A short hike from Bert Webber's living-room windows, the cold, freshwater of the Nooksack River ends its journey from the shoulders of Mounts Baker and Shuksan and dumps into Bellingham Bay, where it mixes with saltwater, reducing the bay's salinity and creating a marine habitat unique on the planet.

From his front lawn, you can stare across the bay at the hulking spine of Lummi Island and imagine the same natural handshake happening, freshwater with salt, in bodies of water all the way south to Olympia and — if you open your mind far enough to jump the border — all the way around Vancouver Island, north to the top of the Strait of Georgia.

Put this area all together in your head, and you have one of the world's largest, richest inland waterways — a broad, deep, protected sea, ringed by madrona and Douglas fir and Cascade volcanoes that create their own microclimate. The sea is home to orca whales, giant geoduck clams, surging waves of silvery salmon, packs of frisky otters and, down deep, solitary giants like the Pacific octopus and the occasional lumbering six-gilled shark.

It's a sea with lower salinity than the ocean at large, thanks largely to the pumping heart of British Columbia's Fraser River, which, most people would be shocked to know, supplies up to 80 percent of the freshwater content of Elliott Bay.

But here's the problem: Most of the 5 million of us living on its shores really can't put this all together in our heads, because on mental maps, the sea doesn't exist — at least in one chunk.

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Webber, in a nod to the first peoples to live upon its shores, chose "Salish Sea." It caught on with some folks — orca huggers in the San Juans, a handful of artists and academics. But Webber, who submitted the name to governments in both Olympia and Victoria, admits it never really caught on.

Still, he has kept hope alive, all these years, because he believes a single name is key to a broader understanding of just how — and where — we all fit into the Pacific ecosystem.

In the two decades since his proposal, the need for a common perception of the big waterway out back seems more critical than ever. Local salmon stocks and orca pods have fallen under protection of the Endangered Species Act. Rockfish and other bottom-dwelling species have nearly vanished.

Click here to read the complete story in the Seattle Times.