— by Toby Cooper —
For 17 days in July and August, all of America witnessed the searing drama of a powerful marine predator, Tahlequah or “J 35”, morphing before us into a grieving parent, literally holding her dead baby aloft for all to see. “My baby died”, she cried. “DO SOMETHING.”
It has been a moment of remarkable emotional solidarity – a moment that continues to this day as island groups convene on the shore to unabashedly sing to the whales and float symbolic waterborne gifts. It is a moment reinforced by almost daily reminders from Ken Balcolm and others that our beloved endangered whales are currently confronted with a significant threat of extinction.
Tahlequah and Ken and literally millions of citizens around the globe agree; it is time to do something. And that’s the good news. We are totally ready to do something.
If our southern resident Orca whales feed on Chinook salmon, as they do, and if Chinook salmon in turn feed upon herring and other key species known as forage fish, as they do, and if Eastsound and precious few other San Juan County sites are blessed with healthy but fragile herring spawning habitats known as eelgrass meadows, then we need to foster and protect these habitats with our every fiber.
There is more good news. The 2017 Eastsound Visioning group recommendations included a plan to safeguard the eelgrass meadows in Fishing Bay and Ship Bay, immediately adjacent to our waterfront. This plan was vetted by the Visioning Workgroups and was overwhelmingly supported by a 73% plurality of respondents to the 2017 Eastsound Planning and Review Commission (EPRC) Vision Survey. Do something, we can.
The 2017 plan is simple, direct, cost effective, and promises great benefits for eelgrass.
- Ask the boating community when visiting Eastsound to voluntarily anchor outside the 30-foot depth contour, mean-low-water (the depth beyond which eelgrass does not grow on the sea floor). All signs are the boating community embraces this idea willingly, if they know.
- Provide a limited number of modern mooring buoys equipped with chain-retrieves that hold the chain off the bottom, thus removing the threat of damage to the habitat and further reducing the need for anchoring.
- Allow new in-and-over –water development along the shorelines if and only if such development is demonstrably beneficial to the eelgrass meadows and productivity of forage fish.
- Partner with the Marine Resources Committee, Friends of the San Juans, and others to provide markers and signs plus public education so as to maximize public understanding as to the fragility and physical limits of the habitat and the ultimate benefits to whales.
In all, it is a 10-point plan, the last of which is to uphold this Eastsound measure as a model for other remaining eelgrass meadows and marine shorelines throughout San Juan County.
So what’s the bad news? Unfortunately, despite asking for an updated Near Shore Waters proposal from the 2017 Vision group and Survey on August 2nd, the EPRC failed to consider this plan at their September 6 meeting due to inept agenda-management (at an exhaustive 4-hour meeting, no less). The plan was tabled until October, leaving the whales with nothing better than the horrific prospect of slipping one month closer to extinction.
Our good friend Bob Friel said it best in the August Outside magazine when he wrote:
We’ve declared the orcas national treasures, bestowed upon them our strongest protections, yet we continue to kill them with building permits, logging, ranching and farming leases, fishing quotas, and dam permits, which all affect the Chinook salmon that these orcas need to survive.
Bob is spot-on, of course. He could have included “inept agenda management” in his list of institutional threats to the whales. Now is the time to look forward, to move beyond paralysis and inaction. The San Juan County Council meets September 11 at the Orcas Fire House.
Please, please PLEASE join us at the Council on September 11, to ask for action on the Near Shore Waters. Tahlequah said “Do Something” Do Something, we can.
Protection of our island shorelines is essential for the survival of our resident orca whales that are starving because fewer and fewer healthy Chinook salmon are returning to the Salish Sea. Each of us can make a difference. Tell your county councilors that our shorelines need better protection from the development that is strangling the food supply for young Chinook salmon. Tell them “no docks over eel grass or kelp”. Tell them “no bulkheads on feeder bluffs or fish spawning beaches”. Tell them “no timber harvest along our shorelines”. The 2017 Eastsound Visioning group recommendations can be a model for all our island shorelines. Please respond to Tahlequah’s anguish and speak out NOW to change from business as usual to protection of our wild shorelines and restoration of degraded shorelines.
Not a peep about overfishing Chinook?
Peg, I think the above proposed addresses what we can do county-wide. I don’t think there is commercial chinook fishing here but if there is, I’d like to see a moratorim of it in SJC.
But this could go further, as concerns any boats approaching whales, including whale watch business boats – and it’s simple. For starters, effective immediately, the County could double the allowable boat distances from orca whales. Education on why this is necessary is a key component. Fines as a last resort would help convince people of the imperatives to obey the setbacks from a species going extinct. Good binoculars would take care of the viewing problem – as would viewing orca whales from our shorelines.
I’m for feeding the SRKW until the chinook population can be brought back up. There are personal voluntary choices we can also make, like not eating Chinook salmon.
That I understand. I haven’t chosen salmon of any kind for a long time for this reason. But I’m talking about the proportional impact of each proposal and the fact that we have representatives with power in state government. The single most important problem for the Southern resident Orcas is lack of Chinook. Closing the Chinook fishery directly addresses that and allows the population to recover. Right now, most salmon returning to spawn don’t make it. This single step is far more important than any of the other proposals for which there is much less evidence. Yet it is being ignored by our government.
Peg is right. The biggest immediate impact each of can personally have is to stop eating or fishing for Cinook salmon. When you see salmon on the menu at a restaurant, ask what kind it is and where it came from. If you can’t get a clear answer, don’t order it.
And thank you, Toby, for an excellent guest column.
Though I tend to do the same (for as little difference as it may make), I try not to eat things that are in decline… as a result I’ve almost gone vegetarian (again). There are, however, MANY studies out there regarding this issue that show that the decline of the Chinook is only one of the ‘symptoms’ related to the decline of our indicator species. Studies show that human population growth throughout the region is one of the main drivers of this phenomena (as does human growth negatively affect many animal species worldwide). It should be noted within the context of all such discussions that necropcies on local Orcas’ reveal that their bodies are full of toxins (human produced toxins). This is also true for their food source… which is also a food source for people. It’s a sad but true fact that MORE PEOPLE = LESS ORCAS.