Orca Pass Gains Momentum

August-September 2003

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
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by Laurie MacBride

Map by Jeff Ardron of the Living Oceans Society, with support from the World Wildlife Fund.

Orca Pass is not a name you'll find on any map or marine chart ... yet. But if the grassroots efforts to establish the Orca Pass International Stewardship Area are successful, it's only a matter of time before the name becomes widely used.

In early 1999, the sister organizations Georgia Strait Alliance (BC) and People for Puget Sound (WA) convened a meeting of about a dozen conservation groups, to talk about the concept of forming a crossborder marine protected area. Would it be possible jurisdictionally? How could public and governmental support be gained? From these early discussions, the idea has grown into an ongoing initiative to win special protection while promoting voluntary stewardship and best practices in the waters that join Canada's Gulf Islands and the United States' San Juan Islands.

Over this summer and fall, petitions to establish Orca Pass, signed by thousands of citizens from Washington and British Columbia, are being presented to federal, state, and provincial governments. As of July, Orca Pass had also been formally endorsed by about 70 organizations and businesses and over two dozen prominent scientists and community leaders. San Juan County and the Islands Trust, the local governments of the area, have also signed on. (For a list of endorsing organizations and businesses, see this article. If you'd like to add your organization or business, go to www.georgiastrait.org/OrcaPass/endorsers.php.)

The area dubbed Orca Pass isn't a single body of water: it's made up of Haro Strait, Boundary Pass and dozens of smaller channels, bays and tidal passes that surround and link the many islets and islands in these transboundary waters. Orca Pass lies at the heart of the "Salish Sea", the shared inland waters we call Puget Sound and Georgia Strait which have been home to the Coast Salish people since time immemorial.

The area is also home to the southern resident killer whales, the majestic transboundary ambassadors that transit these waters regularly, recognizing no political border.

These orca are much loved - so much so that they're the center of a multimillion dollar whale watching industry - but they're also in deep trouble on both sides of the border. Canada has listed them endangered, with only 79 individuals left.

What better symbol than the orca to evoke these waters we cherish, which are threatened by pollution, habitat loss, declining fisheries and the impacts of human population growth? Thus the name, Orca Pass International Stewardship Area - and the urgency of protecting this magnificent area for future generations.

Image Produced by People For Puget Sound

Adding together the many endangered or threatened species lists from various jurisdictions and agencies, some 60 marine species in the Georgia Strait/Puget Sound ecosystem are in serious trouble. It's a rich ecosystem, but it's teetering on the edge.

The Orca Pass proposal calls for a network of protected zones to be established within the area, based on the best available science as well as local and traditional knowledge about what resources are threatened and how they can be protected. Towards that end, "biological hotspots" have been identified where marine life is particularly rich, but threatened. Some of these will need to be no harvest areas, to allow the recovery of slow-growing species like rockfish. Others may need to be areas where, for example, mariners are expected to anchor in water at least 30 feet deep or use fixed moorings to avoid damaging sensitive eelgrass beds. The locations and nature of the protected zones to be proposed are being discussed all around the area through community consultations.

But Orca Pass is about more than special protection zones. Designating these waters as an International Stewardship Area emphasizes the fact that everyone who lives, works or travels on these waters - from the schoolchild all the way to the shipping company executive - helps determine whether or not the marine environment remains healthy. Orca Pass is all about taking responsibility, through the daily decisions we make and actions we take in our homes, workplaces, towns, campsites, kayaks, boats and ships, in and around Orca Pass.

Winning official designation for Orca Pass is not going to be straightforward or easy since literally dozens of agencies are involved and the cross-border nature of this proposal makes it all the more complicated. Marine protection is complex in itself - since the sea is our "commons", you can't simply raise money to buy the area for conservation, like you can with land.

Most likely, the Orca Pass International Stewardship Area will be established in stages over several years, through a patchwork of regulatory and voluntary mechanisms on both sides of the border. In this way, Orca Pass is not only a vision for the future, but also a process in the present: a stitching together of individual measures that will eventually form a large, cohesive quilt of marine conservation.

Some of these measures are already underway. For example, on the Canadian side, a feasibility study to establish a National Marine Conservation Area in southern Georgia Strait has started (see this article). And four Rockfish Conservation Areas have been established within Orca Pass, where fishing is closed in order to help restore rockfish populations (see this article for more). The Islands Trust (the local government of Canada's Gulf Islands) has two local marine stewardship initiatives underway within Orca Pass. Neighbouring San Juan County, on the US side, has established voluntary bottom fish recovery zones and is looking at the possibility of a county-wide marine protected area (see this article). This spring the Canadian federal government created a Gulf Islands National Park Reserve which will give protection to some of the lands in and around Orca Pass. Each of these measures is a step towards achieving the goals of Orca Pass.

But a massive, region-wide effort will be necessary to protect endangered orcas, to restore degraded near shore habitat and eelgrass beds, to bring back depleted populations of rockfish and lingcod.

Paddlers, boaters, divers ... all of us need to be involved in this effort, and the time is now!

© Laurie MacBride is executive director of the Georgia Strait Alliance and associate editor of WaveLength. She is an avid boater and paddler whose roots are in Orca Pass.