Off the hook
Unchained
by Joel Preston Smith
The federal government recently acknowledged that salmon have a hard time swimming through concrete walls. It’s too late for the native sockeye salmon population on the Elwah River—they’re extinct—but the dozers are rolling, and the two tombs that for the past 99 years have buried 70 miles of wild river are finally coming down. Engineers recently resurrected the Elwha after a century-long sleep. On March 16, workers removed a final barrier around the Elwha Dam, allowing the river to flow in its native channel for the first time since 1912, when developers in northwest Washington decided the state needed voltage more than it needed salmon, wild rivers, or Lower Elwha Klallam Indians, the latter of whom depended on seasonal returns of salmon for more than just ‘power,’ or ‘energy,’ or even just ‘food.’
Aerial photos of the revived Elwha show, for the first time in living memory, a river that looks like ... a river. Not a domesticated, demure slough, but a vibrant, unpredictable watercourse—braided, weaving sinuously, unfettered, free.
Mostly free. When the Glines Canyon Dam—eight miles upstream from the Elwha Dam—removal is completed sometime around summer of next year, all of the Elwha will let down her hair. For the Lower Elwha Klallam (and for others) this means a river that once again welcomes salmon into its furthest reaches. The U.S. National Park Service estimates that before construction on the dams began in 1910, as many as 400,000 salmon spawned in the 70 miles of mainstem and tributaries.
That number now stands at about 3,000 migrants—all of which were trapped at the 108-foot Elwha Dam, five miles inland from the Elwha’s mouth in the Salish Sea. Only about 100-200 winter steelhead were able to outmigrate to the Strait of Juan de Fuca as far back as 2008, according to a technical memorandum by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The demoltions mean hope, of course, and renewal. The Elwha constitutes the largest watershed (270 square miles) in Olympic National Park, and the return of major salmon runs would return marine-derived nutrients to the watershed, restoring a vital food source for the range of life that inhabits it.
For consumers, the teardowns mean more good, and possibly more goods—if the Elwha’s salmon recover. That’s not the best reason to bulldoze this or any dam. Not just so we can stack more fish on a plate. It was that same ‘utilitarian’ viewpoint that led developer Thomas Aldwell and supporters to favor jobs and profits over salmon and Indians ... that led entrepreneurs to rest the dam on gravel (not bedrock—which would have increased the cost to his Canadian financier) ... that led to it being designed in a manner guaranteed to kill salmon (and wound the Lower Elwha Klallam) ... that led federal officials to approve such a lethal monstrosity in a national park.
When the dam burst (it was later reconstructed) the night of Oct. 30, 1912 during heavy rains, the Olympic-Leader later reported (in somewhat celebratory language) that the resulting 18-foot ‘tidal wave’ left “great numbers of salmon and trout strewn over the fields and through the woods, and everyone going down that way got all the fish they could carry home.” What we now would call a tragedy was then a windfall.
The National Park Service seems exceptionally proud of the teardown. The agency posted a video covering the troubled history of the Elwha’s dams, and in it, you can hear counter-currents of antiquated pragmatism versus a more modern existential view of why salmon must live, and dams must go; a series of narrators explains, “The cost of keeping the dams has cost a shadow over their benefits ... We were going to have to spend an enormous amount of money to allow fish passage, which is tremendously expense ... The machinery was going to have to be replaced ...”
If the narrative stopped there, viewers might be left with the impression that someone’s back pocket had made the decision to kill the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams (Congress authorized their removal in 1992, then failed—until recently—to appropriate enough funds to demolish them). But then there’s Robert Elofson, restoration director for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, who reminds us of a higher form of accounting—why dams must go, and fish must come.
“We want our dammed salmon back ... Our hopes are that our grandkids can see the same Elwha River our grandparents saw.”
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Water out of fish
by Joel Preston Smith
“Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish.” ― Comedian Steven Wright
There’s more than enough fish in the sea.
The oceans are dying.
Don’t worry.
Panic.
The histrionic debate over whether fish stocks are healthy, or whether they’re on the verge of collapse, has consumers lost at sea. The two most prominent scientists in the controversy stand on opposite shores; Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington argues, in essence, we’re worrying needlessly. For the fishing industry, he’s the patron saint of purse seining.
Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia is everywhere (YouTube, The New Republic, NPR, treehugger.com), pleading for reduced harvests, if not outright bans on fishing certain stocks. How bad is the divide? Trawling Google for “Pauly overfishing collapse destruction apocalypse” nets 45,000 results. A search for the same terms (but replacing ‘Pauly’ with ‘Hilborn’) yields 2,110 results, but that’s because Pauly appears in 945 of them.
You probably don’t need a calculator to sum up who’s more popular with Greenpeace. But who’s right? Who’s wrong? Should we pick a side, blindly (trustfully) throw out another line ... or just avoid seafood altogether?
The answer—possibly one of the few times it’s ever been stated publicly by a journalist—is I’m not qualified to say. Few, if any reporters could competently question the findings of either Pauly or Hilborn. To even have an inkling of the science behind their work would require an advanced understanding of statistical analysis, computer modeling, marine sampling techniques, the natural history of each fish stock under consideration, the relative impacts of purse-seining vs. trawling vs. long-line vs. trolling vs. gillnetting ... In short, the only people imminently qualified to draw us a picture ... cannot agree on what the picture looks like.
And so ... we are worried. We want to do the right thing. Behave in a way that won’t make things worse. If only someone could say what that right thing is.
