Fifteen-year-old Kyle Petersen lives on a small farm near Sultan, Washington, in the Cascade Range foothills--about forty minutes’ drive from the nearest saltwater beach. And yet he is one of the Salish Sea’s champions.
As a trained volunteer for the Beach Watchers, Kyle is doing his part to protect Puget Sound from pollution, habitat destruction, and damage to the sea creatures. He might be his family’s number one beach volunteer, but his mom, Leigh Anne Burford, is right behind him. She, too, volunteers for Beach Watchers.
“I’ve always been a big fan of nature,” says Kyle, whose family moved to Snohomish County from California when he was ten years old. He got hooked on Puget Sound on his very first visit to the Mukilteo Lighthouse Park, twelve acres of open space with 1,500 feet of sandy beach near the state’s Mukilteo ferry landing, “I walked around and played in the water, and I got to see a lot of crabs and stuff,” he recalls.
That inspired him to get involved in protecting the Sound. He and his mom signed up for thirteen hours of training plus twelve hours of volunteer time, qualifying them as Beach Naturalists. Next, they completed an additional ninety hours of training and eighty hours of volunteer service over two years, making them Beach Watchers.
The whole family also does its part back home. They committed themselves to protecting the five acres of old-growth forest surrounding their eighteen-acre property. And they work to keep domestic animal waste cleaned up so it doesn’t wash into the Sultan River, a salmon-bearing stream that joins the Snohomish River and flows into the Sound at Everett and Marysville. The family has plenty of animals to clean up after. “We have a horse, three goats, four dogs, two chickens, six cats, two guinea pigs, my little brother’s bunny, my lizard, my fish, and my bird,” says Kyle.
As Beach Watchers, Kyle and his mom have been trained to speak with people of all ages--offering nature lessons and helping beachgoers do their part to keep the Sound and Salish Sea healthy. Examples of the information they share are the state fisheries rules for harvesting crab, and being careful not to treat precious eelgrass marine habitat as a park lawn at low tide.
Kyle also keeps busy as a student. At fifteen, he enrolled in Sky Valley’s Environmental Science School’s immersive curriculum in both the sciences and humanities. “I want to become an engineer, but I also want to be a biologist,” Kyle says. “I want to get a college major in engineering and a minor in biology.” And since he is interested in robotics, you never know what he may someday invent to keep our waters healthy.