I need some NW advice. Bush is easing salmon habitat restrictions. The libs are in uproar and I've been in and out of conversation with some on this.
Have y'all heard anything local?
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/12/01/salmon.plans.ap/index.html
Looks like a great and good thing to me. Keep in mind that this has little if anything to do with real science or fisheries management. It's all about politics and power. Much of it is about land use.
Salmon are treated as 'endangered' even though currently we are seeing record salmon runs. Streams and rivers are locked into salmon protection schemes whether they actually are salmon streams or not.
Here's a good place to start:
http://www.buchal.com/hoax.html
My take on this... and I am more of an environmentalist than many on FR, is that the "critical habitat designation" for rivers that do not bear salmon but theoretically ~could~ is silly. There are a lot of rivers that never had salmon in them, and never will, and yet property owners are unable to use their land. So this lifting of restrictions is a good thing. "critical habitat designation" means any creek property that has water in it can't be built on or changed in any way within a hundred feet of the bank. I have a friend who owns treed property on a Chum salmon-bearing creek (not a threatened run, a healthy one). Her house is crammed at the far end of her lot by the road, and she can't even build a picnic spot, gazebo or deck within view of the creek below. Homesites near rivers isn't what kills salmon!
Here's the main point. Salmon are not endangered. There is this great deceptive dialogue and it is hard to sort through, but there are lots of fish, it's just that they are refusing to count hatchery fish as part of those numbers, even though they were caught from and are the exact same fish on the same creek where they are seeing few 'wild fish' survive. They can have a hundred thousand salmon returning to the hatchery on a particular creek, and yet declare the entire coastline off limits or restricted to fishing, and eliminate any activity near the river, all to save the 'wild' cousins in a particular creek with a healthy hatchery population 5 miles downstream. They are the same fish!
There are benefits to smart development and protection of rivers, but as always, the silliness can take over. I'd say somewhere in the middle is the right answer.