Muddy Waters

In its dual role of beach steward and shellfish-industry promoter, the DNR’s credibility sometimes comes into question, especially when it pontificates on the ecological effects of geoduck farming. For example, on August 11, 2006, it proclaimed that “our scientists have looked at the forage fish issue and determined that there would be minimal interaction between the geoduck aquaculture methods and forage fishes (sand lance and surf smelt).” For 20 months citizens’ groups pressed for specifics. Finally, on April 10, 2008, the DNR’s Peggy Murphy wrote Kathryn Townsend of Protect Our Shoreline, as follows: “Two of the Department’s scientists reviewed the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife website information and based on their training and best professional judgment determined that the interaction is minimal.” In other words, the DNR’s research on possible dangers to forage fish consists entirely of surfing the Web which, even at the Fish and Wildlife site, contains no information to support a conclusion of “minimal interaction.”

Supposedly for the protection of fish and other near-shore organisms, wild geoducks can’t legally be harvested in water shallower than 18 feet below the average low-tide line. So why does the DNR assume there’s no problem with harvesting farmed geoducks in the intertidal zone?

British Columbia is not accepting new applications for intertidal geoduck aquaculture “due to gaps in understanding of geoduck aquaculture techniques on fish habitat.” And so worried is Trout Unlimited that Paul Sparks had contacted me before I could contact him when he’d heard I was researching geoduck aquaculture. “Geoduck farmers prefer a white sand and gravel mixture,” he remarked. “That also tends to be the preferred spawning habitat for surf smelt and sand lance. When farmers plant a beach they often take off the rocks, shellfish, logs, all the stuff that’s habitat for, say, coastal cutthroat trout. In some cases they drag the beach.”

Jim Gibbons, founder and president of Seattle Shellfish, the second-biggest oyster, clam, and geoduck operation on the West Coast after Taylor, sees the forage-fish flap as, well, a red herring. “There is no science to support the case that geoduck farming is harmful to the environment,” he told me. And he’s right.

There is, however, no science to support the case that it’s not harmful, and there’s excellent reason to suppose that it is. Gibbons suggests that farmed geoducks are cleaning up Puget Sound by filtering out phytoplankton, certainly a possibility but a stretch when one considers that only about 300 acres have been planted so far and that the biomass of wild geoducks is greater than that of any other species in the sound. Finally, his contention that the geoduck flap is driven by rich, vocal “NIMBYs” appears only partly true.

Some backyards are worth protecting, I thought, as I sat on the porch of Laurie Brauneis’s cabin, inhaling the sweet Pacific breeze and waiting for the tide to fall out of Carr Inlet. Pigeon guillemots bobbed and ducked. Closer to shore great blue herons stabbed at shoals of dimpling forage fish. An adult bald eagle sailed out of a Douglas fir and taloned a stranded flounder. Kingfishers chattered, and somewhere a baby seal oooohed for its mother.

Brauneis didn’t strike me as a rich NIMBY. Before taking on her full-time, non-paying job as president of Save Our Shoreline! four years ago, she cleaned houses. At dead low tide we walked far out onto her beach, tickling the tips of wild geoducks necks and getting squirted. The brittle chimneys of tube worms protruded from the mud like week-old whiskers. Moon snail egg masses, resembling mud-stained shards of plastic milk bottles, littered the beach. Crabs scuttled out of our way. We walked around thick beds of eelgrass and picked our way through dark masses of sand dollars.

Five years ago Jim Gibbons had approached Brauneis and her neighbors with an offer to lease their tidelands for geoduck aquaculture. He was talking big money, and Brauneis needed it. It sounded like a win-win. But to make sure, she and her neighbors visited Totten Inlet, then turned Gibbons down. “Plastic tubes and pieces of net were strewn around,” she recalled. “Dangerous things—broken tubes, rebar—were everywhere. I was totally appalled that our beach could look like that . . .” She turned away. “Excuse me,” she said and cried briefly.

Before I could contact Taylor Shellfish, the company’s newly retained public relations consultant, Bruce Gryniew-ski, contacted me. He’d heard I was working on a geoduck story and wanted to make sure I got a “balanced” view of the industry. Accordingly, he arranged for me to observe harvest and seeding operations. It would be an “antiseptic tour,” the insurgents informed me.

On the bright, still morning of August 3, 2008, I met Taylor’s public affairs manager, Bill Dewey, and geoduck manager Brian Phipps at company headquarters in Shelton. Taylor may be the biggest and oldest geoduck producer, but I’m not sure it’s capable of giving anyone a “balanced view” of the industry.