Environmentalism

There are seven species of salmon native to the Pacific Northwest, from the very small (the coastal cutthroat trout, a sometimes-anadromous subspecies, weighs one to four pounds on average and no more than six pounds; the pink salmon, a more typical member of the salmon family, weights three to five pounds and no more than twelve pounds) to the very large (the chinook salmon weighs only ten to fifteen pounds on average, but can grow up to one hundred thirty-five pounds.) Many salmon runs are already extinct, and more are expected to follow. There are predictions that entire species of salmon will start going extinct within the next fifty years.

Because salmon are both iconic and a large part of local industries, there's a big effort to restore them. Any dammed river requires a fish ladder, or if not that then an attached hatchery. Some hydroelectric power plants go to extremes like actually shipping--by truck--baby salmon around the dam on their way out to the ocean. (This is an ineffective system that causes large numbers of fatalities, although there's still probably fewer deaths than would be caused by going through a turbine.) There are very strictly regulated and calculated quotas and harvest limits for each species, based on hatch numbers for the year that's currently mature enough to fish. There's more of a conservation effort for salmon than any other animal in the state of Washington: schools raise tankfuls of baby salmon (part of the incredibly repetitive our-cultural-heritage/natural-bounty curriculum covered every year, until any given sixth-grader can repeat the salmon life cycle in a dull monotone: egg, alevin, fry, fingerling...) to be released, there are designated "salmon streams," and there's more and more laws going into effect about building near streams, and logging near streams, and polluting into streams.

But it's still not enough. Salmon are still going extinct. Why?

That's a complicated question. Partially, it's because salmon are sensitive. They require very clean, clear, fast-flowing, highly-oxygenated and cold water for their eggs to hatch. As eggs, alevin and fry, they're sensitive to pesticides; silt will clog up their gills and suffocate the eggs; too warm water or too sluggish water won't have enough oxygen for them to develop. Dams can even block the right-sized sediments from being washed downstream (and "the right size" varies depending on the salmon: a chinook will require bigger rocks than a pink salmon), which means that the salmon won't be able to build it's redd, or nest. Without it, the eggs get washed away.

As the salmon matures into a fingerling, it travels downstream, where it requires an estuary while it waits for its systems to adjust to saltwater and it grows. Estuaries are semi-marine environments, sheltered from most of the big predators of the open ocean, and they're highly nutrient-rich environments. Here, again, it's extremely sensitive: if there's no estuary, the odds of any given fingerling surviving become extremely minimal, even by the normal salmon standards, which are remarkably low to begin with. Then, once the fish leaves for the open ocean, there are, again, threats like whales and seals, other fish and humans.

Some environmental measures are fairly straight-forward: you put hundred-foot forest buffers around any known salmon stream, to keep the water from over-heating and to keep silt from getting into the stream. You protect pre-existing estuary environments, and work on restoring others. You continue monitoring catch sizes.

What about taking down all the dams on salmon rivers? What about farming salmon for food?

All the dams in western Washington are, in essence, for hydroelectric power. The problem is that there is no good answer to the energy question: oil, coal and natural gas are all finite resources that add to greenhouse gas emissions, causing global warming and climate change; nuclear power creates nuclear waste, which persists for thousands upon thousands of years; windmills can massacre flocks of birds, especially migratory ones; tidal energy is likely to disturb the echolocation of whales because of its vibrations, causing them to beach themselves, and will do the same thing that windmills due to birds, only underwater and with fish, along with potentially eroding beaches at a faster rate; hydrogen combustion is too potentially explosive; nuclear fusion is still only a theory.

So we make these pay-offs. Is it better to have dams that lower salmon numbers, or is it better to have that much more clean energy? Do you farm fish, saving precious wild stocks while still meeting the huge demand for Pacific salmon and preserving an important economic force in society, or do you save precious wild stocks from the deadly parasites bred en masse in fish farms, which also ruin the near-shore environment where they're placed by releasing huge amounts of waste, not to mention the antibiotics and dyes farmed salmon are fed?

