Salmon Fishery on the Rocks

  • The Chinook salmon was initially introduced to the Great Lakes in the 1870s. Michigan, New York and Wisconsin reintroduced the Chinook salmon to the Great Lakes in 1966. (Photo courtesy of USFWS)

There’s a decision looming for Lake Huron that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. The state must decide whether it should keep putting chinook salmon in the lake. The fish has been the driving force behind sport fishing in the Great Lakes. But the salmon’s future in the Upper Lakes is now questionable. Peter Payette reports:


It’s hard to overstate how drastically salmon transformed the Great Lakes after they were introduced more than 40 years ago.


Ed Retherford is a charter boat captain on Lake Huron.
He says in the old days on a weekend in Rockport he’d see cars with boat trailers backed up for a mile or two waiting to launch.
But that’s all gone now.


“You’d be lucky, except maybe for the brown trout festival, you’d be lucky to see twenty boats there on a weekend. It just decimated that area. You can imagine the economics involved.”


Chinook or king salmon practically disappeared from Lake Huron about seven years ago. Most of the charter boats are gone now because the kinds of fish that remain are just not as exciting to catch as salmon.


State officials figure little towns like Rockport lose upwards of a million dollars in tourism business every year without the fishery.

More about Chinook salmon from the DNR

A related Environment Report story

Ten Threats to the Great Lakes

Transcript

The salmon’s demise followed the disappearance of its favorite food, little fish called alewives. Scientists say there were too many salmon eating the alewives and problems lower down on the food chain caused by invasive mussels.


State fisheries biologist Jim Johnson says salmon would rather starve than eat something besides an alewife.


“So at first, the salmon went through a period of just being starved out. They didn’t have enough to eat. They wouldn’t switch to eating round gobies and they died of malnutrition.”


The changes in Lake Huron since have been significant.


Neither salmon nor alewives are native to the lake. And with them out of the way, native fish like walleye have come back.


The state continues to stock one and a half million Chinook salmon in Lake Huron every year.


But Jim Johnson says the walleye eat most of them. He says Lake Huron can’t support a big salmon fishery any more.


“It’s just not realistic. The lake doesn’t offer that and there’s nothing the DNR can do to change that.”


The question now is whether to stock any chinook salmon in Huron at all. Giving up on the most popular sport fish in the Great Lakes is hard to swallow but most people see the writing on the wall. So even if stocking continues, it will likely be a fraction of what it once was.


On the other side of the state, there are now worrying signs that the same fate might be in store for Lake Michigan.


There are lots of salmon in Lake Michigan today.


But charter boat captain Denny Grinold says something went wrong last fall. He says the big salmon, the four-year old fish that come up into the rivers to spawn in August, never showed up.


“You keep looking for ‘em. You keep looking for ‘em. You go out and you fish the patterns that you’ve fished in the past. Those large Chinook should be there and they just weren’t there.”


The warm water and lots of windy days last year might account for the missing fish. But research provides no comfort for the future.


The DNR has created a system of red flags to evaluate the conditions for salmon in Lake Michigan. These are based on things like how much food is available, the weight of the fish and how many are being caught.


Twenty of the 30 flags have been triggered.


The manager of Lake Michigan for the Department of Natural Resources, Jim Dexter, says the lake is not a happy place.


“The lake is very perturbed. It’s certainly not a stable, quality ecosystem. I mean it’s working right now. It’s producing a fishery. People are happy but it’s tenuous.”


There’s not much the state can do to change anything.


If the experience of Lake Huron is any guide, it’s the presence of those little feeder fish, alewives, that is critical.


At the moment, there are believed to be fewer alewives in Lake Michigan than at any time on record.


For the Environment Report, I’m Peter Payette.

