DISCOVERY BAY — A career biologist and landscape architect for 30 years, Shelly Solomon took up filmmaking and a serious cause — promoting projects that are good news for the North Olympic Peninsula’s marine environment.
She was joined on Friday by Kevin Long, project manager for the North Olympic Salmon Coalition, at the site of one of the coalition’s prize projects: the restoration of Discovery Bay’s tidal channels, once buried and polluted by tons of old lumber mill sawdust.
The two talked about Solomon’s “Feel-Good Environmental Film Series,” a party-like event to be staged Feb. 20-21 at Sirens Pub, 823 Water St. in Port Townsend.
A similar event in Port Angeles in March is expected to be organized.
It also will be sponsored by the North Olympic Peninsula Resource Conservation and Development Council.
“It just kind of morphed into a fun thing to learn about the environment,” said Solomon, who has been shooting films about marine preservation and restoration projects the past four years for her production company, Leaping Frog Films.
“I thought a lot of people are out there doing great things for the environment, and I wanted to capture them on film.
“At a time when there is doom and gloom and the economy is bad, I am trying to present positive message.”
The restoration of Discovery Bay’s tidal channels in the summer of 2008 removed five collapsing abandoned mill buildings, fill material and old mill wood waste to restore about 11 acres of salt marsh and tidal channels at the head of the bay.
Juvenile salmonids, especially summer chum salmon from Salmon Creek, use tidal channels for refuge and feeding.
The estuary work was funded through a partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which granted the project $100,000 through its Community-based Restoration Program.
The national program funds grass-roots marine and coastal habitat restoration projects that will benefit salmon species, commercial and recreational resources and endangered and threatened species.
More than 20,000 cubic yards of wood waste and 46,000 cubic yards of gravel and other materials have been removed from two sites at the mouth of Salmon Creek.
“The sheer volume of material was obscuring habitat and releasing toxic leachates,” Long said.
The wood waste was composted for farm and garden mulch.
Long said the film series also is intended to encourage recruitment of new volunteers to the coalition’s force of 150 to 200.
Some of those volunteers were out planting trees near the Morse Creek re-meander project site on Saturday.
Solomon has focused her camera lens on the Port Townsend waterfront eelgrass protection program, another project to remove creosote-tainted pilings from the same waterfront and the Discovery Bay tideland cleanup effort, locally.
She also traveled to the Kingdom of Tonga, an archipelago in the south Pacific Ocean, where she filmed coral reef monitoring, organic gardening and heritage plant protection projects.
Those films will be part of the series.
Also planned will be films on the Jefferson County Marine Resource Committee’s native Olympia oyster restoration project on Discovery Bay, restoration of Washington’s only native abalone population, and community shellfish farming and water quality-restoration on Puget Sound.
The film series is showing in Seattle this week.
The Port Townsend environmental film festival comes with a message intended to showcase the North Olympic Salmon Coalition’s work, Solomon said, “so it’s not just kept in the science community.”
She said the festival will also serve as an educational experience, showing boaters why eelgrass protection buoys were placed on the Port Townsend waterfront.
The buoys encourage boaters to not drop anchor in the eelgrass beds, which are natural marine habitat protection for migrating juvenile salmon.
Rebecca Benjamin, salmon coalition executive director, will attend the event to talk about the Port Hadlock-based nonprofit organization’s projects.
Contributors to the event include Sirens, Leaping Frog Films, North Olympic Salmon Coalition, Jefferson County Marine Resource Committee, North Olympic Peninsula Resource Conservation and Development Council, Jefferson County Conservation District, Seton Construction, Taylor Shellfish, The Printery, Chimacum Printing and several individuals.
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Port Townsend-Jefferson County Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-385-2335 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.