The American economy has performed well over the past four decades: real per capita income has doubled since 1970 and pollution is down even with 50 percent more people. The choice between a healthy environment and a healthy economy is a false one. They stand, or fall, together. We’ve been blessed in the United States with abundant water resources. But we also face daunting challenges that are putting new demands on those resources — continuing growth; the need for water for food, energy production and manufacturing; the push for biofuel crops; the threat of new contaminants; climate change and just maintaining and restoring our natural systems.
If we narrow our vision of the Clean Water Act, if we buy into the misguided notion that reducing protection of our waters will somehow ignite the economy, we will shortchange our health, environment and economy.
I don’t quite understand why the EPA is coming under so much attack this election cycle. I get that some people find any and all regulation reprehensible, but if the government shouldn’t be the ones to regulate the environment, then who should? Perhaps an independent commission of executives from BP, Exxon, et. al.? Ya, that’s probably the right solution.
When Bush left office in 2008, many questioned what his legacy would be. I just watched the movie Gasland, and I think it does a pretty fine job of exposing this legacy. In 2005, oil and gas companies were exempted from environmental regulations including the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act in order to fast track “hydro fracking” natural gas wells across the country. In the handful of years since, these unregulated wells have sprung up by the hundreds of thousands across the country, leaving devastation in their wake.
If you haven’t yet watched this documentary, it is a must see. Truly saddening, and as lovers of clean, pristine water, this issue needs all of our attention.
According to the UN, 30 percent of fish stocks have already collapsed, meaning they yield less than 10 percent of their former potential, while virtually all fisheries risk running out of commercially viable catches by 2050.
Currently only a quarter of fish stocks - mostly the cheaper, less desirable species - are considered to be in healthy numbers.
Whitefish Can’t Jump, along with other blogs and forums, posted last week that Pike Place was selling Wild Steelhead. Myself, along with lots of other pissed off folks emailed them explaining just how horrible this is, and turns out they listened!
We’ve read your emails, we’ve taken in the conversations at the market, we’ve had sustainability representatives speak at our meetings, and we’ve asked the tough questions to our suppliers. Our commitment is to make a difference and we can do that on many fronts, the supply of our seafood being one. We’re constantly educating ourselves and understand sustainability to be a process and one that starts with no longer carrying wild steelhead.
“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”
Ever since last August when California banned suction mining, the practice of vacuuming sediment from the bottom of rivers in search of gold and other minerals, it was only a matter of time before more miners hurried north to Oregon.
Now there’s a new gold rush developing along pristine rivers and streams in Southwest Oregon’s Siskiyou Mountains, a stronghold for salmon and steelhead and one of the most ecologically diverse places in the United States. Miners have staked out claims along dozens of miles of vital salmon-bearing streams, including the Chetco River and Rough and Ready Creek, and some of even nailed up “No Trespassing” signs even though their claims sit squarely in public lands.
More recently, a miner posting an the Oregon Gold Hunters Web site for prospectors suggested that miners ought to consider shooting members of a southern Oregon wildland group while they were out for an old-growth forest hike near the Rogue River. It would be easier to dismiss such threats as silly bravado if a miner in the Rogue River Siskiyou National Forest hadn’t shot an off-road-vehicle-driver last spring, causing a wound that required the amputation of the man’s arm.
Vacuuming a river bed for gold? I had no idea this was actually legal, and how ass backwards can you get? These miners are probably making a few hundred bucks max, and potentially destroying hundreds of thousands of dollars of Sport fishing economic boost (or harvest) in the process.
Apparently Wyden and Merkley have called for a moratorium on mining along the Chetco and other Southern Oregon streams, but the Obama administration is taking it’s precious time. And with mining season opening in a few months, time isn’t on our side.
I also don’t understand why California can ban vacuum mining outright, but Oregon needs some moratorium from the Department of the Interior?