The Great Blue Heron

  • An island in the Upper Mississippi, not far from downtown Minneapolis, is home to many Great Blue Herons.(Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)

Some people say robins are the first sign of spring. But there’s another bird that makes a dramatic entry in northern states. The Great Blue Heron soars in to make a nest… and guard it:

Transcript

Some people say robins are the first sign of spring. But there’s another bird that makes a dramatic entry in northern states. The Great Blue Heron soars in to make a nest… and guard it:

On an island in the Upper Mississippi River, a stand of cottonwood trees is silhouetted against a gray sky. The bare branches are festooned with big nests, made of twigs and branches. Next to the nests, like sentinels at the castle gate, stand Great Blue Herons. These birds are four feet tall. More than a hundred of them are claiming their domain in these trees, just upriver from downtown Minneapolis. When one takes off and glides away, its six-foot wing span dwarfs the ducks and songbirds sharing the island.

It’s hard to tell the males from the females because they’re the same blue and gray. Birder Sharon Stiteler is leading me on a tour of this rookery.

“The males arrive first, and they work out who’s going to take which nest. Where you see one bird standing up, that is most likely a male. He’s hanging out there because the other males who are still waiting to attract a female could come by and steal sticks out of his nest to make his nest look better.”

On some nests, you can see females already sitting on pale blue eggs the size of small mangoes. But Stiteler says herons are not always good parents.

“If the chick falls out of the nest and lands on the ground, that chick is toast: the parents will not continue feeding it. And oftentimes you’ll see turkey vultures hanging out at rookeries, and they’re waiting for the young to fall and starve, and then they’ll have a whole bunch of food.”

But at least on this island, there won’t be many predators like coyotes or foxes.

These birds were once threatened by humans. Their cousins the egrets were hunted for their beautiful white feathers, and both suffered disastrous population loss until the pesticide DDT was banned.

Now you can see them in streams and lakes all over. They breed in Canada and the upper midwest. They spend their winters wherever they can find food. Herons literally stalk their prey.

“They have a lot of patience, and they just stare at one spot for long time, and then they jab down and grab the fish. Their beak is shaped like a pair of super-sharp chopsticks. Sometimes they catch a huge fish and they have to juggle it around, especially if they have it perpendicular with their beak, they have to jostle it around, and the fish is wiggling, and eventually they get it just right so it’s straight in line with the bill, and you can watch this huge thing slide down that long slender neck.”

Sharon Stiteler is a part-time naturalist with the National Park Service, and she writes a blog called bird-chick-dot-com.

Today the herons are pretty quiet. But Stiteler has a Blackberry loaded with their sounds, including the prehistoric squawk they make when they’re startled.

And Stiteler says it can sound really strange when the young are clattering for food.

After the young are raised — at least the ones that survive — the herons will stay here on the river, until it freezes over and they can’t fish anymore. Stiteler says the birds decamp all at once.

“One day we have Great Blue Herons, and the next day they’re gone, and they migrate at night.”

They tuck back their long necks when they fly, forming an S-shape and hiding their true length.

Stiteler says the recovery of Great Blue Herons, along with pelicans, eagles, and other birds near the top of the food chain is a sign of a healthier ecosystem.

For The Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

Related Links

Interview: Asian Carp

  • Asian Carp can weigh up to 100 pounds and are notorious for jumping out of the water and injuring boaters. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

The US Supreme Court has turned
down a request from Michigan and
other Great Lakes states. They
wanted the locks in a canal to
be closed immediately. That man-made
canal artificially connects the
Mississippi River system and the
Great Lakes. For now at least,
those locks will stay open to cargo
traffic. This fight is all about
a fish, a type of Asian Carp, that
many people don’t want to get into
the Great Lakes. Lester Graham
spoke with David Jude about the
threat of the fish. Jude is a
research scientist and fish biologist
at the University of Michigan:

Transcript

The US Supreme Court has turned
down a request from Michigan and
other Great Lakes states. They
wanted the locks in a canal to
be closed immediately. That man-made
canal artificially connects the
Mississippi River system and the
Great Lakes. For now at least,
those locks will stay open to cargo
traffic. This fight is all about
a fish, a type of Asian Carp, that
many people don’t want to get into
the Great Lakes. Lester Graham
spoke with David Jude about the
threat of the fish. Jude is a
research scientist and fish biologist
at the University of Michigan:

Lester: We keep hearing if this fish gets into the Great Lakes system, it will be devastating for the ecology of the lakes, ruin the commercial and recreational fishing. What is it that all these people think this Asian Carp fish will do to the Great Lakes?

