On the heels of last February’s first of its kind Green Infrastructure Summit, Stewardship Partners entered into a collaborative effort to develop a new campaign aimed at reinventing the way Puget Sound residents engage in their urban landscapes. Six months later, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy, Washington Environmental Council and City of Seattle’s Office of Sustainability and Environment, with help from dozens of other groups and hundreds of insightful stakeholders, that campaign is emerging as “City Habitats.”

Cities are where the vast majority of human habitat exists and, simultaneously, it is where natural habitats are most altered and diminished. Realizing that these dense, vibrant places are where nature’s services are most needed but also where people’s power to create, cultivate and curate nature is most available, a new question emerges. It is no longer “can we coexist sustainably with nature?” We are asking: “how best can we partner with nature?” and “what innovations will provide the most and the best benefits?” This call to innovation is at the heart of City Habitats.

This campaign resonates with Stewardship Partners’ mission and our distinct way of connecting people to the land and waters and place where they live. For you, our friends, partners, supporters, these ideas are not radical or new. But this collaboration provides a vehicle for more people to catch onto optimism and see opportunity. With innovation and emerging technologies, we can combine the urban and natural into a radically new kind of habitat.

Stay tuned as this campaign rolls out across the Puget Sound region. Stewardship Partners’ focus will remain the same but opportunities will expand. You can participate in both small and larger ways by choosing Salmon-Safe products in your local grocery or restaurant, volunteering for Snoqualmie River riverbank restoration and salmon habitat projects, building a rain garden or using other water management tools at your home or business, or by building and retrofitting better buildings.