Sound Champion and Steward: Ralph Munro

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RALPH MUNRO’S hometown newspaper, the Bainbridge Island Review, said it with eloquent simplicity in a December 27, 2004, headline: “Orcas have a friend in Munro.” Indeed they do. And so do the shellfish, salmon, bald eagles, and other wild critters of the Puget Sound basin. As do the beaches, tidelands, and shorelands. And the children, the ancient people, and lovers of the Sound, present and future.

It would be difficult to find an individual who has done more to protect Puget Sound and its biological and cultural diversity than this Bainbridge Island native. Ralph Munro has been both a public champion and a personal steward of the Sound and its resources for decades. He became a staff member to Washington governor Dan Evans in the 1970s, and in 1976, lit the fuse that ended commercial whale captures in United States waters. He later served as Washington’s elected secretary of state from 1981 to 2001. After retiring from public office, Ralph continued to express his lifelong commitment to stewardship of the Sound. In 2006, he and his wife, Karen, executed a perpetual conservation easement on 203 acres of their Triple Creek Farm and its 3.5 miles of sinuous shoreline on one of the Sound’s southernmost bays.

Ralph’s commitment to improving the health of the Sound is driven by a lifetime of treasured memories and by a disturbing reality. “It’s in much worse shape than people realize,” Ralph explains. “It’s beautiful, but the water quality has dropped dramatically. If the ecosystem collapses, we’ve got problems for the whole state.”

In the late 1800s, there were an estimated two hundred Southern Resident orcas living in Washington waters. Salmon were plentiful. As the second decade of the twenty-first century draws to an end, the orca population living in the state’s waters has dropped below seventy-five, leading to warnings that the Southern Resident killer whales could become extinct. They have been listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

Meanwhile, some of the seagoing fish that return to spawning streams—another key indicator of the health of the Sound and its intricate watershed—have also been listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act. They include Puget Sound and coastal chinook salmon, Hood Canal summer chum, Puget Sound steelhead, and Puget Sound and coastal bull trout. As the apex species with their spectacular breaching displays, orcas are icons of the inland sea of Washington and British Columbia. Ralph Munro’s love of orcas began in earnest when he was four or five years old in the 1940s, living with his family in a cottage on the southwest shore of Bainbridge Island. He remembers one night when he could hear a group of the marine mammals in the bay outside his window. As he described the experience in a 2004 interview with the Bainbridge Island Review: “They were sleeping, but I wasn’t. I was just—for hours—lying in my bed listening to them breathe . . . .”

In the 1960s, Puget Sound orcas became targets of capture for amusement parks. Dozens of the mammals were removed from Puget Sound and nearby waters, causing an immediate and lasting decline in the overall population.

The last straw for killer whale capture came on a March day in 1976, when Ralph and Karen Munro were sailing with friends on a small sloop in Budd Inlet just north of Olympia. They suddenly saw orcas speeding by, chased by power boats and aircraft commissioned by SeaWorld. Ralph vividly recalls the human pursuers repeatedly dropping explosives to herd the orcas into a net, separating mother orcas from their babies. “It was gruesome,” Ralph recalls. “And they were going to take that whale out of Puget Sound and put it in a swimming pool somewhere. I had the feeling enough was enough.”

At the time, Governor Evans was out of state on a ski vacation, but Ralph was convinced the orcas couldn’t wait for his boss’s return. He immediately set to work with Attorney General Slade Gorton’s legal team in filing a lawsuit in the US District Court. “I was skating on thin ice,” Ralph says. “But Dan Evans agreed with me that we had to take action.” The state prevailed, and SeaWorld was forced to release the orca. Ralph says, with unmistakable finality: “That was the last whale capture in the United States.”

In 1975, Ralph and Karen took a big chance and bought some privately owned shoreline and adjoining pastureland just outside Olympia. Getting along on a 1970s state-employee salary, the purchase stretched them financially, he recalls, but they were able to pay the previous owner in installments—$450 a month for years to come. This purchase began a lifelong process of transforming the property into a family home as well as a diverse network of habitats for saltwater, freshwater, wetland, and upland species. Over time, they purchased a neighboring pasture and tidelands, where they hauled out hundreds of discarded tires.

