Cities and the Seas Around Them

By Timothy Beatley

In this era of climate change and extreme weather events, the seas that extend and wrap around our cities are seen as potential sources of danger. While retreat and adaptation are certainly necessary in some places, so, too, is recognition of the many benefits that the marine world provides.

There is already a growing sense that our urban pride of place must extend to, and embrace, these watery realms. Vancouver has declared its intention to be the greenest city in the world by 2020. This is an admirable and ambitious goal, paired with a detailed action plan with clear targets.

For Vancouver to become a green city exemplar, however, it must also be a blue city. Like many coastal cities, it is profoundly embedded in a watery seascape that can and must make up a big part of any effort to promote urban sustainability and resilience.

While Vancouver's greenest city action plan lacks consideration of the blue, a small but influential group called the Georgia Strait Alliance has been building coalitions, raising awareness, and working to conserve and celebrate the water. GSA's work centers on the Strait of Georgia, the sea that Vancouver faces, and the northern half of the Salish Sea (Puget Sound on the American side makes up the southern end). It is an important shipping channel (the Strait of Juan de Fuca connects it to the Pacific Ocean), recreational amenity, and habitat for thousands of species of marine organisms, including the charismatic orca.

Few environmental elements are as defining as this sea, with some three million residents living within the watershed of the Strait of Georgia (and an estimated 25,000 Vancouverites living within 300 meters of water). Many people actively use and enjoy the sea (there are thousands of boaters, for instance), but there remains a big challenge in connecting them — physically and emotionally — to the water, in ways that might cause them to change behaviors and to support efforts to protect it.

I spoke recently with the GSA's director, Christianne Wilhelmson, about the group's impressive accomplishments and future plans. Formed in 1990 as a charity, the organization has 1,200 members, a small but energetic staff of seven, and support in the form of corporate and government funding (including Vancouver's Greenest City Fund).

She tells me that those who move to Vancouver will often talk about the importance of the mountains and water. "But yet, oddly enough, they are still very disconnected from them," she says. And very few residents understand the ways in which their urban lifestyles — from driving cars to wastewater and stormwater runoff — can negatively impact the water.

The GSA is doing many things at once. A big push is outreach, and the group has produced a "Guide to Green Boating" and has created a series of "Stewards of the Strait" pledges that challenge residents to commit to responsible waterfront living and whale and wildlife watching. Another program, Clean Marine BC, undertakes eco-audits and certifications of area marinas.

And there is a new waterfront initiative that is exploring how design and planning along the water's edge can help strengthen people's connections to it. The GSA is engaging stakeholders in the development of this new vision for the city that seeks both direct physical and emotional contact.

A voice for the marine world

The alliance also advocates for marine animals and ecosystems that are underrepresented — and literally out-of-view — in mainstream politics. As Wilhelmson explains, "[The GSA] was formed by a group of people who really felt that there was a lot of pressure being put on this body of water and yet nobody was actually speaking for it." There have been significant victories so far, including efforts to clean up discharges from pulp mills and municipal sewage, and to discourage the damaging practice of salmon aquaculture.

Right now, the GSA is fighting the expansion of an oil pipeline by energy behemoth Kinder Morgan, which would likely increase tanker traffic on the strait and ramp up the potential for oil spills. In collaboration with the Rainforest Conservation Foundation, the alliance is engaging the public in a simulation: Biodegradable drift cards are released at various points, and residents are encouraged to look for the cards and call in to report their locations. A drift card map at once shows how fast and widespread a spill could be and how people in the region have been reached through the campaign.

GSA also developed a visionary plan for a new marine protected area — the Orca Pass International Stewardship Area — that included both Canadian and American waters. A much scaled-down version is under development by the Canadian government (for just the southern strait), and has apparently stalled, illustrating the difficulty of establishing marine parks on par with terrestrial ones.

Vancouver is, of course, not the only city cultivating a blue sensibility. It is happening in New York City, through the leadership of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance; in Singapore, which just established its first marine protected area; and in Wellington, New Zealand, where development of a "blue belt" (to complement the land-based network of greenbelts) is under way.

Part of the story is recognizing the profound quality of life and stress-reducing potential of these seascapes and our connections to them. They can do much to advance the health of urbanites, as the impressive new book by Wallace J. Nichols, Blue Mind, points out. A major challenge will be to cultivate new mental (and planning) maps that understand that life and nature do not end at the shore's edge, and that there is an immense and wondrous world just beyond our sight that deserves our affection and care.

Resources

Image: Alexandra Woodsworth with the Georgia Strait Alliance releases biodegradable drift cards to simulate how quickly and widely an oil spill could spread. Photo by Andrea Reimer.