The Osprey: Clean Water for Salmon - An Elusive Goal
It isn’t news to wild fish advocates that clean water is an absolutely crucial component of healthy aquatic ecosystems. We’re pretty good at keeping our eye on water quality in the streams where wild fish swim and spawn. We advocate for closing roads in forests where they contribute to erosion and sedimentation, and for buffers off limits to loggers to protect riparian corridors (on that note, NOAA and the EPA have just rejected Oregon’s logging rules as inadequate for protecting fish and water quality — the only West Coast state not to qualify).
And there are catastrophic events that focus our attention because of their magnitude and immediate impact, such as chemical spills or mine pollution, such the Mount Polley Mine disaster in British Columbia, detailed in this issue of The Osprey.
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
• SALMON AND PESTICIDES
• CHAIR’S CORNER: TRANSITIONS
• MT. POLLEY MINE DISASTER
• KLAMATH RIVER DAMS
• HOOD RIVER RECOVERY
But there is also a significant cause of water pollution, perhaps even more insidious because it often “flies under the radar” of wild fish advocates — pesticides that commonly end up in our streams. A difficult issue involving complex chemicals and equally complex regulations, they are more widely used than many of us realize. But as Sharon Selvaggio, author of our cover story on pesticides describes, even if they don’t often result in mass die-offs of fish that make the evening news, these contaminants can have seriously detrimental effects over the long-term. It’s a subject that wild fish advocates would do well to learn more about and pay more attention.