These things move in waves. For a while, nuclear energy was going to solve the energy crisis, and the consequences be damned--regardless of how, now, when sites for the placement of nuclear waste are considered, it's thought of in terms of plate tectonics, because that's how long it will persist? For a while, GMOs--genetically modified organisms--were going to feed the world--now they're considered a possible threat to non-modified gene pools, potentially contaminating them. There's concerns about the safety of GMOs. There's concerns about what having our fields all be GMO monocultures could do, if a plague or disease breaks out. It'd be like the Irish potato famine, only on a global scale. Even earlier than that, pesticides and artificial fertilizers were going to feed the world--that led to the modern environmental movement, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and organic farms.

There's this huge cultural legacy of innovations coming with unforeseen consequences. There are no easy answers in this world--except maybe nuclear fusion as an energy source, assuming we can ever get it to work. But it doesn't look like fusion will be energy-efficient at any point in the foreseeable future, since it happens in conditions like those inside of stars, and there aren't any easy answers out there.

Recently, DDT, rightfully or wrongfully one of the most maligned pesticides, was re-approved for use in certain African countries. The plan is to paint it on the outside walls of houses, where it will help kill mosquitoes. Considering the astronomic (and equally horrific) levels of malaria, especially in children, it could save hundreds of thousands of lives and improve the standard-of-living for those who survive: malaria, a blood-borne parasite that settles in the liver, red blood cells and, in one particularly nasty strain, the brain (where it causes hemorrhaging and other nasty side-effects), is a killer that will end up infecting something like a quarter of all children in some African countries. And such a simple effort--DDT is cheap and, therefore, possible to subsidize, unlike providing daily anti-malarial medication to countries worth of people--especially when combined with mosquito netting, could do so much good.

But DDT almost caused the extinction of a lot of big raptors. It's been accused of, variously, causing cancer, infertility, brain damage, liver damage and pretty much anything else that you can think of. In reality, it's one of the safer chemicals to use for humans, especially when applied sanely, instead of it being dumped by the ton at random. Enough of it will kill you, but enough of anything will kill you--lethality is only determined by how much it takes. Salt will kill you, if you eat too much of it.

So will DDT, it just doesn't take as much of it. It's has been demonized. For the most part, it just kills insects, which is what makes it such an effective form of mosquito control--it was DDT, among other things, that eliminated malaria in the United States. That brings up environmental problems in and of itself: even ignoring bioaccumulation and biomagnification, the names for how fat-soluble chemicals and toxins build up the older, bigger and more predatory an organism is, killing all the insects, indiscriminately, in a certain area will knock out one of the most basic building blocks of the local food web. Bugs are really low on the trophic levels, and that equals a lot of starving animals further up the chain. It's like knocking out one of the legs on a three-legged stool, and balanced on top of that stool are another four and a half chairs. That's the most damaging thing DDT does. The killing-of-birds (especially birds of prey, who get the highest concentrations of the chemical, as well as being the slowest to reproduce) is what got attention--that was the "silent spring" that Rachel Carson alluded too, one without birdsong--got the attention, but the biggest impact was the death of insects. (Interestingly, DDT is not actually particularly toxic to the birds themselves. Instead, it thins their eggshells because of the way it effects how they metabolize calcium, and then the eggs break before the chick is hatched.)

So there's another issue. What's more important--the environment, or peoples' lives? To what extent are they codependent? How do you even know if you're doing the right thing? They introduced Nile Perch to Lake Victoria, in Africa, to feed the local fisherman, who subsisted primarily on native fish they pulled out of the lake. The Nile Perch devastated local species, driving some extinct and seriously endangering the others, causing population crashes in other species before they crashed themselves because they'd overhunted all their prey species, and significantly lowering the yield of the lake in terms of biomass. But it's too late to fix the problem.

We do tend to make things worse. Punishing Germany after WWI caused WWII. There was an Aleutian island, one that was essentially barren except for large numbers of nesting seabirds during the summer. Rats were introduced to it, and they decimated the numbers of birds on the island, stealing and eating their eggs--the birds had no natural defenses against their predation. Foxes were introduced to eat the rats, and instead they also ate bird's eggs, supplementing their diet with the birds themselves. It's the sort of idea that seems like a good one at the time, but turns out to be mind-numbingly stupid but also essentially irreversible.

(Sources: Puget Sound Shorelines: Species - Salmon; Endangered Species: Salmon & Bull Trout - The Issue; Salmon Facts: An Informational Guide to Our State's Natural Treasure.)