David Jude: Well, I am sure they all watch the video where the fish are jumping out of the river, in the Illinois River, and harming some biologists and some people that are there.

Lester: Smacks them in the head!

David: Yes, so they are very concerned about that. And then biologists are concerned about the fact that they have taken over the river there, they are very voracious feeders, and so they have really crowded out a lot of other fish in the river. So there are a lot of things that are going on with regards to impacts on humans as well as impacts on fish communities that we certainly don’t like.

Lester: And these are big fish, they are up to 100 pounds.

David: Exactly.

Lester: There’s this electric barrier in place in the canal that is supposed to prevent these Asian Carp from swimming from the Mississippi River into the Great Lakes. Environmentalists say that there’s still too much of a risk, too many scenarios where the fish could get through because of flooding or some other scenario, and that canal should be closed. The Obama Administration is fighting that, the state of Illinois if fighting that, they say we need that open. There’s barge traffic carrying steel and rock and gravel and grain, all of this seems to be coming down to money. Is money the right measure when we’re looking at this situation?

David: No, it’s not. I mean traditionally, we’ve gone into the, a lot of these decisions are made and the environmental costs are not taken into consideration. The costs of having that canal open are going to be very very high and, uh, and you have to balance it against what the sport fishery and the commercial fishery is the Great Lakes is going to be because once they get in there it’s going to be a very detrimental impact on them.

Lester: This fish is knocking at the door, we’re not even sure it’s not already in, so, is there a certain inevitability that this fish is going to be in the Great Lakes and we should just start making plans to deal with it?

David: Well, I don’t think it’s inevitable and I think if we did stop them and somehow were able to shut down the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal and prevent that avenue, we’d go a long way toward preventing them from coming in. The other avenue for them getting in, of course, is people that like to eat them and they might bring them in and stock them. So, I think we should be doing everything we can right now to stop them, I mean this is our opportunity to do that. But, the other part of it is, because they’re so close, and because as you know there probably could be some in the Lakes already, you know, we should be prepared to have some plans on what we might want to do to try to, you know, focus on some of these optimal spawning sites and see what we can do to keep their populations down there.

Lester: David Jude is a research scientist and fish biologist at the University of Michigan. Thanks for coming in!

David: Oh, my pleasure.

Related Links

Asian Carp Update

  • Charter boat captain Eric Stuecher says Asian Carp will likely ruin his business. (Photo by Jennifer Guerra)

A big monster of a fish is at
the center of a US Supreme Court
case. Asian Carp are making their
way up the Mississippi towards the
Great Lakes. Michigan’s Attorney
General filed a lawsuit asking the
Court to close a Chicago canal in
order to keep the carp out. The
shipping industry says, ‘no can do.’
Jennifer Guerra has
a closer look at what’s at stake:

Transcript

A big monster of a fish is at
the center of a US Supreme Court
case. Asian Carp are making their
way up the Mississippi towards the
Great Lakes. Michigan’s Attorney
General filed a lawsuit asking the
Court to close a Chicago canal in
order to keep the carp out. The
shipping industry says, ‘no can do.’
Jennifer Guerra has
a closer look at what’s at stake:

There’s one way to look at this as a purely economic story. In one corner you’ve got the people who ship cargo by water.

“Lynne Munch, senior vice president regional advocacy of the American Waterways Operators.”

She says, if the Illinois is forced to close two of the locks in the Chicago canal permanently, more than 17 million tons of cargo will have to be shipped by truck instead of barge, and hundreds of jobs will be lost.

“One company alone has reported that they will lose 93 jobs next year if the locks are closed. One of our towing companies estimates they’ll lose more than 130 jobs if the locks are closed.”

In the other corner, you’ve got the seven billion dollar tourism and fishing industries.

“Oh hi, I’m Eric Stuecher, I own a company called Great Lakes Fishing Charters.”

