Ridiculous, Hopeful Symbolism

The Coho Salmon return to greet Barack!!!!

Yeah, it’s silly but that was my thought as I read this article in the SF Chronicle. For eons there was no greater symbol of natures bounty than the Salmon runs in central Claifornia and up the coast. You could stand at a creeks edge and watch them literally swarm…

Meanwhile, salmon from the Garcia River were netted by the thousands, smoked and shipped to San Francisco. The Nature Conservancy’s Carah estimates that as many as 500,000 coho once squirmed and wriggled their way up California streams every year as late as the 1940s.

Old-timers living in Mendocino County remember spearing coho in the Garcia. After the first rains, dozens of young coho could be seen in every pool and eddy. They were so abundant that people simply ignored the 25-fish limit, sometimes just scooping the fish out of the water.

The fish began to disappear when the widespread clear-cutting of forests began after World War II. The rampant building of logging roads in the watershed, the removal of riparian vegetation and huge amounts of silt running off into the creeks ruined their habitat.

Then came the rapacious logging practices that have been a focus of many, many protests in Northern California, Southern Oregon and elsewhere. Protest like Redwood Summer, that led to the  Judi Barri case, an outrageous pepper spray attack, and perhaps best symbolized by Julia Butterfly Hill camping out in a giant redwood tree for 738 days to keep it from being killed. The clear cutting and resulting clogging and destruction of streams and rivers was incredibly destructive to the salmon population.

And then came Dick Cheney.

From the WaPo series on Cheney, The Angler. A must read series in the ‘know your enemy’ genre. It is a long article and part of a long series so I am going to take a little liberty (perhaps) with fair use and post the entire lead section….

Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message awaited her.

“This is Dick Cheney,” said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an interview. “I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation. Please call me at — hmm, I guess I don’t know my own number. I’m over at the White House.”

The vice president has intervened in many cases to undercut long-standing environmental rules for the benefit of business.

Wooldridge wrote off the message as a prank. It was not. Cheney had reached far down the chain of command, on so unexpected a point of vice presidential concern, because he had spotted a political threat arriving on Wooldridge’s desk.

In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.

Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in.

First Cheney looked for a way around the law, aides said. Next he set in motion a process to challenge the science protecting the fish, according to a former Oregon congressman who lobbied for the farmers.

Because of Cheney’s intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.

The salmon have never recovered.

(Though of course we cannot lay ALL of their destruction at Cheney’s clogged door, there are many other factors as well, but….ya know, that symbolism thing!)

Now, we have exciting new sightings, on the verge of Cheney leaving office!

Yeah, I know! That is why I titled this piece as I did, lol. But there ya go, my spirits are lifted by the end of The Republican Reign of Terror and the Demise of Darth, perhaps other spirits, like that of the salmon are too! Well at least we can hope so, for a bit at least, before the optimism engendered by a new beginning under Obama is almost inevitably soured by that ole Buzz-killer….reality.

But for now, I’m goin’ with it!

Welcome back, Coho!