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Hypocrisy Kills Salmon

Editor:

Missing from the “cascading crises facing Pacific salmon” in “Witnessing the Collapse” (Aug. 5) is any mention of, dare I say it, logging.

Wholesale industrial logging of watersheds produces thick groves of young, thirsty trees that dry up drainages and deprive them of water-cooling riparian shading, decimating the fragile salmonid evolutionary cycle. After the loggers leave, wildfires thrive. Without healthy forests, the planet bakes and the oceans acidify, de-oxygenate, warm and rise as glaciers melt, reducing fresh water supply, killing fish and eliminating nature’s carbon capture and sequestration capacity.

Salmon are central to watershed health, exiting coastal rivers weighing ounces and returning two to four years later fattened on a protein-rich diet that gets delivered to growing trees, vegetation and critters. Bears and others deposit the remains of nitrogen-rich, post-spawned salmon cuisine to upslope trees, whose nourished roots and canopies then retain sediment that would otherwise cloud the waters of visual feeding salmon, and bury their redds.

Salmon, and we, suffer from the hypocrisy of California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Chuck Bonham and the water boards’ blaming the lack of state and federal laws rather than their cowardly refusal to implement and enforce such laws as the basin plans and endangered species regulations that are designed to protect native aquatic residents. Their powers to regulate logging and protect salmon and our thirsty watersheds are separate from those of the impotent and corrupt state Board of Forestry and Fire Protection.

But these so-called regulators shrink before the power of industrial logging, blame convenient scape-droughts and exacerbate the water shortages. Whatever happened to blaming the seals, Native Americans and Japanese fishermen?

If we don’t acknowledge all that we understand about the drought, especially because some big bad actors will squawk, we deprive our solutions of effectiveness. Ken Miller, McKinleyvile

Terry Torgerson

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Humanizing Hesitancy

Editor:

My heart was warmed, and frustration pacified, while reading last week’s NCJ. It seems there were a few attempts to humanize the hesitancy some members of our community feel about getting vaccinated (Mailbox, Aug. 19).

The snippet from the New York Times article provided useful tactics for reaching the unvaccinated, including a long-awaited sentence, “... using fear, shame, and shock have now been shown to not get us where we need to go ... .”

Moving forward, I hope the NCJ can take such a stance into consideration when covering COVID. I have known more than a few vaccine hesitant Democrats that have been “pushed right” due to all of the misrepresentation, when so much of pop culture lumps all vaccine hesitant people into a group of selfish, uneducated Republicans. Counter productivity could find no better poster child.

The letter pleading for vaccination signed by so many of our local doctors was also well-played, and well-timed (“Please Get Vaccinated”). The simple, genuinely caring, human-to-human tone sets another great precedent for a productive approach to having a conversation with those on “the other side.” I was a bit disappointed that they did not communicate the importance of eating healthy, getting exercise, fresh air and sunlight. They state they are “tired of the suffering, pain and death that can be avoided by getting vaccinated.” Vaccination isn’t enough. As a community concerned about health and safety it is up to each one of us to promote the use of every tool at our disposal to fight this thing. Along with healthy physical living and vaccination we need to take serious inventory of our informational diet and collective mental health. Stress and anxiety are immune suppressants, and we are in dire need of love as an inoculate against all psychological viruses of our time. Ross Burns, Eureka

Please make your letter no more than 300 words and include your full name, place of residence and phone number (we won’t print your number). Send it to letters@northcoastjournal.com. The weekly deadline to be considered for the upcoming edition is 10 a.m. Monday. l