Stuecher takes people out on the Great Lakes and in rivers across Michigan. Salmon, Trout, Perch, you name it, he’ll help you fish it. But if the invasive Asian Carp get into the Great Lakes?

“It would probably cost me the business. They’ll eat anything they can get in their mouths, to the demise of so many of our other game fish.”

So that’s the economic side of the story. But what if we told you there’s more at stake here than dollars and cents.

“In terms of environmental impact, the Asian carp have the potential to seriously disrupt the Great Lakes ecosystem.”

That’s Marc Gaden with the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission. He says there are already a lot of pests in the Lakes.

“There are 180 non-native species in the Great Lakes, many of which came in accidentally. Precisely two of them can be controlled. That’s it. So that’s why biologists and others are very, very concerned about the Asian carp. Once they get in, the cat’s out of the bag.”

Asian Carp were first brought to the states by Southern catfish farmers. The carp escaped the South in the 1990s because of flooding and have been making their way north ever since. These fish are huge. They can grow to four feet and weigh up to 100 pounds, and they reproduce like crazy. In some areas, they reproduce so much that by weight they account for more than 90 percent of the fish in the Mississippi River system.

So you can see why people around the Great Lakes don’t want them.

That’s why Gaden and a lot of other scientists say we should somehow block the man-made canal that connects the big rivers to the Great Lakes for barges carrying cargo.

“We need to be open to saying, just because we’ve been moving goods on the canal by barge for decades and decades, doesn’t mean we need to continue to do it that way. Is there a better way to do it? Can we shift it to rail?”

Gaden and others have been arguing for 15 years to get some kind of permanent barrier built in order to stop invasive species from moving from one ecosystem to another.

“The government agencies that are responsible for doing things on that canal are not moving at the speed of carp, they’re moving at the speed of government. And we don’t have a minute to spare.”

That’s because new DNA tests suggest that Asian carp have moved well beyond the electric barrier meant to keep them out of Lake Michigan.

For The Environment Report, I’m Jennifer Guerra.

Related Links

Counting the Fish in the Sea

  • Researchers at the Census for Marine Life have spent the past decade counting fish. (Photo courtesy of NOAA)

You’ve heard there are lots
of fish in the sea, but nobody
knows exactly how many. That’s
what a project has been trying
to find out. Samara Freemark reports the results
will be out soon:

Transcript

You’ve heard there are lots
of fish in the sea, but nobody
knows exactly how many. That’s
what a project has been trying
to find out. Samara Freemark reports the results
will be out soon:

Researchers at the Census for Marine Life have spent the past decade counting fish. They want to get as accurate a count as possible of how many animals are in the sea.

The project is based at the University of Rhode Island, but 2000 scientists around the world are collaborating.

Darlene Crist works with the Marine Census. She says the project used a huge range of tools to sample fish populations: electronic tags, robots, cameras– as well as some pretty unconventional research methods.

“We’ve used old tax records, ship logs, even restaurant menus.”

Now Crist say they’re done counting and they’re starting to crunch numbers.

Researchers say the data will serve as the first baseline measure of life in the ocean. They hope it will help policymakers better manage the fish stocks that remain.

Full results will be available this fall.


For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Keeping an Eye on Fish Farming

  • Right now, there are no federal laws regulating offshore fish farming. (Photo by Randolph Fermer, courtesy of the National Biological Information Infrastructure)

Proposed legislation would put
in place the most sweeping
regulations yet on ocean
aquaculture – or offshore fish
farming. Samara Freemark tells us why people
think regulations matter:

Transcript

Proposed legislation would put
in place the most sweeping
regulations yet on ocean
aquaculture – or offshore fish
farming. Samara Freemark tells us why people
think regulations matter:

Critics of aquaculture say the practice can spread disease, introduce invasive species, and pollute the environment.
The Ocean Conservancy’s George Leonard says that’s a problem.

“In the absence of an overarching framework, aquaculture continues to move forward kind of in fits and starts here in the US. And we think if it proceeds that way, many of the environmental concerns will kind of fall through the cracks.”

Legislation introduced last week in Congress could change that. The bill would require fish farmers to apply for federal permits before setting up shop. Those permits would set standards to protect ocean ecosystems.

