Ecological Madness

Much of the US may be unaware of salmon runs, which is sad, because these fish once ran up and down rivers across The US, and now, most salmon and their runs are extinct. What’s left here on The West Coast, is in deep decline overall, with a few recovering run in rare cases where dams and all other man made hindrances are removed. Man made hindrances abound here in Washington State- where we not only love to control our ocean connected waterways, but also dam our rivers for cheap power, which won’t be cheap for much longer with all the AI centers moving in. Today, while visiting The Ballard Locks, I got a real reminder of the insane world we’re living in.

People are the problem- we really do just drop in and make whatever we’re gunning for how we think it will best pay out for our monetary gains. What? That sentence could be written better- but the jumbled wording reflects our action. A lock between a freshwater lake and an ocean sound. Because we could- or at least, a very rich person or persons who gained their wealth from taking invaluable ecological spaces, chopping them up, and selling them to more crowding in. Madness, and we’re still not capable of seeing it- we enhance it, reinvest in the stupidity of finite resources, the natural world, unable to supply our every whim and wanting. But hey, we can pour a billion tons of concrete and make a window for kids to watch and learn how to dismantle their own environment.

Step right up and see our fish ladder plaza everyone! It’s really cool to watch a token number of fish swim through man made systems that completely remove the entire natural process from the wild and into a curated nightmare for kids to scream at and adults to take a selfie and move on to the next attraction. There were once billions- trillions of salmon in both The Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans. Now, the last of these great animals struggle to survive in the madness of mankind. We the people are not thinking about fish, or seals, or the environment at a whole, and our place in it. We keep trying to remain outside the living world, glancing at it from a metal gated platform, or through thick glass with a vending machine near by.

What’s even worse, is that these ancestral colonial legacies knew what they were doing when they came to take place and put their ideas to work. Mr. Chittenden knew his lock system would kill the salmon, destroy their migration routs- he’d already watched it happen on the east coast, and now, continued to build over nature, but wait, he did put a ladder in to help a few poor fish get across, and then, within another lifetime of human gluttony, the salmon populations crashed. Shame, shame on us for continuing this farcical play on mother nature. But Liz, the guy put in fish ladders, we’re still putting in fish ladders, we’re doing what we can. No, we’re taking what we can, putting up more, crowding in now without a care for what’s disappearing all around us. And when nature tries to balance it’s self back out- like seals gathering at the base of these ladders to eat what salmon is coming through- we blame the seals and get to work creating more useless systems to prop up our failing infrastructure.

Two men came over in a boat and, for two hours, circled around smacking the water with a sound pole to chase off the seals. That’s right- men in a boat circling around in the water, making loud noises, and wasting two hours of marine diesel burning in the salmon migration zone- which was holding the fish back from the ladder. Of course, once they jumped in and went up, they were stopped again at a man made gate where they piled up in desperation. It was horrifying to watch. I did call out the the boat, “this is a waste of fuel and manpower”. The men had no identifying marks anywhere on them- heck, it could have just been two guys who don’t like the seals and wanted to cause trouble. Also, the seals went to the far end of the lock and waited, knowing the men would have to leave at some point, but the salmon would keep swimming in. Once again human mismanagement and madness on top of human hubris and addiction to consumption.

I ate wild caught salmon from Alaska yesterday. There are still some “healthy” runs up there, where not enough colonial extraction has come, because it’s expensive to build up there, and not many wish to invest in that cold, dark place when there is so much warm bright land to live on further south. Otherwise, the great white north would be completely overrun too- and it still might be, especially with all the untapped fossil fuels and rare earth minerals. mine mine mine You want to know where salmon are recovering down here? Places where we have taken down the dams and removed badly placed infrastructure to block fish passage. Where we pull out and leave things to nature, she abounds.

Recently, Washington Tribes won in court to have their fish populations recognized as sovereign food. There was a lot of legalese around it, but in a nut shell, tribes held the federal government to it’s promise to protect tribal rights to their traditional foods. So, Washington took out bad culverts, some dams, and replaced barren ditches with habitat- like native plants and log jams. This was labeled crucial “rewilding”, in quotations because suburban drainage and agricultural ditches are far and away from the native old growth forests which once grew here- and never will again because of human caused climate change.

The Hudson bay was described by early colonial invaders as being so full of sea life, you could walk across it and not get wet. I can see the same bounty here in Western Washington- and across The Americas, before greedy robber barons descended on this continent to rape and pillage. Yeah kids, enjoy watching the salmon climb the little ladders our benevolent engineers built for us. How could things get any worse? Well, the current federal government is pulling back on its promise to protect salmon across the US. The people don’t care about fish- they want to build more homes, process more industrial waste to make things, and not care about where the residues get dumped. It’s ok though folks- we can trust self-regulation. Utter madness!

Imagine what First Nations people think? How can this continue? Well, it will, because we’re very good at self-destruction for a few good earnings. The Ballard Lock was built for convenience, and now it’s an expensive mess for the ecology, and our economy, because we have to keep maintaining it. Through my 5 hour visit to the area, I saw mostly pleasure boats going through the locks, and the tow industrial boats, one a tower and the other an empty barge, were not lynch pin economic drivers in this community. However, there is huge push to defend the locks and keep paying to maintain them- and they use salmon protection as part of the argument. There are too many ills surrounding the locks for us to turn a blind eye. The dream of big commerce around this lock sunk long ago, but somehow, this ecological nightmare continues to perpetuate the problem of our mindless presence.