The salmon fisheries along the Chuit River would be severely damaged, so much so that the researchers say that restoration would be “virtually impossible”.

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This week’s protestors all have similar objectives – they want better local land use, and more consideration for the needs and behaviours of many different forms of land user.

Utahns want their recreational space back

Around 3,000 Utahns marched on their state Capitol last weekend, to protest federal control of their open spaces. Their complaint is that forests and other lands are increasing being closed or having only restricted access and their protest is staged both against the federal government and environmental protestors who ask for areas of land to be turned into reserves.  The protest attracted a wide range of people from farmers and hunters through to walkers and those who enjoy off-road riding: many protestors rode motorcycles, four-wheelers or other forms of all-terrain vehicle.  The local Representative Mike Noel, said, ‘If you want to see what it’s like to live in a socialist regime, go to southern Utah.’

French beach users want less green slime

In Brittany, France, environmental groups have launched a range of protests from petitions, to placards, to demand for new legislation to remove algae from local beaches. The problem is not just unsightliness or odour – the concentration of the algae caused a horse to die, and its rider to collapse, after they both fell victim to fumes given off by the rotting material.  An autopsy confirmed that the fumes killed the horse, and the rider’s owner has started legal action against ‘person unknown’ – but the assumption is that if the case gets to court, it will be local farmers who will be the subject of the action.  A local environmental activist says that intensive farming practises cause chemicals from animal feed to enter local water supplies and that these chemicals cause the toxic gases in the rotting algae. Local authorities say they have made efforts to reduce the quantity of farm effluent that is released into the sea. Some towns have spent a lot of municipal money on algae reduction schemes because they fear it puts off tourists. However, scientists say it isn’t a systemic problem and there is no widespread danger to beach users.

Puget Sound won’t have another pier

In Puget Sound, a dock isn’t being built. The water reserve on Maury Island has been a battleground for years – Glacier Northwest wanted to build a pier which would support pipelines carrying fine sand out onto the water to load barges. Local protestors were ready to chain themselves to the construction cranes or form a barrage of kayaks to block access to the pier, but a federal judge made it unnecessary – ruling that such projects needed stricter environmental review. It wasn’t enough, ruled Judge Martinez, to consider the individual impact of a building or development, the cumulative effect of all built and planned building had to be factored into the equation. He went on to say, ‘No single project or human activity has caused depletion of the salmon runs or the near-extinction of the … orca, or the general degradation of the marine environment of Puget Sound. Yet every project has the potential to incrementally increase the burden upon the species and the Sound.’ Local residents, who’ve been fighting the development, were jubilant, but Glacier Northwest feel the judgement is unsound because it means they must remove the sand with trucks which means more environmental impact on roads and use of fossil fuels.

Puget Sound courtesy of Brian Teutsch at Flickr under a creative commons licence

There has been significant success in decreasing the levels of chemical contaminants in our nation’s water ways in recent years, thanks to the Clean Air and Water Acts passed by Congress. However, low levels of many contaminants (such as metals, pesticides, and synthetic molecules like PCBs) persist in many rivers and streams, home to salmon and related trout species.

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Concerned about how sustainable the fish is that you’re eating for dinner? Do you think that the farm raised option is always the best choice for seafood?

There are varieties of fish that have fewer chemicals or are from highly managed wild populations that are more sustainable than others.  To make the selection of fish easier, the Monterrey Bay Aquarium (ironically an organization dedicated to protecting the same creatures it’s helping you decide to eat) has developed a website that details dozens of different varieties of fish, mussels, and shrimp and states which is the best environmental choice, which is the best alternative, and which ones to avoid.

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The Friant Dam on California’s San Joaquin River, built in the 1940’s, is slated for removal as part of today’s Congressional designation of wilderness status and federal protection to 2 million acres across nine states.

Included in Congress’ largest expansion of the wilderness system in 15 years is an ambitious river restoration effort on the San Joaquin River. The legislation authorizes the federal government to carry out an $88 million settlement won by environmentalists in 2006 after a court battle that spanned two decades.

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The Nature Conservancy announced this week that they have purchased ranchland in Shasta, California and hope to return Big Springs Creek to its former glory as a major salmon run.

The organization noticed the creek’s consistent, glacier-fed flowing water supply should make it the perfect spawning area for the embattled Pacific salmon, but it wasn’t being properly cared for. Years later, they’ve purchased 4,136 acres of surrounding land and plan to fence off the creek to protect it.

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Unique coastal wolves range from Southern Alaska to Vancouver Island. Their fur has a red tint and their diet includes salmon, beached whales, and seals.

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Why kill sea lions instead of lowering allowed fishing quotas? This question and others were left unanswered at a press conference today.

Activists with In Defense of Animals and the Sea Lion Defense Brigade were awarded hard hats and badges before attending a press conference by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife at the Bonneville Dam.

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Apparently sea lions like salmon a little too much. People in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho are threatened — they want all the tasty salmon for themselves.

Okay, perhaps that’s a bit of an oversimplification. But I have to wonder — if salmon didn’t taste good, would people be going to such great lengths to prevent a natural predator-prey relationship between a sea mammal and a fish?

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This information is useful for redesigning hydroelectric dams to minimize damage to fish or campaigning for dam removal. According to the New York Times:

On rivers with flood-control and hydroelectric dams, like many in the Pacific Northwest, the young salmon are buffeted, subject to sharp pressure changes and otherwise knocked around as they pass through spillways, tunnels and power-generating turbines.

Dr. Miracle’s methods of measuring protein in cell walls could replace the current usage of  dummy fish containing accelerometers and embedded sensors in live fish.