Over the years, the Munros have hosted numerous events, welcoming guests and visitors, many of them for conservation fundraisers, to this piece of Puget Sound paradise. Ralph sees people as an essential and natural part of the equation of a healthy Sound, and encourages visitors to Triple Creek Farm to walk around the property.

On a walk with Ralph along the creeks and shoreline, you see numerous passageways where fish and other aquatic animals find protection among tangles of roots, logs, branches, over- hanging banks, and marshland vegetation. Five species of seagoing fish are regular neighbors here, as are bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, great blue herons, cougars, coyotes, and of course deer. In a shallow tidal creek near the house, there are remnants of ancient cedar posts that were part of weirs—fence traps—used by Squaxin tribal fishermen for centuries.

In time, Ralph came to suspect that the land here had been used by native people as encampments for fishing and for gathering clams and oysters. He invited a noted archaeologist from nearby South Puget Sound Community College to visit the property, and his suspicions were confirmed. In the muddy shoreline between a pair of creeks, they found surefire evidence of human habitation: fist-size rocks that had been split open by the heat in shellfish-baking pits.

For eleven summers ending in 2009, Triple Creek Farm became an important upland and tideland archaeological dig, revealing stories about the lives of the ancestors of today’s native people. Among other things, the digs yielded fragments of ancient fishnets made from woven cedar bark. Because of the meticulous research, it is now known that Squaxin ancestors lived and worked here in seasonal encampments as far back as nine centuries ago. In gratitude, the tribe commissioned Quinault-Squaxin master carver Randy Capoeman to carve a “welcome pole” from redcedar as a gift to Karen and Ralph. It stands on the point of land at the water’s edge, looking out on the body of water now known as Eld Inlet in southwest Puget Sound.

Given the natural, cultural, and historical significance of this place, it is fitting that the Munros decided to protect it in a conservation easement, which went into effect in 2006. The easement was created in partnership with the Capitol Land Trust in Thurston County, with the support of the Trust for Public Land, US Fish and Wildlife Service, state Department of Ecology, Squaxin Island Tribe, and South Puget Sound Community College.

Ralph credits the remarkable conserved habitats of Triple Creek Farm for helping him recover from life-threatening open-heart surgery in 2011. “I was in the hospital, almost dead,” he recalls while treading one of the paths at Triple Creek. “A friend sent a note, reporting there were more than a hundred eagles at McLane Creek right near here. I thought: I’ve got to get out of here and see that.” His promise to himself worked. In the years that followed, he saw with his own eyes eagles congregate to feed on salmon carcasses around the place that he and Karen purchased so long ago.

When asked what success in restoring Puget Sound to a healthy condition would look like, Ralph recalls the words of the governor who set the original challenge: “I think Chris Gregoire said it very well,” Ralph says. “We need to make sure the Sound is swimmable, diggable, fishable.”

We have a long way to go, he says. Orcas, as the top of the Puget Sound food chain, have accumulated vast amounts of toxic residue in their tissues from chemicals, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that flowed into the Sound for decades and continue today despite being banned in the US in 1976. Because they persist in the environment, these chemicals present a continuing threat. Nonetheless, Ralph has seen progress in how people treat the Sound. “We used to carry a net on the bow of the boat,” he says. “We would pick up the bottles and cans floating out there. Now you can spend a week in the San Juans and not see a can or a bottle on the water.”

And he says kids have a conservation ethic that their elders could learn from. “All this environmental education is paying off. They want to do the right thing. It shows up in how they live later in life,” he says of his experience working with thousands of kids in Scouting and with elementary students on conservation projects.

But he believes the best teachers have lived in the Puget Sound region for thousands of years. “We can learn lots from the native people, their history, how they lived off the land, and how they would regenerate the land,” he says. “I think we have too long neglected how much they can teach us.” Thanks to the Munro family, these lessons are on display in perpetuity at Triple Creek on the shore of Eld Inlet in Puget Sound.