WELCOME TO THE FALL 2020

ISSUE OF SALISH MAGAZINE!

Adelia Ritchie, Managing Editor

We’re very proud to welcome you to the first issue of our third year! To celebrate this milestone, we’ve dipped our toes into one of the more prevalent, visible and important features of our Salish Sea area — wetlands.

When I was a child, I used to consider swamps and bogs as icky, smelly wastelands, soon to be filled in to become farmland or dry ground for building new houses. But after reading Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, as a teenager I began to understand the importance of these teeming damp places so full of interesting life forms. And as climate change began to slither across our planet, wetlands became even more important for recycling and storing carbon in the deep.

In this issue you’ll discover the incredible beauty of some of our local wetland areas that you can explore, whether on foot or by kayak. But before you put on those waders, this issue will also give you an appreciation for how and why wetlands are vital to all life in this area. You can read about all the different types of wetlands (swamps, bogs, ponds, estuaries, and more), the lifeforms they support, and how they function to maintain life as we know it.

This issue also features several of our region’s most gifted poets and artists who were inspired by some aspect of wetland life.

We have lots of additional articles on this topic coming over the next few weeks. These will include restoration work at Carpenter Creek, our area’s geologic past that can be seen in boggy sediments, some fun thoughts about duckweed, preservation of wetlands, and fun facts about newts! We will send out newsletters announcing these additional articles, so if you haven’t subscribed to our newsletter list, use the Connect menu to visit our signup page.

With all these articles and your own explorations and observations, we hope you will come to the same conclusion that I have, that every slimy creature, dragonfly, bullrush, fish, and seaweed bit is connected to every other creature in some way, and without them, there could be no life on Planet Earth.