Image: Josh Parrish on Flickr under a Creative Commons License

“Leave No Trace” has always been an honored credo of the Boy Scouts of America. The trumpeted tenet is supposed to refer to ethical guidelines which preach having a minimal impact on land, nature and wildlife. But according to a recent investigation, the Boy Scouts have been caught logging over 34,000 acres of pristine forest over the last 20 years, including 60 clearcuts and 35 salvage harvests. They’ve literally left no trace– of the forests.

Furthermore, the survey showed that most of the acreage was logged to turn a backdoor profit, and there’s evidence of corruption. A number of Scout councils submitted inaccurate and misleading logging plans, and allegedly disregarded rules and regulations which were in place to protect wildlife and the watershed. Some of the deals even involve cozy relationships with private companies and state regulators.

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Climate change, developers, and logging are blamed

Since the winter of 2006, when a state of emergency was declared for 18 counties in the state, Western Washington has experienced increasingly dramatic annual flooding episodes creating a state of emergency in growing numbers of counties each year.

For the past three years here, the number of roads, farms, buildings, and houses damaged or destroyed increased—helped along by the landslides that usually follow in the wake of such flooding. Although with this year the number of landslides has been somewhat constrained, the total area of flooding has increased from the previous two years (several sections of Interstate 5 remained shut down as of Saturday night, Jan. 10), and tens of thousands of people have had to be evacuated over the past 10 days. The governor declared a state of emergency in late December, which has only abated in the past couple of days.

It would seem that a “trifecta” of reinforcing factors is to blame: climate change (an extra heavy dose of snow, followed by several days of heavy rains), upland forest clear-cutting (leaving less vegetation to soak up water and hold the soil in place), and over-development in flood plane areas (leaving too many people’s houses too low in the face of rising rivers) …all of which set the stage for the current state of emergency. The damage is still being tallied, and although the heavy rains have largely abated, repairs to roads and highways will take months if not a full year (and with state budgets so tight) or more.

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Our fish need cold, clean water to survive, but they’re getting less and less of it. Dams block access. Climate change is now looming to exacerbate the threat, and it increases the urgency. All of these things are pushing our fish toward extinction. If we allow these fish to go extinct, we’ve allowed the deterioration of the streams and rivers.

The bull trout has already gone extinct as a result of Shasta and McCloud Dam. Unfortunately, I don’t think waiting until 2020 to possibly remove the Klamath Dams is quick enough action.

Image:  Eric Luse / The Chronicle

The giant Chinook had recently spawned and died in Battle Creek, a tributary of the Sacramento River. Due to a canceled commercial fishing season in the Pacific Ocean, this fish was able to live a full life and probably weighed 90 pounds before beginning its journey upriver.

Via:  Redding Record Searchlight

Image:  California Department of Fish and Game

In two weeks The National Organics Standards Board is expected to vote in Washington on what kinds of fish can actually be labeled organic.  Tell Washington what YOU think by signing a petition from the Consumer’s Union.

We’re all pretty clear on what “organic” means when it comes to vegetables, poultry and red meat, but what about fish?  This is a question that has been on our radar for quite some time. There is a limited amount of seafood being sold as organic at stores in the US but oftentimes these products were certified in other countries.

The organic fish question still has us scratching our heads, because as of yet there has been no “official” organic designation when it comes to seafood in the US.  That’s about to change.

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For sushi aficionados, that means both pleasant surprises — and some disappointments. Popular items like toro (bluefin tuna) and unagi (freshwater eel) are on the Eco-Worst list, as is most sake (made with farmed or Atlantic salmon). These species are either overfished, caught in ways that destroy ocean habitats or kill large amounts of other sea life, or they are farmed with methods that pollute the ocean or threaten nearby wild fish populations.

But such choices as sake made from wild-caught Alaska salmon, hotate (farmed scallops )  and hirame (Pacific halibut ) are Eco-Best choices, in part because they come from abundant, well-managed fisheries or — in the case of scallops — are raised using eco-friendly aquaculture methods.

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While residents complain that washing cars is a family pastime that they should not be required to give up, officials say that the at-home car wash is too harmful to the environment to ignore. “I understand this is something people have done for a long time,” said Bill Moore, a water specialist with the Washington State Department of Ecology, which enacted the ban. “It’s not something we should be doing any longer.”

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The recent The New York Times story about two high school students who did DNA testing on fish shines a light once again on one of the seafood industry’s dirty little secrets — fish fraud. They found that one fourth of 60 samples of seafood taken in New York City restaurants and seafood markets were mislabeled.

But with lax FDA regulations and virtually no enforcement, the practice is more common than one would hope. In recent years, there have been numerous reports of fraud occurring around the country. Three years ago, a Times investigation also found that fish sold as wild Alaskan salmon by high-end New York City markets was mostly cheaper farm-raised salmon, selling for as much as $29 a pound. (See my previous post Plenty of Safe, Eco-Friendly Fish in the Sea.)

The U.S. Food Drug and Drug Administration, which oversees the safety of our seafood supply, defines fraud as the substitution of a less expensive fish for a more expensive kind, for example, tilapia for red snapper, farmed salmon for wild from Alaska, or basa or tra (Vietnamese catfish) for grouper.

Checklist: How to spot fish fraud

Being informed and knowing your seafood is the best way to arm yourself against fraud. Some things that should raise red flags are:

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Among the thousands of stools that were collected by the researchers in the spring and summer months, 90-95% of them contained some indications that wolves were eating deer as prey. In the fall, however, this number dropped significantly. About 40-70% of the stools in this time of year indicated that wolves were dining on salmon.

So what’s the big deal?

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While the move is unprecedented, it is not without some flaws.

The PPL Corporation, the power company which currently owns the dams, currently has no plans to replace the lost power with a new sustainable source. Instead it has increased the output from three up-river dams and intends to reactivate the turbines on another currently inactive dam…

[Read the rest of this entry at CleanTechnica.]

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