salmon
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Eagle Creek six years after the wildfire. Photo George Wuerthner In September 2017, the Eagle Creek Wildfire scorched 50,000 acres in the Columbia River Gorge east of Portland. Numerous media accounts suggested the blaze “destroyed,” “damaged,” and devastated the forest communities. Wildflowers are favored by wildfire. Photo George Wuerthner As one reporter suggested, the…
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Air view of Pedro Bay area on Illiamna Lake, Alaska. Photo George Wuerthner In December, the Pedro Bay Native Corporation (PBC) in Alaska placed 44,000 acres of its property under a $20 million conservation easement that may be the nail in the coffin for the proposed Pebble Gold and Copper Mine in Bristol Bay. The…
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Agreement ending 100 years of fighting over the uses of the Klamath River’s waters falls to a group of local malcontents- After many years of fighting over salmon, dams, irrigation water, tribal treaty rights and ocean fishing matters came to an unpleasant head in 2001-2 when VP Dick Cheney sided with irrigators and let 70,000…
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Earlier this year two dams on the Elwha River in Washington state that had blocked migration of salmon and steelhead for over a hundred years were finally removed. Within just months salmon and steelhead trout swam past the dam sites and spawned. Such a quick response is what everyone had hoped for, although some believed they…
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Most people know the inspiring story of the salmon. Hatched in the gravel of a rushing mountain stream, the smolts are pulled by the waters downstream past logjams, lethal crevices in the rock, and sometimes into side pools from which there is no escape. Mile-after-mile, sometimes many hundreds of miles, the river grows but nowadays…
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Did Canada cover up the emergence of Atlantic salmon virus on the Pacific Coast for nine years? In late October we ran the story that infectious salmon anemia (ISA), which has devastated Atlantic salmon and salmon farms in Chile was found in three wild Pacific salmon. It might have spread to west coast fish farms…
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AquaBounty’s super salmon frighten salmon fishers, greens and some of the country’s brownest congressionals- They were created from a sterile Atlantic salmon female with a Chinook salmon growth hormone gene added. They grow twice a fast as natural salmon, and are designed to be farmed in inland ponds. They are sterile, but many fear what…
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The Elwha River, on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, flows out of Olympic National Park. It was dammed in the early part of the last century in violation of an 1890 law which required fish passage facilities on dams “wherever food fish are wont to ascend”. The logging companies were so powerful that the fisheries commissioner allowed…