Six Degrees of Separation from Killer Whales
A Lot More Rides on Salmon Than Scales
Saving a species of fish can help save everything around it, including some major mammals. Like us.By Amy Linn, 1-26-10
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| A brown bear snags a salmon at a creek near Hyder, Alaska. Flickr photo by Alan Vernon. | |
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The connectedness of a shrinking world can sometimes feel cringe-worthy. Do we really want to know that dot A connects to dot B and on to dot Z—that everything we do has consequences? Escaping that over-connected feeling is something a lot of us seek in the wilderness, where no one can hear us singing Neil Young songs off key and where a bird call, or silence, fills our brain pans.
But wilderness, of course, is the essence of interconnectedness, with each critter in a niche that keeps another living thing in balance. That’s what the Los Angeles Times reminds us of with a fine column by Carl Safina, founder and president of the Blue Ocean Institute, who writes about a photo of an Alaskan bear eating a salmon, with a wolf looking on.
“Your eye goes to the bear, then the wolf. But the salmon convened the meeting. Without the salmon, you’d see only water,” Safina notes. “Everything else in the photograph—trees, bushes, all the animals and plants in the forest and the water—contains ocean nutrients from salmon.”
The linkage doesn’t stop there. The endangered wild salmon are the most important food source for similarly endangered killer whales on the Pacific Coast, Safina reports. If salmons perish, orcas will, too.
So what can be done? There are steps we can take to protect West Coast salmon stocks, thereby helping orcas, bears, flora, fauna and, eventually, Joe and Jill Public (the Publics might not think they care about salmon, but that’s just because they haven’t thought about fish a lot lately, what with the Jill losing her job and Joe losing his health insurance and all).
Economic disasters, it’s true, make the environment a tough sell, a muted worry. But even in times like these, a few good choices on behalf of—yes, a fish—can make a difference. For the Obama administration, all that’s needed is a little more caring about wild salmon and a little less caring about eight hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers, Safina writes. (For more on that issue, click here and here.)
Salmon abundance is “the beating heart of the Pacific Northwest—the flow of energy that connects and sustains people, fishing towns, bears, wolves, orcas, forests and the rivers and seas we all love and use,” Safina writes. And that’s a link that shouldn’t be broken.
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Comments
It's worth remembering that as with the spotted owl, the salmon issue is not "jobs or salmon." Snake River restoration, for instance, would restore jobs in fishing communities along the Columbia and the coast, and jobs would also accompany a commitment to replacing the hydropower with other carbon-free sources, and so on.
See orcanetwork.org for more on orca/salmon connections.
You make it sound so simple.
"...........a commitment to replacing the hydropower with other carbon-free sources, and so on."
So what ya got in mind?
Hmmm....Nuclear is carbon free.....Naw, fat cats run that one and they are unethical.
OK Windmills then........ Nope, too noisy and ugly in my back yard...
Solar then........Can't do that the protected squirrels and tortoises won that land fight....
Gee looks like somebody painted themselves into a corner.
Anyways...
My main point was, you said:
"...........a commitment to replacing the hydropower with other carbon-free sources, and so on."
It seems you just throw that out there like fact.
You do it again here:
"And the NW Power Planning Council says we can replace the power from those dams pretty cheaply, without using nukes or coal."
OK fine, so where are you going to get 3,033 megawatts (enough for 3,033,000 homes) of RELIABLE power to replace the 4 dams?
That is what I should have asked...
The potential for wind is enormous. Mr. Stephure [a consultant] said that by 2020, wind’s installed capacity could be five times higher than it is today, reaching about 180,000 megawatts." - NYT, y'day.
And at the same time:
"Northwest dam managers will need to start filling the region's reservoirs earlier in the spring to minimize the impact of climate change on power production and salmon, a new study concludes.
In a warmer future, scientists expect spring runoff to peak earlier, reducing summer flows in Northwest rivers for fish and hydro-power demands.
That means water managers can no longer count on past experience to plan for the future. So scientists at the University of Washington and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers looked at what would happen at dams and reservoirs if the region was 2 degrees Celsius warmer by the middle of this century.
That, they calculated, would lead to a drop in hydro-power production in May, June and July of nearly a quarter." -Oregonian, Jan 22
So maybe it won't take as much to replacing the power from the dams, after all.
There's still a need for gas-fired power and the hydro produced on the COlumbia and elsewhere, of course. Few people - well, nobody I know - think we can move to 100 percent wind and sun. But can we find 3000 MW? You bet.
One more point: The Snake River dams produce the majority of their output in spring and fall, when it isn't needed in the NW, and BPA sells it out-of-region. That is, it's excess power.
Every additional pound of salmon generated by Snake dam removal would cost $267 after the dust settled. That was so nuts, I started over, ran them all again, and yep, $267 a pound. From now until forever. What a deal.
Solar Farm Held Up for Two Dozen Tortoises:
http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2010/01/solar-farm-held.html
On a strip of California's Mojave Desert, two dozen rare tortoises could stand in the way of a sprawling solar-energy complex in a case that highlights mounting tensions between wilderness conservation and the nation's quest for cleaner power.
Oakland, Calif.-based BrightSource Energy has been pushing for more than two years for permission to erect 400,000 mirrors on the site to gather the sun's energy. It could become the first project of its kind on U.S. Bureau of Land Management property, leaving a footprint for others to follow on vast stretches of public land across the West.
The construction would come with a cost: Government scientists have concluded that more than 6 square miles of habitat for the federally threatened desert tortoise would be permanently lost. …
BrightSource President John Woolard warned in government filings released this month that heavy-handed regulation could kill the proposal. He did not mention the tortoises directly but referred to "unbounded and extreme" requirements being placed on the company.
India, the government there, has announced a major push for solar power to help ease the energy situation and help improve the climate. In the US, new solar projects destined for public lands out west, where the government owns most of the land, have been put on a two year freeze for "environmental impact" studies.
"It doesn't make any sense," said Holly Gordon, vice president for legislative and regulatory affairs for Ausra, a solar thermal energy company in Palo Alto, California "The Bureau of Land Management land has some of the best solar resources in the world. This could completely stunt the growth of the industry." ed.z.: and if you remember, they already put a hold on a lot of new big wind projects because it allegedly interferes with fatherland security radars. Of course the new mandate for the solar only affects public lands, but still, the mantra has been "we have millions of acres of hot sunshine out in the deserts just sitting there" for some years now..because we do, that's reality and they are spiffy places to do the large scale projects. So...sort of an oddball *coincidence* with the fast rising conventional fuel prices, isn't it?