The bill would also provide money to research how aquaculture is impacting the environment.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Salmon Spawning in Sewage Plant

  • Peter Baranyai directs Wastewater Operations for the Sanitary District of East Chicago, Indiana. The plant's effluent channel looks like a natural stream and has apparently fooled wilflide into thinking so, too. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

You might not expect much good
environmental news to come from
sewage plants, but, believe it or
not, there is some on occasion.
And in one case, that good news
even involves thriving salmon.
Shawn Allee has the story:

Transcript

You might not expect much good
environmental news to come from
sewage plants, but, believe it or
not, there is some on occasion.
And in one case, that good news
even involves thriving salmon.
Shawn Allee has the story:

Sewage plants are often out of sight, out of mind, and people usually like it that way. But people who work at the water treatment plant in East Chicago, Indiana, want everyone to know about an ecological come-back story there.

I’m game. So I meet the plant director Peter Baranyai.

Allee: “You’ve got this strange mix of some really striking natural areas, rivers and streams, but then everything’s kind of dotted by industry as well, and has been for a long time. What kind of industries are we talking about in this region?”

Baranyai: “Basic steel mills, oil refineries, chemical industries also.”

Allee: “So, when they’re talking ‘heavy industry’, they really mean it here?”

Baranyai: “Yes.”

Allee: “What are we looking at here?”

Baranyai: “We’re trying to look at our discharge channel. That’s the effluent from our treatment plant. This pipe here’s a 60-inch pipe.”

Allee: “You can see the water moving out of it pretty quickly.”

The treated wast water is from nearby homes and factories. And when it leaves the pipe, you’d swear it’s a natural stream. Apparently, it’s fooled plenty of critters, including Chinook salmon.

Each Fall, salmon swim from Lake Michigan, past shipping canals, steel mills and chemical factories – just to spawn in the treated waste water.

Baranyai: “They’re not being too cooperative today because I don’t see too much.”

The salmon spawned earlier than normal this year, so, I only find dead salmon on the banks.

Baranyai: “This was a, oh, almost 4-foot chinook salmon.”

Allee: “Or the evidence of it.”

Baranyai: “And he died.”

Allee: “Again, they’re kind of programmed to die after they spawn.”

Baranyai: “Yeah, he died on the rocks here.”

The government introduced Chinook salmon to Lake Michigan decades ago, but for a long time, salmon wouldn’t spawn here, and birds and nearly everything else shied away, too.

Baranyai says one problem was that they used to disinfect water with chlorine.

Baranyai: “It’s a very effective way of disinfecting, but it continues to disinfect downstream. It’s not selective, usually anyhthing that’s alive, it usually kills. It pretty much sterilizes everything. And that’s how most water treatment plants in our country do that, still.”


Baranyai says in the late 80s, things turned around. His plant added better filters, and now, when they disinfect water, they kill bacteria with ultraviolet light, not chlorine. In just a few years, salmon started spawning – right in the plant. Plus, fresh-water sponges grow in the plant, and herons showed up. Word got around.

Roger Klocek was a biologist at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium at the time. He learned the news from a fellow scientist.

Klocek: “I thought he was nuts, literally. What are you talking about?”

Klocek says you have to understand, for a long time people ignored water treatment plants or they expected them to remove only the worst industrial pollutants.

Klocek: “I had no idea that waste water plants themselves could actually contribute to an improved ecology.”


Allee: “Maybe the opposite, they were putting chlorine in the water or bacteria, if they weren’t disinfecting.”

Klocek: “Absolutely, you know we hear constantly that technology is going to save us and I really don’t believe that. I think we put too much stock in that, but it sure is gratifying to see when there is some technology that makes a remarkable improvement.”

Klocek says, too often, people assume industrial areas like East Chicago will always be ecological basket cases.

