http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/northwest/story/5159903p-4693122c.htmlLast salmon could die by 2100 JEFF BARNARD; The Associated Press
Published: September 7th, 2005 12:01 AM
GRANTS PASS, Ore. – Too many people using too much energy and natural resources make it inevitable that wild Pacific salmon will become extinct over the next century without a major overhaul in the way people live their lives, a group of 30 scientists, policy analysts and advocates concluded.
“If you look at the four places on the planet that salmon runs originally occurred – the Asian Far East, Europe, Eastern North America and Western North America – as the numbers of people increased, the numbers of salmon went down,” said Robert Lackey, a salmon biologist for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Corvallis, Ore., and one of the organizers of the project. “You can’t have high salmon runs – wild salmon runs – and all these people and their standard of living.”
The Salmon 2100 Project will be presented at the 135th annual meeting of the American Fisheries Society next week in Anchorage, Ala.
William Rees, a population ecologist at the University of British Columbia who developed the theory of the ecological footprint, said the extinction of salmon is inevitable as long as human populations continue to increase, leaving less energy and resources for all other species, including the fish. The decline of salmon is a minor regional symptom of a global problem, he added.
“Even if we in the Pacific Northwest come to agreement to slow down our growth, to totally conserve the remaining primary salmon habitat, if the rest of the world carries on in its present development path it won’t do any good,” Rees said. “Because climate change may result in warming of the North Pacific to the extent that salmon migration routes and feeding resources are diminished.”
The contributors are primarily scientists from universities and state and federal agencies, plus a few policy analysts and advocates from environmental groups, a law firm and a consulting firm.
“Our goal is that in 2050 or 2100 we don’t want somebody to look back and say, ‘Gee, we didn’t understand what was happening. If somebody told us this was happening we would have made different policy choices,’” Lackey said. “If this is the path society is going down, we want to make sure everybody understands.”
The proposals include new and familiar ideas: imposing an extinction tax on parties responsible, creating refuges to protect the healthiest runs, converting the primary role of hydroelectric dams from energy production to managing river flows for salmon and giving up on saving runs too close to extinction.
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Topic: Very Bad News For Salmon Across the World (Read 4169 times)