This mapping tool's purpose is to bring an immediate geographic impact to the subject of a sustainable future for us all; an impact that might serve to educate, alert, and even activate individuals and groups to pressing environmental issues in the Lake Washington watershed with an emphasis on sustainable development and shared natural resource usage practices and policies. After all, if a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps a map can be as well, especially given this theme (not to mention that, as a hopeless hunt and pecker, one thousand less words per entry will be mercifully less typing to have to do!). And if ecology and the environment are indeed inherently big picture issues, well, you can't get much bigger picture than global satellite imagery; except perhaps snapshots of the Hubble variety.

Towards this goal of promoting better stewardship for our planet, theCascadian's mapping tool will feature "layers" of added interactive information including: graphical map tile overlays, location specific markers - often displaying data accessed from feeds and services provided by government and non-profit resources, and where useful overlain line and polygon graphics. The map itself is Microsoft Live's VirtualEarth 3.1 technology and leverages MS Research's MapCruncher tool to create the tile layers with adjustable transparency. Along with the very cool BirdsEye perspective available for many locations, It's simply the best out there among the web-based map tool offerings right now.

Along with the ability to pan and zoom the map to a desired location and scope of interest, the associated layers provide easily accessed text and data content about that location and can include related photos and even multimedia highlighting both the positive and negative from a sustainable perspective and in the broader context of the encompassing natural systems from a sustainable perspective and presented in the broader context of their encompassing natural systems. I mention scope as well location because the reality of these issues require an ecosystemic approach. And ecosystems are complex open systems of nested parts interconnected, interactive, and evolving across many scales of space and time. We should not and cannot ignore the artificial but also real political and economic "hard" geometric boundaries stamped upon this "soft" mutable and fractal biosphere - indeed it's precisely at that juncture where all these issues "live". But our map's ability to zoom freely from scale to scale and view the local details in the context of the regional can provide a unique glimpse into that nested, rough-edged world that we inhabit, too often overlook, and pretend to own. To encourage this "outside the conventional political-economic box" perspective, the respective biome, ecoregion, and bioregion for each location addressed is included below the map with links to additional information and the watershed most relevant to the issue's scope is used categorize it.