He says, sure there’s room for improvement, but having one concrete example of something that works? That can give you hope about what nature can do if you give it a chance.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Dirty Gold

  • Mary Yeboa lives new Newmont's mine - an American gold mining company. (Photo by Anna Boiko-Weyrauch)

Buying a piece of jewelry for
someone is often an emotional
celebration. But some people
are concerned about the damage
caused by mining that gold.
Anna Boiko-Weyrauch takes us from
the jewelry store to the gold mine:

(Research assistance
provided by the Investigative Fund
of the Nation Institute.)

Transcript

Buying a piece of jewelry for
someone is often an emotional
celebration. But some people
are concerned about the damage
caused by mining that gold.
Anna Boiko-Weyrauch takes us from
the jewelry store to the gold mine:

“It is a white gold band, with a star sapphire in the middle.”

In New York City, Sarah Lenigan is showing off her engagement ring. She got married this summer in California. Nowadays some people like her are starting to wonder where the stuff they buy comes from, including their wedding rings.

“You know the idea of the blood diamond, and not just the movie but, you do think about these things when you think about real jewelry. And this is the first time we’ve bought real jewelry, so it was a whole new ball game, I guess.”

It’s hard to say exactly where the gold in Sarah’s ring came from. Gold isn’t like other commodities – it’s almost impossible to track. But more and more, gold like Sarah’s is coming out of Ghana, in West Africa.

(driving sounds)

We’re driving over a dam on the Subri river in Ghana. The country used to be called the Gold Coast and today it’s the second largest producer of gold in Africa. Most of the gold comes out of a number of large surface mines. They’re all owned by companies from abroad.

At this dam, the American gold mining company, Newmont, stores water and waste from its gold mine.

Adusah Yakubu is with me. He’s a member of a local advocacy group. One side of the dam is green forest and clear water. But the other side looks like the surface of the moon.

“It looks like there’s cement in the river. It’s very hard, and it’s very gray. (What is that?) It’s a tailings dam.”

A tailings dam is where mining companies put waste from processing gold. After the precious metal is extracted, you get a mixture of sand and water. It also contains cyanide. Now, the chemical is poisonous, but it’s used all the time in gold mining. And miners work to control it.

But there are also accidents. Some of that waste overflowed this fall at Newmont’s mine, and killed fish downstream. The company says it was a minor event.

For the people who live around Newmont’s mine, the operations have really disrupted their lives. This river used to be the main source of drinking water and food for nearby villages. Kwame Kumah and his wife, Mary Yeboa live by the dam. They say they used to rely on the river for a lot of things.

“There are so many different things we got from the river. You could even get food from it, like fish, crab. But nowadays we can’t get anything from it.”

Now they can’t go near the water because of security guards. Newmont gave the community a well to make up for it. But the villagers say the dam has brought more mosquitoes, and with the mosquitos, disease. Although the company sold them discounted mosquito nets, Mary Yeboa says she gets sick much more than before.

“Right now, my body hurts all over. As I’m talking to you I have a headache, it really hurts. I don’t feel well at all.”

The gold mining company, Newmont declined to comment for this story.

The company sells its gold on the world market. Some people might buy it as investments, others for manufacturing. Or, it could end up as jewelry, like Sarah Lenigan’s engagement ring. That’s actually where most new gold goes, to jewelry.

Soon jewelry consumers, who care about their impact might be able to get some guidance. Certification systems such as the Responsible Jewelry Council are looking at gold, from the mine to the store.

Council CEO, Michael Rae says they are trying to clean up the jewelry business.

“It looks at environmental performance, social performance, labor standards, occupational health and safety, child labor issues and also in business ethics.”

The system won’t guarantee that gold or diamonds are from a specific mine, but it will reveal whether retailers and miners are making an effort to play fair.

Many jewelry and mining companies have signed on to the code. Newmont, the owner of the mine in Ghana we visited, is not a current member.

For The Environment Report, I’m Anna Boiko-Weyrauch.

Related Links

Fish Swimming in Hormones

  • Fish are putting up less of a fight on the line when caught - making them less fun for sport fishing. (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service)

A recent report from the US Geological
Survey confirms past findings that fish
are in trouble. Tanya Ott
reports the hormone estrogen is getting
into rivers and lakes and could reduce
fish populations:

Transcript

A recent report from the US Geological
Survey confirms past findings that fish
are in trouble. Tanya Ott
reports the hormone estrogen is getting
into rivers and lakes and could reduce
fish populations:

The fish have been turning up with lesions and intersexed –
meaning they have both male and female characteristics.

