October 24th offers us all a chance to gather and assess the information gleaned from surface and groundwater studies to date, and analyze alternatives based on what we know so far. And while the data presented will supplement what we know, and help us to confirm some predictions, we still have a number of benchmarks to reach in this phase before moving to 30% design. As we anticipate what we hope will be an illuminating Community Meeting later this month, we do so with a renewed respect for the power of models; the power of images.
Mid Sound has featured a timeline in our communicatiions to help ground all of us in the present; an arrow indicating a direction, a process, and the intention to include the community in the investigation of place. A goal projected into the future can motivate some to remain engaged. For others, we have learned, the point of the arrow represents great uncertainty, and certain change.
When we circle back to the scientific method, though, it’s clear that the work we’re engaged in is anything but linear. Projects like this one take into account valuable scientific precedent, and test predictions using the most advanced technology available, weighing what is garnered against the latest academic findings and current best practice. And while Projects like this one exist independently, the timing of both their funding & their implementation can impede or benefit sister projects on a watershed scale.
The words we use are powerful, too. The transparency we’ve committed to achieving with the community relies upon a shared vocabulary. The preliminary design process we are funded to perform – with engineers who specialize in coastal restoration, with County officials accessible to residents, with our formal partners and the Point No Point Community – is a Project. Naming the current design process a potential project discounts the data collection process and the value of our evolving model. The Point No Point Community has been engaged in a funded Project of collaborative research along with Mid Sound and Blue Coast Engineering for more than two years now. And the research will continue into the fall and winter. We look forward to completing a model of the existing conditions that will point us toward a proposed design alternative.
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
-Anon-
We are learning every day about the dynamic nature of Point No Point. We’re learning from keen observers like Chris Brinton & Don Thomsen who live along its borders. They know the sand’s choreography, and the weather’s extremes. They live by the tides, and chart and predict the seasoonal visitation of birds and whales & the people who study them, too. The rich recent history told by those whose families have called Point No Point home provide a crucial layer of what will become our existing conditions model.
The sense of place communicated by users who live elsewhere – a different but no less complex collection of knowing, based on belonging, too – will populate a vital chapter in our model as well. Our time in the field with birders and educators provides us with new questions to ask of our design, and important baseline data for our formal monitoring program.
But the modelers will require us to go deeper. There is data still hidden in the creek that runs through privately held land above the marsh. We know some of what is buried below the surface of the land, but like the histories of the families who called Point No Point home before houses came to stand here, natural processes were rerouted. The size and complexity of the Point No Point site create challenges for the creation of a conceptual model. We have technology that didn’t exist a decade ago, but these tools require time, and they call for more data. We are grateful to the landowners along Hillview Lane for coming to the table – not once but twice – this summer to share their perspective, and talk about what might be possible with time and with continued study of the project site as it relates to points south.
Doris Small of WDFW, Paul Dorn of the Suquamish Tribe, and a number of other well-respected scientists through time have described what native peoples knew when they set up their winter village here. Point No Point is not a place with potential to tap, but a dynamic system with promise to restore. Tools & technology, political will, and funding priorities are dynamic by nature, too. And the availability of these resources impact the general theories that result from scientific inquiry. Scientific understanding itself is an evolutionary phenomenon, and the social climate for studying climate now demands that we spend more time refining, altering & expanding upon the groundbreaking work of scientists from a decade back who are still in the field. They are looking at the science in new ways along with us.
Data collected in 2007 may not have led to a model for Point No Point in 2010, but that data helped to refine future predictions. In fact, the science used in the draft report advising against restoring Point No Point that year* informed the November 2016 report that ranked Point No Point so highly for restoration.
Mid Sound Fisheries Enhancement Group, the engineers at Blue Coast Engineering, and the bodies funding the Point No Point Estuary Restoration Project rely upon peer-reviewed research, and data related to a tidal exchange scenario involving the eastern mouth of the marsh. While raw data from precedent research factors into its feasibility, the Project is grounded in and driven by the most current long-term data available related to intact embayment estuaries and the needs and behavior patterns of healthy outmigrating juvenile chinook in the Puget Sound.
*Interested community members can read page 8 of the unpublished draft “Final Report” (2010), quoted and mistakenly attributed at the July 28th Community Meeting to our current ecological picture and Point No Point Project here.