Environment Forum

from Tales from the Trail:

Salmon ‘chanted evening?

The one word that leaped out of President Obama's State of the Union address to Congress wasn't "optimism," "business," "teachers," "economy" or "budget."

To those who listened to the speech on National Public Radio, the memorable term was "salmon," writ large in a word cloud NPR compiled from its listeners after Obama finished.

That kind of makes sense. Without the Punch-and-Judy theater of Republicans and Democrats popping up from their seats to cheer or boo, as they customarily do when they're seated on opposing sides of the room for a presidential address, it was up to the Commander in Chief to deliver some chuckle-worthy lines.

Obama got his biggest laugh for this rather understated poke at overlapping federal bureaucracies:

"There are 12 different agencies that deal with exports. There are at least five different agencies that deal with housing policy. Then there's my favorite example: the Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they're in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they're in saltwater. (Laughter.) I hear it gets even more complicated once they're smoked. (Laughter and applause.)"

(No offense, Mr. President, but this was kind of an easy room if you got such a boffo response to this joke. Plenty of Facebook and Twitter posters wondered why you didn't mention cream cheese and bagels.)

This being Washington, though, it didn't end there.

More bad news on the fish front

There’s more bad news on the fish front.

According to a new report the advocacy group California Trout, 65 percent of the state’s native salmon, steelhead and trout species may be extinct within the next century. To see the whole report click here. It was written by Dr. Peter Moyle of the University of California, Davis.

“The report’s findings indicate that the state’s native salmonids are in unprecedented decline and are teetering towards the brink of extinction – an alarm bell that signals the deteriorating health of the state’s rivers and streams that provide drinking water to millions of Californians. It’s also a sign that fish are likely to be struggling nationwide in this era of global warming, water diversions, and rapid development into previously uninhabited areas,” the organization said.

Salt and freshwater fisheries almost everywhere are in decline. Overharvesting, poor management of commercial fisheries, habitat destruction, climate change, dams – you name it, the inhabitants of our aquatic ecosystems are in trouble.

Anadromous fish such as salmon — which spawn in freshwater but spend most of their adult lives in the sea — have nowhere to run (well, swim). They get hammered by trawlers at sea and by pressure on their spawning grounds when they return to freshwater. The salmon’s life-cycle is one of the most arduous but compelling narratives in nature, from its birthplace in streams to the open sea and back again. It is a journey that is increasingly fraught with danger from California’s coast to the Baltic Sea.

But the report also highlights the success of restoration efforts which show that when blocked flows are reinstated and migration barriers removed, native fish stocks show signs of recovery.