The Salish Sea, Finally!

The term the Salish Sea was first proposed in 1988 by marine biologist Bert Webber, who recognized the need for a single geographic term that encompassed the entire ecosystem, spanning across the international border. Having a name to identify the entire area calls attention to the trans‐border commonality of water, air, wildlife and history. Rather than being a replacement for any of the existing names, the designation Salish Sea is an overlay which includes and unites the established and familiar names of the various water and land bodies (the Strait of Georgia, Strait of Juan de Fuca, Puget Sound, Gulf Islands, San Juan Islands, etc.). The name also pays tribute to the Coast Salish peoples who have inhabited the area since long before Euro‐American explorers first arrived.

On October 30th the Washington State Board on Geographic Names (the folk who decide what to call creeks, mountains and other natural features) named the inland waterways shared by Washington and British Columbia the Salish Sea. The British Columbia government approved the name six days earlier. Of course this still has to be OK’d by the US Board of Geographic Names to make it official and, as Mike Sato, communications director for People for Puget Sound writes, “the real official measure is its adoption into customary usage”.

Many of us have long favored the name Salish Sea, not only because it encompasses the waters that we cruise, not only that it sees all these waters as common body when we look at environmental and pollution issues, but because it simply makes sense to honor the indigenous peoples into whose lands and on whose waters we move.

But all this surfaces (no pun intended) an interesting conundrum: what exactly is Puget Sound? A popular description seems to encompass everything up to the Straits, and perhaps (with a bit of grandiosity) even including the waters up to Anacortes, if not the San Juan Islands, let alone as far north as Bellingham. Caleb Maki, executive secretary of the Washington State Board on Geographic Names, calls this the “Puget Sound Creep”, describing in an earlier email to me that Puget Sound keeps "getting larger and larger."

For the record, officially, Puget Sound starts at that body of salt water lying South of Admiralty Inlet/Possession Sound down to just above Olympia.

So, to now be really politically correct, what about all those titles that identify themselves using the descriptive Puget Sound? As People for Puget Sound’s Mike Sato opines in his blog, “renaming ‘People For the Salish Sea’, ‘Salish Sea Partnership’, ‘Salish Sea Business Journal’? Nah.”

Interesting.

Want to weigh in on this? Just post your comments and let's see where we end up.

Meanwhile, for me, here’s to the Salish Sea, at long last!

("The Salish Sea Map", cartographer Stefan Freelan, WWU, 2009")

Editor's note. Some readers have made comments on earlier blogs, but regretfully, in the editing process they were dropped. If you previously sent a comment but failed to see it, would you please resend? Thank you, and again, my apologies.