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What
it will take to restore salmon
Pat
Wiggins
My
Word
The
Times-Standard
There is a paradox about
salmon: We love them, but we are part of their problem.
We love them as an
important food, as the base of fishing economies, for sport recreation,
and as symbols of fresh water and renewal. But we harvest them, dam,
pave and pump their streams, pollute their water and mix their gene pool
with hatchery fish.
Then there's global
warming and changing ocean currents.
When we look at Central
Valley Spring Run salmon decline, we look back to the 1990s and realize,
shocked, that the populations have crashed by over 90 percent. Estimates
may make that 95 percent or worse.
But that only looks at a
few years. We don't like to acknowledge that less than two centuries
ago, the fish were so plentiful that they supported cultures. They were
so abundant, in fact, that they could be harvested with pitchforks. The
run of fish supported animals, the soil and plants, and were a
significant wild ocean resource as well.
Now the runs are on the
ropes, and wild salmon will be disappearing from our plates, as well as
our rivers, for the next couple of years ... at least.
The problems that salmon,
as a group of species, have encountered are epic. They include loss of
habitat, fishing in the ocean, changing ocean and inland conditions,
less water, more pollution and predation from other marine life. In
addition, we have introduced hatcheries into the life cycle of the fish.
Our runs are
hatchery-dominated, with survival and pathogen issues plaguing the
raised fingerlings. The hatcheries stand with the dams, the mitigations
for cutting off spawning habitat, adding up to hundreds of miles of
major rivers and thousands of miles of tributaries, the small streams
where fish reproduce.
Ocean-farmed fish are not
a solution. There are so many problems of disease, escapement and
pollution that
The problem of salmon
collapse is not restricted to the
On April 1, the Senate
passed my bill (SB 562) to support salmon monitoring and restoration
with nearly $5.3 million. This money, which may enable our state to
secure up to $20 million in federal matching funds, will go to basic
science and the repair of specific problems on creeks and rivers. It is
an investment in this resource.
But we will need more
than simple patience and investment to get salmon back to respectable
runs. We will need cooperation from fishermen, farmers, water users, the
tribes, power companies, the governor's office and the Legislature to
find an effective path to recovery.
We also need help from
every citizen to “think at the sink” and “use your brain at the
drain,” and not introduce oil, detergents and chemicals into our
waters.
No less than recovery is
necessary for our fishing and sport-fishing economy, for our
responsibility to the species, and to have great tasting, healthy wild
salmon as part of a continuing
State Senator Patricia
Wiggins (D-Santa Rosa) represents
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Source:
http://www.times-standard.com/opinion/ci_8901613