The furor (and confusion) started in 1998 when Pauly and co-authors published a report in Science, arguing that global fish stocks were in jeopardy; commercial fishing (they said) had depleted larger fish, and as a consequence were targeting lower and lower levels of the marine food chain in order to replace the biomass that used to reside higher in the food web. It sounded like common sense, but the implication was that the very foundation of the marine food chain was crumbling. Not so obvious (to the general public) was that as older, heavier fish were depleted, and then replaced by younger fish of the same species ... some fish were being netted before they could reach breeding maturity. Meaning that targeting younger, smaller fish could potentially wipe out entire generations of species, leaving few juveniles to reproduce.
The controversy reached a fevered pitch in 2006 when fisheries biologist Boris Worm (Dalhouise University, Halifax, Canada) co-authored a study in Science, arguing that if commercial fishing trends continued unabated, global stocks were doomed to collapse by 2048. Around the globe, media cited the study as heralding ‘the end of fish.’
Hilborn has been on an anti-Pauly, anti-Worm campaign ever since. He’s the most outspoken critic of the gloom-and-doom camp—if by outspoken we mean ‘given over to invective’ (which is not to say he’s wrong, just that he sometimes sounds like he’s inviting other biologists to step out back and count knuckles). Worm’s 2003 study (saying that stocks of tuna on the high seas were 90 percent depleted by 1980) “was totally bogus,” Hilborn says.
“Someone should hold Pauly’s feet to the fire,” Hilborn wrote to me recently. Hilborn says Pauly claims (some) fish stocks are “60 percent deleted,” but has failed to note that those ‘low’ numbers are well within the limits set by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Service. “The [U.S.] management goal is to reduce fish stocks to 30-50% of their unfished [sic] abundance,” Hilborn argues.
In other words, ‘depleted’ may not ultimately mean ‘harmed’ if those reduced numbers are compared against the target goals established by NOAA’s Marine Fisheries Service and the eight U.S. Fisheries Management Councils. The ‘low’ numbers might mean we’re fishing in a way that (in essence) skims off the ‘surplus.’ If we can accept the concept of a surplus (which most of us who want to eat fish can or do accept).
Hilborn says that the public (and management agencies) should ignore the (doom-saying) Worm of 2006, harkening instead to the (upbeat) Worm of 2009. In that year, Worm (with Hilborn and others as co-researchers) reported that, “In 5 of 10 well-studied ecosystems, the average exploitation rate has recently declined ...” That sounds positive indeed. In the abstract for the same paper, Worm and Hilborn add, “63% of assessed fish stocks worldwide still require rebuilding, and even lower exploitation rates are needed to reverse the collapse of vulnerable species.”
A 2009 press release issued by CIRSO Marine and Atmospheric Services in Australia (the employer of one of the co-authors of the study) paraphrases Worm as having said ‘there is still a troubling trend of increasing stock collapse across all regions.’ The Worm of 2009 doesn’t seem to sound all that different from the Worm of 2006.
Many agencies do fear collapses, and the economic turmoil that comes from fishing closures, given that many stock assessments indeed seem grim; Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick petitioned the U.S. Department of Commerce for $21 million in disaster relief last November, in the wake of low stock estimates for Atlantic cod, and a 61 percent decline in groundfish landings between 2009 and 2010; the outlook for Chilean sea bass, sharks, grenadiers, bluefin tuna, blue ling, and orange roughy is also reported to be grim.
It’s not all dire. The Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife predicted “strong returns” of spring chinook and coho this year, and extended the chinook season in the lower Columbia River by eight days. Halibut fisherman in Puget Sound will get a four-day extension this year, partly because last year’s catch fell short of the quota by about 11,600 pounds. If you troll hard, you can find some positive numbers, but you have to use a long line, and you have to be patient.
It’s an enormously complicated issue, and even fisheries scientists admit they don’t have enough information to made accurate estimates for all stocks (some of which are commercially valuable, some threatened). Rick Methot, who’s been modeling ocean ecosystems for NOAA for more than 30 years, says that of the 230 most important stocks managed by U.S. fisheries agencies, NOAA only has “adequate assessments for about 57 percent of them.” NOAA’s 2011 Fish Stock Sustainability Index notes that 237 major fish stocks “have overfishing thresholds not defined or applicable, or are unknown with respect to their overfishing status.”
It’s not for lack of willpower, or competence. Methot says it’s primarily lack of funding. The agency currently operates eight vessels to conduct fish assessments for the 18,000 square miles under its purview. NOAA budgeted $62 million this fiscal year for fish counts, says Methot, that will provide current estimates and near-future projections for an industry whose value in 2009 was estimated at $196 billion in sales, income and “value-added impacts,” according to NOAA’s 2013 budget request to Congress.
Consider for a moment, the surreal nature of the dotted line: $62 million to NOAA to tell us how fish are doing, but the U.S. government outlays $162 million in subsidies for one fishing industry alone—high-seas trawlers. And then provides disaster relief when some stocks collapse. It’s a little like getting a handout to buy a nice gun to rob the bank, then going back to the bank and filing for financial relief because the vault is empty. If you’re lost, you’re not alone.
So ... who to believe? What to do? They (the researchers) don’t know—not with a high degree of assurance. The author of this essay certainly doesn’t know. Maybe you don’t know. But Sound Consumer generally advocates a better-safe-than-sorry attitude. If you want some reasonable advice, we recommend turning to (of all places) a living fish museum—The Monterey Bay Aquarium. Since 1999, the aquarium has maintained the Seafood Watch program, which aims to tell consumers how to eat sustainably. Their seafood ap for the iPhone has been downloaded 240,000 times to date—which, ironically, was the projected harvest of chinook for Southeast Alaska in 2008.
“When there is scientific uncertainty,” they note, “we err on the side of conservation.”
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10/07/12 | 0 Comments | Off the hook