First a little explanation about this piece.
This diary started as a comment/rant to Devilstower's excellent Gooooo, Fish! diary entry. What started as a quick comment turned into a substantial piece and I think covers a similar yet different angle to Devilstower's piece.
Being a relative noob here I'm not really sure if it is in good form to turn a comment into a diary and if it is in bad form I will certainly delete it. I just felt it might deserve to be more widely read than it would be as a comment.
Though I don't do much fishing anymore, I'm still a huge fish enthusiast. Here in Western Washington, as a kid, I used to visit a local stream not far from my parent's suburban home. During the summer it would nearly dry up and just a trickle of water would maintain a series of small ponds in the creekbed shaded by trees. Most people that lived in the neighborhood regarded it as a dead stream with nothing in it.
It wasn't. It was a wild salmon stream. In the fall when the stream was full, the Coho would return and I'd go watch their efforts to reproduce as they jumped log obstructions and struggle up sand and gravel patches so shallow their backs would stick out of the water. I'd watch them clear patches of gravel with their tails and sides. The stream would be full of the dead fish carcasses that would in turn nurture the stream's flora and fauna, in return that flora and fauna would feed, feed on, protect and shade the salmon fry. The young salmon also served to help support a small trout and crayfish population. In the summer, during the dry period the small ponds would become little individual ecosystems with their own trout, tiny salmon and crayfish. Each serving their niche in the food chain, mutually dependent, shaded by the overhanging trees along the stream bed and hiding in their roots for protection. It had been that way for uncounted millennium.
Then came the development along the stream. Drainage was diverted directly into the stream from streets and sewage entered in from septic systems. Trees were cut down removing the shade that kept the summer ponds cool and provided protection. Many ponds dried up and stagnated in the summer heat. Still, some fish managed to survive and return and I continued to monitor the dwindling numbers through my early college years. Then one day I went to the creek and there was nothing. No salmon. No trout. No crayfish. All gone.
So I investigated. Turns out when I was away in college some corporate assholes had decided to pave over a local patch of muddy bogland for a Pay'n'Pac hardware store 10 miles away upstream. What could be more useless than a muddy patch of ground? No stream obviously connected to the swamp, nothing would be effected by paving it over. It was more useful as a parking lot right? Wrong assholes. You see, that muddy patch of ground was a year round spring. There was very little water coming out of it, not enough to start an obvious stream or form a pond or lake but just enough, just barely enough, to work itself into what would become the stream and maintain the trickle of water that supported the little ecosystems that the young salmon grew in. Without that muddy patch of ground to provide that tiny year round water, the stream dried up completely in the summer and murdered the fry. The salmon still spawned a few years and the fry died until there were no salmon returning at all. The trout and crayfish died. The stream died. It's nothing but a ditch now.
Some well meaning and I'm sure sincere, but stupid guy behind a desk made sure millions were spent on re-designing the streambed to be "salmon-friendly" but it was too late. Because some other asshole behind a desk had permitted Pay'n'Pac to build a parking lot on a "useless" muddy bog. Everytime I think about it I still get furious. Well, Pay'n'Pac went bankrupt years ago. A few years back I drove by that Pay'n'Pac, and the parking lot was empty with weeds growing, the store deserted and a chain link fence surrounded the sprawling carcass of the building.
So for the price of untold generations of salmon in that stream, Pay'n'Pac got a parking lot for a few years. Even if the bogland were restored, the particular run of wild Sockeye who were born, and lived and died in that stream bed for perhaps millions of years are gone FOREVER. Poof. All for a parking lot that eventually would not even be used.
And people wonder why I despise the right and toadie politicians that place corporations over the environment. That stream is a large part of it.