While you wern't looking they did it again.

Shrub and his gang of thieves took out 80% of the rivers and streams
protected as critical habitat for Pacific salmon. Of course they
waited till late Friday afternoon to announce the move.
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/orego...880.xml&coll=7

Watch you local stream for that 6,000 sq ft. "log home", no
tresspassing signs and speeding SUVs. It won't really matter as the
only fish left will be in the Seattle Seaquarium.

In article .com,
"BJ Conner" wrote:

Shrub and his gang of thieves took out 80% of the rivers and streams
protected as critical habitat for Pacific salmon. Of course they
waited till late Friday afternoon to announce the move.
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/orego...age/1123927179
24880.xml&coll=7

Watch you local stream for that 6,000 sq ft. "log home", no
tresspassing signs and speeding SUVs. It won't really matter as the
only fish left will be in the Seattle Seaquarium.

BJ,
I read the article and I don't see at all where you get 80%. As in most
things environmental policy wise it will entirely depend on how this is
implemented. If you want to make real difference in Pacific NW salmon
stocks get rid of the nets. Used to fly the radar pattern around NAS
Whidbey over the two forks of the Skagit and the miracle was that any
fish ever made it up the river for all the nets.

Allen

"In Friday's mapping, total protected river miles amount to one-fifth
the amount protected under a set of "critical habitat" rules issued in
2000."

In article .com,
wrote:

"In Friday's mapping, total protected river miles amount to one-fifth
the amount protected under a set of "critical habitat" rules issued in
2000."

Yep JD I read that but then I look at the other stats in the article

"Out of 23,630 Northwest stream miles occupied by threatened and
endangered stocks, the agency excluded 2,817 stream miles -- an increase
of nearly 400 miles over the area proposed for exclusion last year."

and

In Washington, private landowners gained exemptions for 381 stream miles
by signing habitat conservation plans, binding legal agreements to
protect streams through a variety of land use practices such as leaving
buffer zones of trees and vegetation.

and notes like this

Lohn said that exclusions were based first on the importance of habitat
for salmon. He said the agency only excluded streams with low
"biological value," such as those running through urbanized areas and
altered by dredging, channelization, erosion and pollution.

and I look at the whole picture and I'm just not convinced this is a
doomsday scenario but something that may well allow effort to be
expended where it matters. If we can get agreements with landowners to
plant riparian boundaries and such I'd rather see it than just blanket
federal rules for tens of thousands of miles or acres with no analysis
of where efforts can make a difference and one's of over regualation. In
the case of the Chesapeake (my local big body after my move east) we
would be far better of working with the chicken farmers on the eastern
shore to figure out how to create better borders for the farms, reduce
nitrogen fertilizer use and provide economic incentive to plant those
borders than to simply plop a federal regulation in. Just my 2 cents.

Allen

For all you that just assume the Administration is evil anyway, this
might be helpful http://www.buttafly.com/bush/index.php

Allen Epps wrote:

.......If we can get agreements with landowners to
plant riparian boundaries and such I'd rather see it than just blanket
federal rules for tens of thousands of miles or acres with no analysis
of where efforts can make a difference and one's of over regualation.

That analysis *was* done, which resulted in the original designation of
protected critical habitat. The roll-back just announced is the *direct*
result of concerted pressure from a number of lobbies (ranching, logging,
mining, etc., but *primarily* the National Association of Homebuilders) to
ignore real science in favor of the pseudosort we've been treated to so
much of in the past few years......

BTW, as long as the nets are deployed in adherence to treaty rights, they
need to be left alone:

http://www.ecotrust.org/nativeprogra...the_pearl.html

Everybody wants to point fingers.... Tribes, sea lions, "ocean
conditions", the commercial catch, Mexican immigrants, politicians,
loggers....

......better just to find a mirror and point at that.

"We have met the enemy and he is us."

Lot of causes, sure, but there's almost no doubt that the key one, the
overriding one, is massive loss of habitat. Lost to dams, lost to poor
ranching and logging practices (which, fortunately, are improving), and
lost especially now to suburban sprawl (which is rapidly worsening).....

Why? Because the knowledge and technologies that *already* exist to allow
us (and even greater numbers of us) to live comfortable lives AND restore
and protect salmon/steelhead are somewhat costly, somewhat inconvenient.
We--US, essentially all of us--are just too damn in love with money and
luxury and waste and sprawl and over-watered, pesticide-drenched,
cooky-cutter lawns and cheap gas and unfettered ease and blame games and,
well, .... it's just too bad for the poor fish, you know?

Hell.

JR

On 8/15/05 8:05 AM, in article , "JR"
wrote:

We--US, essentially all of us--are just too damn in love with money and
luxury and waste and sprawl and over-watered, pesticide-drenched,
cooky-cutter lawns and cheap gas and unfettered ease and blame games and,
well, .... it's just too bad for the poor fish, you know?

And the Starbucks double grande caramel mochachino, don't forget! Poor
brookies never knew what hit 'em.

Bill
Guilt displaced the latte

The same story in the Seattle Times.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...salmon01m.html
The lead paragraph says 80%. I wouln'd expect the Oregonia to be unbiased.
They supported bush and will are pro timber. The map in the print edition
of the Oregonian looked like 80+ %.


