The expediency that habitats and floodplains were destroyed during early colonization is quite staggering. The Army Corps spent decades channelizing, diking, dredging, and removing large wood from all of our rivers and streams. Timber companies logged every last old growth off the landscape, and used barrier culverts to access them. This all happened with little to no permitting scrutiny or oversight. Agriculturalists filled and plowed fertile floodplains and estuaries, and installed irrigation ditches robbing watersheds of valuable water. Now we are expected to rebuild salmon runs within the confines of the damaged landscape we have been given.

Fast forward to today: Restoration activities receive more government scrutiny than any development project ever would. Developers damage waterways and ask for forgiveness, receiving a slap on the wrist if anyone even notices. And we continue to lose habitats at a pace substantially more quickly than we are able to complete even the smallest of restoration projects. Restoration practitioners operate in a world where every single funder is so risk averse and afraid of being sued they can barely put projects in the ground. Basin management plans, comprehensive plans, and legislative rulemaking has every inch of habitat restoration under a magnifying glass before it is ever even close to shovel ready. The permitting and planning minefield restoration practitioners navigate results in bloated restoration projects costing millions of dollars and taking decades to implement at a scale so small they barely even make a dent in the thousands of river miles destroyed Puget Sound Wide.

Until a day that we see large scale, decades long RESTORATION work that can be compared in scale to the decades long campaign perpetrated by the federal government to destroy our rivers in favor of development and agriculture, we will never see habitat restoration. We need unbridled, fast, meaningful restoration occurring at a large scale, and we just simply are not doing that.