We appreciate the state agencies that are walking this path with us through the hard work of creating the initiative and beyond. Together, we can find solutions to manage outdoor recreation in ways that protect our treaty resources — and the lands and waters we all share.
_________________________
Ed Johnstone is chairman of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission (www.nwifc. org). This column represents the natural resources management interests and concerns of the treaty Indian tribes in western Washington.
