Gov. Christine Gregoire found these facts reason enough to push through the Puget Sound Partnership (PSP), a $250 million, 13-year effort to save Puget Sound, our natural heritage.

But will this suffice?

In a slideshow presentation for his new book, Saving Puget Sound: A Conservation Strategy for the 21st Century, John Lombard pointed out an appendix-buried critique from PSP scientists, saying PSP will not be given an opportunity to achieve the goals it set for itself.

Near the beginning of his book Lombard quotes a former oil executive — Oysteine Dahle, Esso’s Norway & North Sea VP — saying: “Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth.”

Lombard hopes to refocus the conversation around conservation into one about the overarching effects our actions produce concerning our environment — something that affects our own health and brings an influx of highly trained individuals and the vast majority of our tourists.

Is the cost to us and to our region the withdrawal of over 250 billion gallons of water from Puget Sound’s watersheds each year and the extinction of the Sound’s steelhead? Lombard spent nearly a decade rehabilitating the Lake Washington watershed and overseeing Northgate’s Thornton Creek, which flows right next to his house.

What is your preferred mode of transportation?

Really my preferred mode of transportation is walking to the kitchen and back. The fact is I do drive, but we only have one car for our family. I telecommute.

Local or organic food?

You know, why not both? But I guess I would say, you know the way the question is being posed, local includes any food no matter how irresponsibly produced, then I’d say, “Well, no.” But if local kind of includes meeting maybe not every possible criteria for being labeled organic, but it’s responsibly grown, well then local.

OK, enough environmentalist-style formalities. Let’s jump right into the water...tax – which you propose in your book. How large a tax is this we’re talking about?

I propose in the book that we have a tax or a fee that would average about a tenth of a cent per gallon. Across the entire region, that would raise something like $200 million, $250 million a year right there, and a typical homeowner would be paying only $5 a month or so. So it’s not really a big hit on a household budget.

So the main educational benefit would be...?

In terms of just making people think, “Oh, this is the consequence of what I am doing when I’m taking water for my bath or shower or whatever, it’s that much less water left in the Cedar River for fish.”

How much water do we go through, ‘round these parts?

We’re withdrawing upwards of 250 billion gallons a year across [Puget Sound]. You’ve got a lot of exempt wells — in fact, hundreds of thousands of wells that have been dug are not only exempt from a water right, but nobody actually knows how much water they’re withdrawing. All of these, they’re taking probably more water, cumulatively, than any city in the region other than maybe Seattle, Bellevue or Tacoma.

And rivers are going dry as a result?

The East Fork of Issaquah Creek has gone dry a few times over the past few years, for example.

But that goes to the heart of frontierism: you get your land, you dig your well down deep, and you got all the sweet water you want, right?

Yeah, the water law directly traces back to the development of the West, and it was [with] that exact incentive you mention to develop water, which basically meant to withdraw it and put it to use. The whole vocabulary of water law presumes that it [water] is not useful if it’s just sittin’ there in the stream.

Has current water-rights law changed so little from frontier days?

Officially, we’ve kind of begun to correct all that when we say, “Oh, now we’re going to establish water rights that include instream flows.” The way we structured it, it’s all based on seniority, and if we’re only deciding what those flows ought to be now, then those flows are legally junior, a lower priority than every other right that’s ever been issued going back go the 19th Century. It doesn’t make any sense from a contemporary perspective [that] in general, [these claims] are all senior to the fish, until the tribal rights get decided.

To some extent those advocating seniority are kind of being hoisted on their own petard because the tribes typically have rights that are senior to everybody. The biggest legal card we know they have is on water rights and flows that relate to the production of fish that they have a right to harvest.

How does this whole cost analogy play out in terms of gasoline consumption?

For gasoline, the ecological costs are actually so huge compared to what we actually pay that any politically-viable proposal for a tax at this stage would actually be really only a small incremental step toward the real cost.

Could you state what you think the whole cost of using gasoline would be?

Well, the study that I talk about in my book, by the Minister of Resources for the Future on the gasoline tax in Great Britain and the United States, found that if it was just to cover the public cost of air pollution alone in terms of asthma, a variety of other lung diseases and infrastructure costs for air pollution, it ought to be just 40 cents a gallon.

Then you throw in greenhouse gases, and a whole set of environmental costs that this study wasn’t thinking about that are central for us — the way that roads change the hydrology of streams and wetlands with impervious surface, the way most of our storm water pollutants are coming off the roads, the way roads fragment habitat across the landscape...

Closer to the entire impact of being part of a gasoline-burning transportation system...

All I’m suggesting is removing the exemption from the sales tax of gasoline, and put it in that larger context of — this is really only getting you a small way there to the whole cost of your action.

What are major ways that city dwellers could contribute to the health of Puget Sound? You spent so much time restoring Thornton and Victory Creeks only to write that you have to write off places like this despite their natural beauty, in the larger conservation picture.

It’s one of the fundamental mischaracterizations of my argument in saying that I would advocate writing off places like these. I put it in the book, that I do advocate writing them off for some, not all, purposes. But I think that the thing that the urban people have to come to accept, if we’re going to succeed with this regionally, is that our natural heritage is really going to be decided in the rural areas. And, if we really care about what happens out there, we need to reorganize the way we approach these things as a society in a way that does send a substantial amount of money — I’m talking hundreds of millions of dollars a year — from urban areas.

For example?

You do a $10 million project in the south lot of Northgate for Thornton Creek and you’re going to be benefiting a few fish every year. You put $10 million dollars into the lower Skagit River, and you’re going to be benefiting millions of fish, every year.

How much money is currently being projected at Puget Sound right now? I’m thinking of the Governor’s Puget Sound Partnership, in particular. To what extent do we need to convince people that more governmental programs are really necessary?

It all depends on how you define it. The way the Governor’s process was defining it, every dollar spent on sewage treatment is spent on Puget Sound. Meanwhile, we’ve seen the habitat, the overall water quality declining.

Stepping back to the question of how you persuade people that this is what we need, I would say a couple of things. I actually really don’t think that the Governor has framed the question appropriately — the traditional governmental crisis terms of “This is a huge problem, we need to fix it up, and we’ll pass this massive legislation and then that’ll take care of it.” And that’s bullshit.

What we’re facing here is something that, yeah, it may have problems now, but the real concern is how much worse those things are going to get with millions more people out here as well as climate change.

So what in the most concise terms, what’ve we got to lose? Why even mention saving Puget Sound?

I would say, first of all, the whole rhetoric of saving, we’re going to save Puget Sound, is wrong — we are always going to be saving Puget Sound, we are never going to save Puget Sound as long as millions of people live here. It’s going to require vigilance and real thoughtful choices from the people who live here forever.

And what we’ve got to lose is what makes this place special. That’s kind of I think in many ways the coolest thing about eco-regional conservation is that [we] really are becoming more and more aware and attuned to the natural world that evolved specifically here and no other place. And I think one of the things about American life really throughout our history, but certainly today, is the sense of dislocation that so many people have. Even if they grew up in the place that they’re still living [in], they don’t really have a strong understanding of what does make that place unique, you know, just what it really means to call this place home. People in this country, by and large, are not very well rooted to their homes. But the natural world is by definition rooted to this place, through eons, and I think the more that we can preserve that and connect with it, the richer our lives are.