— by Gwen Stamm —
The Puget Consumers Co-op https://www.pccmarkets.com/, a chain of locally supported, organic food markets in the greater Seattle area, has taken a bold and decisive step. In an email to its members today it announced that they have made the decision “to stop selling fresh, frozen or smoked Chinook (king) salmon from Washington, Oregon or British Columbia in an effort to support our resident orca whale population. The orcas, who are critically endangered, feed almost exclusively on Chinook salmon from our region.” This decision by the PCC had to very difficult but I applaud them wholeheartedly. In their article they refer readers to https://www.wildorca.org/orcas-salmon/ an organization that has looked at all the science available to explain why the orcas are declining and what needs to be done to bring them back.
The article which is very informative ends with 5 things we as individuals can do to help the orcas.
- First, only eat sustainable seafood (which does not include Chinook salmon);
- second get involved with local salmon habitat restoration;
- third, support dam removal, (watch the movie Damnation);
- fourth, vote for politicians that support salmon recovery; and
- fifth, donate to the Salish Sea Marine Survival Project. See Long Live the Kings https://lltk.org/
Not surprisingly, nowhere was it suggested that in order to save the orca do we need to start shooting/culling the sea lions.
Link for consumer guides: (https://www.seafoodwatch.org/seafood-recommendations/consumer-guides
Habitat restoration: https://www.rco.wa.gov/documents/salmon/lead_entities/LeadEntityDirectory.pdf
Movie info: (https://damnationfilm.com/
Scorecard for Washington’s representatives: https://scorecard.lcv.org/ )
To read the entire announcement/position by the PCC go to: https://www.pccmarkets.com/news/2018/09-10-pcc-ends-the-sale-of-pacific-northwest-chinook-salmon/
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Let’s commit ourselves to learn about and press all of our politicians about the critical need to breach the Lower Snake River dams THIS YEAR in order to bring the salmon back. These sites are excellent resources:
https://damsense.org/
https://srkwcsi.org/
Excerpts:
NOAA’s satellite tag research and acoustic recorders deployed on the coast show Southern Residents’ presence, centered on the mouth of the Columbia River frequently during the winter and spring months, through April when the Snake River adult spring/summer Chinook are entering the Columbia River.
This year the Snake River has become a killing field for the larger than average salmon runs that are returning to spawn. Due to drought, climate change and the four dams, superheated water temperatures have killed 80% of the returning Sockeye salmon and are expected to be lethal to the fall Chinook runs.
The federal agencies have spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to improve fish passage through, over and around the dams. None of this has worked to recover salmon and steelhead runs on the Snake River. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars more to mitigate the dams’ impact on salmon is a waste of taxpayer dollars.
This is horrible – that record numbers of spawning salmon are DYING in those dams – this is WRONG! I will do my part – I hope others will too.
Time to breach these dams. We should have been “on it” with solar energy and other clean energy, in the early 1970s. Enough already!