Salmon spawning in the upper Columbia River, first in 80 years
spokesman.com
spokesman.com
It's good that salmon can come into this area but smelter from Trail, BC has been polluting upper Columbia river for about hundred years. With chemicals and smelter sludge. Fish is not edible, sand is black from sludge.
Salmon may have reached upper Columbia river, but water in that part of the river is heavily polluted.
And south of Coulee Dam, there is storage of nuclear waste, just north of Richmond, WA - Hanford site. Nuclear waste already leaks into Columbia river, north of Tri-Cities area.
So in my opinion, human created disasters in the Columbia river, rank in this order: nuclear waste at Hanford site > smelter at Trail, BC > Dams without passage for fish.
Sorry for typos, typing from phone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
Federal government promised to clean up but failed.
"During Hanford’s plutonium-production heyday, workers discharged some 1.7 trillion liters of waste liquids into soil disposal sites, which developed into vast underground plumes of toxic chemicals, including the carcinogens hexavalent chromium and carbon tetrachloride [PDF], that infiltrated aquifers."
Of course, knowing what we do now, they absolutely are dangerous. It's horrible they've leaked into the aquifer. Reminds me of the trichloroethylene plumes in Silicon Valley. Also a solvent once considered pretty benign, now known to be a carcinogen. (And actually linked to quite a few cancer cases I believe, unlike many chemicals "known to the state of California to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity.")
[1] https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/phs/phs.asp?id=194&tid=35#:~:text=....
There was also the issue of "waste" being removed from those reactors for processing into more than 60,000 weapons.
* other dangerous stuff being fun things like mustard gas and nerve agents
This was supposed to be cleaned up purified put into safe modern radioactive waste containment vessels and stored deep in Yucca mountain until the NIMBY folks got involved.
The Columbia river is one instance. The strait of Juan de Fuca is another [0]. The citizens of Victoria only stopped dumping raw untreated sewage in it earlier this year!
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/victoria-crd...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21298472 , definitely worth a read if you care about salmon
Not to say fishing doesn’t make a difference. It’s just not the only problem. Fish farm research was suppressed by the Canadian government which showed that the farms were spreading vast amounts of disease very consistently, for example. One disease acted so quickly that the fish would die before they could spawn. Fortunately the research surfaced eventually and farms are largely being shut down, but these farms have been operating for decades.
It’s a very complex and frightening problem. I’m glad we’re making progress in understanding it better.
https://spo.nmfs.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/pdf-content/mf...
In 2019, only 18 salmon returned to the lake.
Further 4 dams in the Snake River are not used for hydro power, nor are they for flood control. They were used to try to make Idaho a major sea port -- despite the fact that Idaho is several hundred files from the ocean.
https://discoversawtooth.org/what-happened-to-the-red-fish-o...
In this case it is true that hydropower is cheap and clean. However, the negative externality of destroying the salmon run is much more than "some fishis" that some Indian tribes cared about.
Aboriginal annual salmon catches have been estimated at over 10 million pounds for year. On top of that, the migration of pacific salmon upriver represents an enormous transfer of nutrients upstream. Salmon are a keystone species and are vitally important for the health of forests.
Unfortunately, the salmon run cannot easily coexist with the dams. Yes, there is value in the hydropower. Yes, it is cheap, clean energy. But it is certainly not without cost. We could be reaping the benefits of one of the largest animal migrations on our planet in a sustainable way. Even disregarding the cultural importance to native peoples there is still enormous economic and ecological value in having a healthy salmon run.
For comparison, the US alone currently harvests 100's of mil pounds of salmon a year. Alaska alone produces 500mil pounds last year (and this was the lowest in decades). Norway harvests around 3 BILLION pounds of salmon a year.
Overall, generally speaking, the ecological condition of the continental US is probably better today than at any time in the past century.
Dams provide so many good things (clean energy, passable water, flood protection, ...). If the salmon can spawn that would be ideal!
Downstream survival rates for juvenile fish are in the high 90s for all the dams on the lower Columbia. [1] Grand Coulee produces more energy than any hydro project in North America so I expect it's worth keeping around even if we have to make some modifications to improve survival rates on the upper Columbia.
