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e-newsletter

Sign up for our monthly e-newsletter – Highwater Marks! You will only receive one email from us each month.

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action alerts and e-news

Sign up for our Action Alerts and monthly e-newsletter. When opportunities arise that will benefit from your engagement, we will let you know. In general, we will not send more than one Action Alert each week, if that.

Take action with us!

Friends Comprehensive Plan Action Team

The San Juan County Council are fast-tracking the final stages of the Comp Plan update process. This will add more pressure on all of us to be sure that the Comp Plan addresses development, housing, Forest and Agricultural resource lands, and climate resilience. Your help is needed! Click below to email Brent Lyles for more information.

Join our Comp Plan Action Team!

Plastic Free Salish Sea – Adopt a Beach program

By becoming a beach steward you are pledging to help clean your favorite beach at intervals that suit you. You could pledge to clean every week, every two weeks, once a month, or once every two months -whatever works for you! Once you have cleaned your beach Plastic Free Salish Sea asks you to report your effort, this will allow them to track how much litter is collected from our beaches.

Become a beach steward!

Are you a boater in the Salish Sea?

You can help by being a Green Boater! Read about how you can leave a small wake while boating around the San Juan Islands and Salish Sea.

Be a green boater!

Anchor out of Eelgrass

Sensitive eelgrass habitats are nurseries for juvenile Chinook salmon and Dungeness crabs; they are also spawning areas for Pacific herring. To help salmon and the endangered Southern Resident orcas, anchor out in waters deeper than the eelgrass, or use a mooring buoy when staying outside a marina. While eelgrass is present at most popular anchorages in the San Juans, in many locations these critical shallow meadows can be easily avoided by anchoring in waters deeper than 15 feet.

Download an Anchor Out of Eelgrass map for San Juan County.

Give Orcas Space

By taking the pledge, boaters are promising to give the southern resident orca whales the space they need to find food and raise the young calves that are in their pods. Not a boater? You can help get the word out by encouraging commercial operators and recreational boaters to take the pledge.

Pledge to Give Them Space!

It wasn’t until 1979 that San Juan County got a comprehensive growth plan and that was largely due to the Friends of the San Juan’s being there to advocate for the shoreline and the ecosystem. Since then, there have been constant waves of pressure by developers. Friends have risen each time, fighting to protect this fragile and precious place.

Liza Michaelson

member, San Juan Island