Editor:
Re: “ODFW study warns wild steelhead at risk of extinction due to sea lions,” The New Era, Aug. 9, it’s not the California or Steller sea lions who are pushing the steelhead and salmon to extinction.
It’s the human dam builders, it’s the loggers who like the dams, who ruin the fishes’ spawning habitats and raise water temps.
It’s the human fisherman who over-fishes and releases invasive non-native fish into the rivers that compete and eat the natives.
It’s the human gold dredger, it’s human pollutants dumped in their rivers and oceans by various industries that weakens them and their ability to reproduce. There are 92 contaminants in the fish of the Columbia.
It’s human-caused climate change. It’s the 7.5-plus billion humans mindlessly consuming and polluting all life on the planet.
It’s the human predators that are pushing the steelhead and salmon to extinction.
How do we know that? Because there were tons and tons and tons of steelhead and salmon when Europeans first got here. They didn’t start to disappear until after we showed up.
So take your lumps, get your tubes tied and stop scapegoating.
Farmers are again asking Trump/Zinke to take the nuclear option and abandon federal protections for salmon and steelhead on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. Let ’em die, they say!
And you know that Hanford with its 56 million gallons of hot high-level radioactive waste leaking away 400 feet from the Columbia River can’t be doing anyone any good. Major contaminants found in the Hanford Reach spawning grounds include chromium, nitrate, tritium, strontium-90, technetium-99, and uranium.
Trump tried to cut $120 million from Hanford’s budget but the Sen. Patty Murray D-Wash. stopped ’em. Does Hanford have earthquake insurance?
Trump and the Republican Congress are cutting all the environmental protections they can – as fast as they can – and doing so using the Congressional Review Act, which ties the hands of any future executive branch from crafting a “substantially similar” replacement rule. Pure evil.
During the second voyage of Columbus, in 1493, near the Gulf of Bataban in southwest Cuba, Andres Bernáldez described seeing so many sea turtles “that it seemed as if the ships would run aground on them, and their shells actually clattered along the topsides and against the ship.”
There were tons and tons of sea turtles for 100 million years. Now, because of human predation, they’re all on the brink of extinction.
Just like the salmon and everything else – except humans.
Diane Daiute
Sweet Home
‘Connecticut Yankee’
great eclipse story
Editor:
A couple of months ago I reread a portion of Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” I highly recommend that many of you find the couple of chapters where the Yankee, from about mid-1800s, finds himself in a dungeon, about 900 A.D., to be burned at the stake tomorrow.
He knows the eclipse is coming, but way back then there was a lot of superstition, which he used to his advantage to save his own life. It’s fun. Read it.
It would have made a wonderful drama skit to entertain the eclipse crowds expected to arrive here, but I don’t know how to transition an idea into an event.
Joan Scofield
Sweet Home
Thanks to ODF
for dousing fire
Editor:
Kudos and thank you to Craig Pettinger, staff and fire control crew at Oregon Department of Forestry for their fast and professional response to the wildfire on Highway 20, milepost 36 last week. Their suppression and control of the fire was extremely well-executed!
The response team was fantastic and stopped a fire which could have had a disastrous outcome. We can’t say thank you enough!
Gary and Mary Betts
Foster