[1] https://www.bpa.gov/news/pubs/FactSheets/fs-201306-Columbia-...
Even if the spawn make it through the dams, they won't be able to come back when they reach spawning age.
They need to invest tons of money in salmon ladders and naturalization, for example, like we are doing in BC. That would be quite the project for the Grand Coulee dam, as I remember it being quite large.
Hopefully this is the first step in the massive commitment that will be needed to restore the salmon population there. The salmon run is such an important part of the ecosystem.
I realize that causes other political issues but that's the only way we're going to have native populations.
I'm an avid fisherman and really LOVE fish. They're amazing animals. Fisherman have a connection to nature that just can't be appreciated unless you have spent significant time on the water.
Fish are SMART, they're capable of amazing things I wouldn't have even considered possible.
I once had a large trout swim UP a (short, about 4') waterfall with my lure in his mouth and I could SEE him swimming up it as if it were just normal water.
When we let nature die a part of us dies with it..
Squirrels remember where they bury their nuts. Octopuses can solve puzzles.
So what about fish? Salmon remember where they were spawned before they head out to the ocean, and come back to the exact same pool to spawn before dying.
https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2013/02/13/mystery-solve...
So sure, they're not "SMART" but there is a lot of "intelligence" they have acquired over many generations of evolutionary cycles.
This article seems to suggest otherwise.
Salmon, butterflies and squirrels are all dumb as hell.
What they are is incredibly well adapted to reproduce and survive on this crazy planet!
However, most small and mid sized dams should be removed as they harm wildlife and are often a safety issue for the general public.
PS: In terms of supporting evidence. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092585741...
I would rather you pay more and pay the full costs of your electrical use. Use solar, wind or invest in a nuclear plant if removing carbon is imported.
Causing extinction in the name of climate change when really it's about cheaper prices is a non-starter.
Interesting. Do you have a source for this?
No, I've done a fair amount of research into the historical climate of the PNW and I've never heard that before! Do you have any journal articles so I can read more about it?
https://boris.unibe.ch/132301/7/333323_4_merged_1557735881.p...
The phenomenon you’re referring to seems to be regional, in contrast to global warming. Global warming has plenty of regional variation, but the average temperature of the whole planet is, in fact, increasing quite a bit.
Global temperatures were not warmer in the past, because there was less energy retained due to lesser amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Not all dams that are blocking salmon runs in the PNW are used for hydro power, or for flood control for that matter.
See this comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25540540
So the question is are we okay with converting barge traffic to rail traffic? Probably. That's the way things are transported across the rest of the country.
Surely there must be another possible solution that more Closely mimics the river before the dams were built ?
This would be much like the scene in The Hobbit with Legolas successfully gaining elevation by climbing up free-falling rubble.
All of the artificial things we've created do nothing to sustain our existence, only to facilitate our connection with the biome.
If, in the process of facilitating this connection, we eliminate the biome's ability to sustain itself, most of us will be dead very quickly.
That's one of the reasons people care so much.
Another reason, if you suspend your human-centric worldview, is seeing other creatures as our relatives on the biological tree of live, admitting their ability to have feelings and desires and suffering, and caring for their plight and happiness alongside ours.
We don't have to kill the biome to sustain ourselves. In fact, the opposite is true.
There are nearly 8 billion humans on Earth.
Can you see the disparity?
And here is a slice of the result: https://xkcd.com/1338/
If you feel like learning more about „The Great Forgetting“, read this: The Once and Future World, by J B MacKinnon (http://jbmackinnon.com/books.html). Contact me if you want the ebook.
I wish the downvoters would have the courage to speak up.
Yes, and there's roughly a quadrillion Cyclothone on Earth, a vertebrate fish with 13 species. [0]
That's 1,000,000 billion fish vs. 8 billion humans: the fish are winning the population game, and it's not even close.
Furthermore, human population projections cap us out around 15 billion in the next century because birth rates go down as population increases—we are naturally self-limiting, like every other species on earth.
Besides that, it's obviously not zero sum. Increasing the salmon population does not decrease the human population. Arguably, in the long run, what is good for the salmon is also good for the human.