Leadership Quote by Norm Dicks

A politician invoking “my own area” is doing more than locating a problem on a map; he’s staking a claim of custodianship. Norm Dicks frames Hood Canal’s “oxygenation problem” as both local and legible, translating a complex ecological crisis (low dissolved oxygen, fish kills, the quiet suffocation that comes with nutrient runoff and stratified waters) into a phrase that sounds technical enough to be real, but plain enough to repeat at a town hall.

The key move is the partnership name-drop: “working with the USGS.” That acronym functions as a credibility anchor. It signals, to supporters and skeptics alike, that this isn’t vibes-based environmentalism or partisan theater; it’s measurable, monitored, and sanctioned by federal science. In an era when “environment” can trigger ideological reflexes, Dicks sidesteps culture-war language by choosing an engineering-flavored noun, “oxygenation,” the kind of term that implies a fix: pump, mix, restore. The subtext is competence.

Yet the sentence also reveals the politician’s careful perimeter. “Dealing with” is deliberately noncommittal. It promises action without naming culprits (development patterns, agriculture, wastewater) or conflicts (who pays, who changes behavior). That’s classic political risk management: present the problem as shared, the response as collaborative, and the solution as procedural.

Contextually, it’s a Pacific Northwest brand of pragmatism: love the place, respect the data, keep the rhetoric modest. The intent is to reassure constituents that their representative is both insider and advocate, able to pull federal expertise toward a distinctly local emergency.