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The residents are starving to death and the governments around the salish sea seem to be uninterested in doing anything to address this. It's incredibly depress

The residents are starving to death and the governments around the salish sea seem to be uninterested in doing anything to address this. It's incredibly depressing.

steve_adams_86 6y ago
My partner works with DFO and it’s pretty complicated. Everyone cares, it’s just a political nightmare. Not many people with careers at DFO don’t care about the ocean or its inhabitants. It’s just so hard to enact change. Real knowledge of what’s going on and what effective solutions would be is surprisingly lacking too. We know industry doesn’t help, such as fishing, shipping, and transport, but these are virtually impossible to change positively in the short term.
- Tiktaalik 6y ago
  I'm sure many on the ground at DFO cares but yeah there's no political leadership to do anything to prevent the seemingly inevitable extinction of residents. No political will to cancel fishing. No political will to halt TMX, etc. Jobs > *
  - steve_adams_86 6y ago
    Yeah, this is my assessment as well. It's quite demoralizing for several people I know working in sciences at DFO. When you have a PhD in a science and can't use it as it's intended because money matters more than the thing you study, it gets difficult to deal with on a day to day basis. It's not a trivial thing to get to that point in a career, but you, your knowledge, and your potential are completely kneecapped when it comes to most jobs competing with the well-being o the environment. The leadership I do know of from second-hand information is hyper-focused on organization performance - they couldn't be further from the sciences, and they actively work to suppress science at times. In fact, there's very compelling evidence of a significant factor in reduced salmon population, but that research was initially muzzled by the Harper administration, and since then, the findings were revealed but the research more or less put on hold. Some action was taken based on the research (shutting down salmon aquaculture near spawning rivers), but it's decades late and a decade later than the research came out. Then we have the evidence that hatcheries put incredibly small amounts of harvestable biomass into the ocean while deteriorating salmon genetics. Salmon are evolved to thrive in their specific spawning territories at a critical, vunerable point in their life cycle; by muddying those genes, you can make it so they lose what gave them the ability to thrive at all. Meanwhile, hatcheries are so established and commonly believed to be so effective and it's exceedingly unlikely to see them go anywhere any time soon. We celebrate the addition of a hatchery but we may have been undermining salmon this entire time. I could go on. It's a very sad situation and very close to my family and heart. Tomorrow I'm going to go free diving and soak it all in. I like to appreciate the beauty while it's still here and remind myself how important it all is.
throwawaysea 6y ago
It’s also tough to change things. Reviving an ecosystem end to end to create viable salmon populations for orcas is tough. For example, some believe all the dams on rivers where chinook salmon swim should be breached, which is controversial (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/the-elwha-dams-are-gone-and-chinook-are-surging-back-but-why-are-so-few-reaching-the-upper-river/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/the-el...). Maybe we need to just release farm raised fish into the sea to sustain the orcas until then? But I do agree the governments (and people) don’t care. Seattle is a problem because it is a big dense population that brings a disproportionate, concentrated impact to the Puget Sound - everything ranging from opioids in the marine food chain to dumping raw sewage directly into those waters. It’s a city that professes environmental culture but doesn’t do much about it, because it would be too inconvenient to admit that it’s very existence is a problem (as opposed to more distributed populations in sustainable balance with their environment).

The residents are starving to death and the governments around the salish sea seem to be uninterested in doing anything to address this. It's incredibly depressing.

steve_adams_86 6y ago

My partner works with DFO and it’s pretty complicated. Everyone cares, it’s just a political nightmare. Not many people with careers at DFO don’t care about the ocean or its inhabitants. It’s just so hard to enact change. Real knowledge of what’s going on and what effective solutions would be is surprisingly lacking too. We know industry doesn’t help, such as fishing, shipping, and transport, but these are virtually impossible to change positively in the short term.

Tiktaalik 6y ago
I'm sure many on the ground at DFO cares but yeah there's no political leadership to do anything to prevent the seemingly inevitable extinction of residents. No political will to cancel fishing. No political will to halt TMX, etc. Jobs > *
- steve_adams_86 6y ago
  Yeah, this is my assessment as well. It's quite demoralizing for several people I know working in sciences at DFO. When you have a PhD in a science and can't use it as it's intended because money matters more than the thing you study, it gets difficult to deal with on a day to day basis. It's not a trivial thing to get to that point in a career, but you, your knowledge, and your potential are completely kneecapped when it comes to most jobs competing with the well-being o the environment. The leadership I do know of from second-hand information is hyper-focused on organization performance - they couldn't be further from the sciences, and they actively work to suppress science at times. In fact, there's very compelling evidence of a significant factor in reduced salmon population, but that research was initially muzzled by the Harper administration, and since then, the findings were revealed but the research more or less put on hold. Some action was taken based on the research (shutting down salmon aquaculture near spawning rivers), but it's decades late and a decade later than the research came out. Then we have the evidence that hatcheries put incredibly small amounts of harvestable biomass into the ocean while deteriorating salmon genetics. Salmon are evolved to thrive in their specific spawning territories at a critical, vunerable point in their life cycle; by muddying those genes, you can make it so they lose what gave them the ability to thrive at all. Meanwhile, hatcheries are so established and commonly believed to be so effective and it's exceedingly unlikely to see them go anywhere any time soon. We celebrate the addition of a hatchery but we may have been undermining salmon this entire time. I could go on. It's a very sad situation and very close to my family and heart. Tomorrow I'm going to go free diving and soak it all in. I like to appreciate the beauty while it's still here and remind myself how important it all is.

throwawaysea 6y ago

It’s also tough to change things. Reviving an ecosystem end to end to create viable salmon populations for orcas is tough. For example, some believe all the dams on rivers where chinook salmon swim should be breached, which is controversial (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/the-elwha-dams-are-gone-and-chinook-are-surging-back-but-why-are-so-few-reaching-the-upper-river/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/the-el...). Maybe we need to just release farm raised fish into the sea to sustain the orcas until then? But I do agree the governments (and people) don’t care. Seattle is a problem because it is a big dense population that brings a disproportionate, concentrated impact to the Puget Sound - everything ranging from opioids in the marine food chain to dumping raw sewage directly into those waters. It’s a city that professes environmental culture but doesn’t do much about it, because it would be too inconvenient to admit that it’s very existence is a problem (as opposed to more distributed populations in sustainable balance with their environment).