Rob Angus is a fish biologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
He wasn’t involved in the USGS research, but has studied the problem for
more than a decade. The culprit?

“You’re a female? You excrete estrogens. Both natural estrogens,
the estrogenst that are in birth control pills, females that are
on estrogen replacement therapy. All of those end up in the
wastewater stream.”

Wastewater treatment plants clean up about 90 percent of the
estrogen, but the remaining ten percent is a problem.

Fish don’t reproduce as easily. And, for sport fishers, the fish
aren’t as much fun to catch. They don’t put up as much of a fight
on the line. That could affect the 75 billion dollars sport fishing industry.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tanya Ott.

Related Links

Interview: Climate Affecting Fish and Game

  • The National Wildlife Federation is concerned about the nation's fish and game species being impacted by climate change. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

People are beginning to notice the effects
of climate change – especially people who
get out in nature a lot. Hunters and anglers
with the National Wildlife Federation recently
released a list of some of the game and fish
species that are at risk due to climate change.
Lester Graham talked with one of the members
of the group:

Transcript

People are beginning to notice the effects
of climate change – especially people who
get out in nature a lot. Hunters and anglers
with the National Wildlife Federation recently
released a list of some of the game and fish
species that are at risk due to climate change.
Lester Graham talked with one of the members
of the group:

Lester Graham: Kathleen Law in an angler, a member of the National Wildlife Federation, a former member of the Michigan Legislature, and a retired research scientist. First, what kind of game and fish, besides polar bears and penguins, are at risk because of climate change?

Kathleen Law: Well, everything that nests in the water or tries to have a fishery involved. It is affecting our national and our local bird, deer, the population, the habitat.

Graham: I guess that’s the question, though – how do we know that it’s not something else at work? How do we know that it’s climate change? And, of course, the skeptics will say, ‘how do we know it’s man-caused changes to the climate?’

Law: Well, we can continue being in a state of denial, and wonder where everything went, or we can get ahead. It’s not important to me who’s causing it, it’s, ‘what can I do to help?’

Graham: The US House has passed climate change legislation, the Senate is debating a version. Will the policies in those bills be enough to save some of these fish and game species you’re worried about?

Law: It’ll give us a chance. Without a concerted, willful effort, we have a very limited chance. So, there are things that we can do, that we must do, as a people who want diversity, who want to fish, who want to eat – I like venison. So what do we do to protect that resource and, and in a positive way? Which is the education and resource restoration, I think, is probably the best way to start.

Graham: Opponents of climate change legislation worry a cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme will cost the economy too much. They don’t want the US to be put at a competitive disadvantage. Will the concerns of hunters and fishers sway any members of Congress to actually support climate legislation, if they believe it’s a jobs killer?

Law: Well, it will certainly be a consideration. The hunters and fishing folk are your constituents, they’re your neighbors, they’re your family. You can look at that, ‘it’s a job killer.’ So is climate disruption a job killer. So, how do we create new jobs? Well let’s get people out planting marsh grass. Let’s, you know, something positive. Something that people can do that makes a difference for them and their neighborhood and their community. That’s positive. That’s hope. We gotta give them hope.

Graham: What is the National Wildlife Federation doing in Washington to affect the debate about climate change?

Law: Well, they have flown in a large contingent of just people who are hunters and fishers and who have represented people in the constituencies to come in and talk to the Senators. Our hunters and fishing people – consider them sentinels. They’re out there in November, hunting ducks. They’re out in April, standing in the water, fishing. These are sentinel people, and to pay attention to what they’re saying is very important, vital, and that’s what we did in Washington DC.

Graham: Kathleen Law is a retired research scientist, a former member of the Michigan legislature, and working with the National Wildlife Federation as part of an effort to save fish and game species the group says is at risk because of climate change. Thanks very much.

Law: Thank you.

Related Links