Our mission is to protect the habitat of Puget Sound tidelands from the underregulated expansion of new and intensive shellfish aquaculture methods. These methods were never anticipated when the Shoreline Management Act was passed. They are transforming the natural tideland ecosystems in Puget Sound and are resulting in a fractured shoreline habitat. In South Puget Sound much of this has been done with few if any meaningful shoreline permits and with limited public input. It is exactly what the Shoreline Management Act was intended to prevent.

Get involved and contact your elected officials to let them you do not support aquaculture's industrial transformation of Puget Sound's tidelands.

Governor Inslee:

Friday, January 4, 2019

2019 Brings Publication of a Book on Pesticides and the Shellfish Industry

In Toxic Pearl, the author reveals the secrets and politics that enabled the destruction of our Washington State native aquatic life, and inspires others to stand up and speak out against this continuing industrial conversion of our marine ecosystem.

- Laura Hendricks, Coalition to Protect Puget Sound



Toxic Pearl, Pacific NW Shellfish Companies' Addiction to Pesticides, by M. Perle, is “The toxic legacy of the WA Shellfish industry", writes Amy van Saun, Staff Attorney for Center for Food Safety.  People should want to know where their oysters come from and “the destructive relationship we can have with the environment that sustains us, and our own health."

A reader should take a broader view while reading this history and consider the link between the Columbia River salmon struggles through their migration to the Pacific Coast, then through their coastal feeding grounds in the toxic shellfish sites described in this book, then onward to the Strait of Juan de Fuca to feed the dwindling population of the Southern Resident ORCAs. It seems all related.

Again, the reader may want to take a more wholistic view of the loss of feeding grounds for migrating birds, such as the eelgrass-dependent Brant. A reader may consider the connection between the USFWS Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge eelgrass resting-feeding grounds for Brants, which could be facing habitat loss there from a proposed shellfish farm, to their stopover at Willapa Bay on the Pacific Coast. It, now, is more like a “grab-and-go” feeding site of whatever may be left by shellfish farmers, hopefully sustaining the birds until their next stopover site. Point being, what is left for these birds?  Where can they find resting sites and where can they find food without pesticides?  

Laura Hendricks of the Coalition to Protect Puget Sound writes, this book should “inspire others to stand up and speak out against this continuing industrial conversion of our marine ecosystems.”  As van Saun says, this doesn’t need to be the future.  

Website: www.toxicpearl.com provides additional information.

Posted by Protect Our Shoreline at 5:40 PM
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