"Allen Epps" wrote in message
...
In article .com,
"BJ Conner" wrote:

Shrub and his gang of thieves took out 80% of the rivers and streams
protected as critical habitat for Pacific salmon. Of course they
waited till late Friday afternoon to announce the move.

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/orego...age/1123927179
24880.xml&coll=7

Watch you local stream for that 6,000 sq ft. "log home", no
tresspassing signs and speeding SUVs. It won't really matter as the
only fish left will be in the Seattle Seaquarium.

BJ,
I read the article and I don't see at all where you get 80%. As in most
things environmental policy wise it will entirely depend on how this is
implemented. If you want to make real difference in Pacific NW salmon
stocks get rid of the nets. Used to fly the radar pattern around NAS
Whidbey over the two forks of the Skagit and the miracle was that any
fish ever made it up the river for all the nets.

Allen

BTW when you were flying around looking at those nets did you notice the
clear cuts? The country south of Olympic National Park looks like some of
the photos of Brazil. All those bare areas on virtulaearth.com aren't potato
fields or cow pastures.

"Allen Epps" wrote in message
...
In article .com,
"BJ Conner" wrote:

Shrub and his gang of thieves took out 80% of the rivers and streams
protected as critical habitat for Pacific salmon. Of course they
waited till late Friday afternoon to announce the move.

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/orego...age/1123927179
24880.xml&coll=7

Watch you local stream for that 6,000 sq ft. "log home", no
tresspassing signs and speeding SUVs. It won't really matter as the
only fish left will be in the Seattle Seaquarium.

BJ,
I read the article and I don't see at all where you get 80%. As in most
things environmental policy wise it will entirely depend on how this is
implemented. If you want to make real difference in Pacific NW salmon
stocks get rid of the nets. Used to fly the radar pattern around NAS
Whidbey over the two forks of the Skagit and the miracle was that any
fish ever made it up the river for all the nets.

Allen

"B J Conner" wrote in message
news:KFRLe.5175$Al5.3208@trnddc04...
BTW when you were flying around looking at those nets did you notice the
clear cuts? The country south of Olympic National Park looks like some of
the photos of Brazil. All those bare areas on virtulaearth.com aren't
potato
fields or cow pastures.

//snip

Here's a photo I took about fifteen months ago looking east and south from
ONP, across Sequim towards Mt Baker and the Cascades. It's pretty ugly in
terms of clear cuts. The picture shows two things: in the center, dead
ahead, are several clear cuts. But on the left you can see roads that have
been built for expensive new subdivisions for people who want to get away
from the cities and who want nice views on the edge of the wilderness.

http://webpages.charter.net/rwpatton...ypen1small.htm

In article KFRLe.5175$Al5.3208@trnddc04,
"B J Conner" wrote:

BTW when you were flying around looking at those nets did you notice the
clear cuts? The country south of Olympic National Park looks like some of
the photos of Brazil. All those bare areas on virtulaearth.com aren't potato
fields or cow pastures.

Yep, and spent quite a lot of time hiking, hunting, camping and fishing
near and in both clear cuts and selectively logged areas in the
Olympics, Cascades, Methow Valley area and over in Okanogan. Not sure
which method is worse (or better for that matter). I don't think that
you get a real perspective on the large forest areas East and West until
you get over it via a road or airplane. It's shocking how much logging
there is but even more shocking is how much logging there isn't. My
point I guess is that development and use of natural resources does not
have to be in opposition to protection of natural resources. Hyperbole
on any side of an issue usually leads to non-useful discourse. I think
in some cases our protection of resources is going to lead to some real
ugly situations. Look at the Blue Ridge parkway in VA. Miles and miles
of in many cases a single species of tree planted by the CCC in the late
twenties and thirties. A truly great effort but what happens when the
next Chestnut blight or Pine Bark beetle comes along? The Blue Ridge
will look much like it did in the 1920's without a tree is site. We
might be better off in carefully logging parts of it and replanting to
create a more diverse biology. There was a great article in last months
Outside I read on the way back from Bozeman about a green leaning
individual who bought some property and found that the forest on it was
a real mess and that he had to carefully log it in order to make it
healthy. Because it was so bad he had a whole lot of "useless" little
trees that, although old, were all less than a foot or so in diameter.
He did some thinking and with some help from gov't grants created a
company to cut and marketing the small, very densely ringed lumber for
high end dance floors and such. Used an expensive Swedish machine to do
so IIRC. A fine use of gov't seed money that may well pay off in getting
folks to pay attention to smarter logging in non-traditional spaces
There is actually reasonable amount of non-roadbuilding helo logging in
the Cascades for large, high dollar trees. Even though they were
supposed to let the schedules folks know when and where they were going
to be in operation, on low level training routes about once a year you'd
come over a ridge inverted at 200' and 500 knots to find a helo with a
log slung under it in front of you, usually you just passed under him
and hoped he didn't drop it.

None of this issue, or any other environmental issue is simple and none
will be solved with a sound bite. The depletion of resources is due to
many smaller issues over a long period of time. It will likely be a
serious of small, appropriate midcourse corrections over time that will
fix them and not some giant change. My earlier comment about the nets on
the Skagit was based not only on flying over them but also fishing the
Skagit with the nets in and the nets out and seeing the difference. Yes,
in most cases those nets are NA nets but they have the same obligation
under treaty and law to protect the resource.

Sorry for the length, off the soapbox.

Allen