Water.
On the Pacific Northwest coast, you cannot help but notice the presence of water in many forms: the Pacific Ocean, so often giving the lie to its name; Puget Sound and the Hood Canal, deep saltwater expanses formed by retreating glaciation; mighty rivers and the floodplains they form when they venture across their banks from time to time; streams and creeks starting as a trickle, then gathering strength as they form their channels and canyons across the landscape; the slightly brackish water of Lake Union and the fresh water of Lake Washington, defining Seattle and the East Side's traffic problems; glaciers, large patches of ancient ice clinging to the mountains, refreshed yearly - or so we hope - by new snow compacting itself into new ice; the snow, winter's curse and winter's blessing; and everywhere, the rain.
The rain defines the Pacific Northwest in popular opinion. When one thinks of Seattle, what so often comes to mind is rain, despite the fact that Seattle gets about the same amount of rain as New York City, a place not defined in imagination by water. So much here does depend on precipitation for renewal that the opinions, while not technically correct, are nonetheless valid.
First, there is the snowpack. On the snowpack, so much else rests:
The renewal of glaciers.
The renewal of the aquifers on which so many of us depend for our water.
Snowmelt, which provides hydroelectric power to run our homes and businesses.
The renewal of the rivers and streams.
The lives, because of the above, of our iconic salmon.
And the rain, too, affects the snowpack: overall climatic heating brings us more rain and less snow. If you are a resident of the greater Seattle area, perhaps you did not notice, last winter, that there was less snow (here in semi-rural Kitsap County, we were snowed in for a week), less rain, less total precipitation; but that was the case as measured by most gauges. We receive more rain and less snow now, too, causing earlier runoff, and that affects the amount of hydro power that we will have later in the year. That, in turn, affects the amount that we can use for ourselves and the amount we can provide to the rest of the West Coast, including California during its most needy periods.
The salmon and other fish depend on water for their lives; it is their home, and their source of oxygen. Dams have hampered their ability to reach the exact part of the creek, river, or lake where they were born in order to spawn. Where once hundreds of thousands of fish returned each year to Idaho via the Columbia River, today one or two lone fish may complete the journey. Removing the dams may - should, we hope - have a positive effect on the fish population, but would remove a vital source of electric power for our region, one generated without producing greenhouse gases.
Some imagine that the salmon can be saved without removing any dams; others, those who more closely study the fish, are less optimistic. The Obama administration's approach thus far has been to continue the plan set in place last year by the Bush administration, something which pleases neither power officials nor fish advocates.
New research shows that dams harm salmon in more ways than previously thought. Not only are the adult fish hampered in their journey upstream to spawn, something that can and often is mitigated somewhat by the installation of fish ladders, but the young smolts, too, are injured by dams in their journey to the sea. Research on traumatic brain injury in soldiers returning from the Middle East has led to the ability to detect traumatic brain injury in juvenile salmon, and it has now been shown that journeying through a dam system causes them traumatic brain injury.
In the summer, when the summer chum salmon return to their hatching points via the Hood Canal, and in the fall, when the fall chinook salmon struggle back to their spawning areas, there is less water in the streams and rivers in which they swim. I have seen in Gorst Creek large chinook salmon, backs and parts of gills exposed to the air above, making their laborious way upstream to above the fish hatchery, to the area where they first saw the light of day as tiny fish, newly hatched, vulnerable to everything around them. There is less water in Gorst Creek, less water in Beaver Creek (the main tributary of which starts just on the other side of my driveway and runs under the driveway through a culvert), less water in the river. Less snow on the mountains. The precipitation is the same, but the form of it is different: more of it is rain, and runs off earlier, and is not there, then, when it is needed by returning late-year salmon.
Salmon recovery efforts have started throughout the region. Broad coalitions of interest groups have come together to protect and increase the salmon populations; many Pacific Northwest salmon are now listed as endangered species and recovery efforts thus bring in federal dollars as well as local ones.
It is too early to tell whether we can save the salmon or not; human effort must increase, including the effort to reduce the amount of pollution we pump into the atmosphere. It may be too late to reverse the early melting trend; in this case, we will need to become far wiser stewards of the water that we have, protecting it for fish as well as for human use. The pollution from automobiles and coal-fired power plants is a major factor in the early warming trends.
Water.
It defines us as a region, and if we do not pay heed now, it will not be there for us in the future.
7:30 am dsnodgrass
10:30 am LaughingPlanet
11:30 am Kitsap River and Charles CurtisStanley
1 pm dadanation (or 2 pm)
1:30 pm Patriot Daily
2 pm Patch Adam (1400)
2:30 pm bob zimway
3:30 pm Patric Juillet (AAF)
4 pm RLMiller
4:30 pm Runaway Rose (or 5 pm)
5 pm Brian Amer (5 pm or later)
5:30 pm rb137
6 pm boatsie
7 pm ALifeLessFrightening