Each of these is a unique ecosystem; and each has, over the passage of time, supported a wide variety of plant, animal, and indigenous human life. Rivers flowing into the Pacific Ocean have been particularly characterized by support of large populations of salmon, stealhead, eels, sturgeon, and (near the ocean) halibut. The salmon's life cycle is especially exotic since the fish is hatched out of eggs in shallow gravely waters, hundreds of miles from the ocean, makes its way downstream to live in the ocean for many years, and then returns upstream to the same gravely banks to spawn and die. From the San Joaquin northward, all the way into Alaska, the salmon has been a staple food source for indigenous people, for thousands of years. But it is also an important food source for other animals, especially bears. In spite of the precarious balance of natural factors, salmon populations flourished over time until Europeans and Americans entered the scene.
Along the Columbia, Americans were so taken with the abundance of salmon that they invented "the salmon wheel," a device that sat on a floating platform which could be positioned with ropes and held out in the river's current. As the current pushed paddles on this float, the paddles drove a huge wheel out of the water, scooping up salmon and delivering them to a catch basket at the front of the float, in a continuous process which ended only when the weight of salmon could no longer be supported and the float had to be hauled in and emptied. Here, as elsewhere, American technology assumed that nature was infinitely abundant, a mistake that indigenous people have rarely made, if ever.
But over-fishing was not the only attack against the security of the salmon. In California, gold miners trod through virtually every creek and stream in the Sierra foothills, dug open stream beds, and sluiced the gravels. Later on, Placer miners used American technological know-how to construct aqueducts bringing water from great distances at high pressure to shoot through powerful water cannons that eroded away whole hillsides of dirt and gravel that got sluiced back into streams and rivers. The tributaries of the San Joaquin and the Sacramento (later, the Trinity and the Klammath as well) were choked with debris that killed fish outright, altered river courses, and changed the water composition permanently. As gold strikes dwindled, logging moved into these areas and created comparable havoc by denuding hillsides, allowing new erosion and warming creeks by exposing them to sunlight. This was merely the beginning.
The next technological concept in line was to dam a river and simultaneously create both a water fall and a reservoir of back water. The fall could be used to generate hydroelectric power and the back water could be used to feed irrigation canals. Incorporating locks allowed barge traffic on the slow moving backwaters. On the Columbia, Boise, Idaho, became an ocean port! The West became a land of managed rivers and, where rivers were not available, massive pumping of aquifers began. If rain was not sufficient in the West, which it never had been, then water would be brought to the fields in some other way.
There are two kinds of problem involved with acquiring water in these ways. First, the rate at which underground aquifers are replenished is very small compared with the demands placed on them. Aquifers are like fossil fuels and minerals, they were created in geological time but they are being consumed in decades and centuries. Second, damming and diverting rivers has other consequences, even though rivers are renewable resources.
In northwestern California, the Sacramento River was dammed to create Shasta Lake. Eventually, dams were also placed to create Trinity Lake and Whiskeytown Reservoir. The three bodies of water are manipulated with a single purpose in mind and that is maintaining navigation on the Sacramento River. Incidentally, of course, water is also sold to the farmers of the Sacramento Valley. This is a diversion project since the waters of Trinity would have flowed out to the ocean through the Trinity River and the Klammath River. Today, the Trinity is maintained at a fractional level of what it was. Along with the damage to the river by Placer mining in the late 19th Century, the reduction in outflow has all but terminated the salmon runs. In that connection, I might mention that the Trinity runs through the Hupa reservation and was the livelihood for the Hupa people. A similar situation now occurs in the Delta region east of San Francisco Bay since water from the Feather River has been diverted out of the Sacramento drainage and into Southern California. The backpressure of salt water from the bay is threatening the delta's sensitive ecology.
Even when river water is not diverted into other river systems, dams have profound ecological consequences. Dams block the upstream passage of fish; they flood land; and they change water temperatures. While fish ladders can allow passage of spawning fish, the baby fish have an extremely low survival rate in their necessary return to the ocean. Inflated by our dependence on technology to accomplish everything, we have even tried trucking baby fish downstream around reservoirs in order to provide them safe conduct to the ocean!
Of course, this is not the end to what a thriving contemporary society can do to a river. Industrial waste -- mining, logging, paper milling, aluminum manufacturing, and everything else that we might put next to a river -- contributes to a wide variety of pollution -- chemical and thermal. Along the Columbia, the Hanford nuclear site is an example.
There is a tendency to look at environmental catastrophes and just excuse them. "After all, they're just fish, and we've got important things to do." At one level, this is poorly informed behavior on our part because ecologies are, by definition, complex. You cannot kill off one part of the ecology without killing off other parts. When one part is destroyed, we really do not know what the ultimate consequences will be. They may result in real economic losses to us, later on. But at another level, there is an arrogance, here, of acting as though we are not a part of the ecological picture, that we are separate from the natural order of things. And this could not be farther away from the truth. No matter what humans decide to do, nature will hold fast and ecology will prevail. The only real question is whether humans will have a place in the natural order.
The fundamental concept in the ethics of behavior with others is "relationship" or, more broadly, "community." To behave well in relationship with others begins with respect for the interests of others; however, it is important to note that, in respecting others, we enhance our own sense of humanity. That is, we both give and gain; we develop ourselves in giving others the respect they deserve. The problem of environmental ethics, it seems to me, is discovering why we seem to feel that we owe no similar respect to nature itself, or natural things in particular. I presume, in fact, that there is much to be gained by humans, in understanding and respecting human nature, if humans would develop a sense of respect for the interests of natural things. Clearly, if we ourselves are a part of nature, then we do ourselves a great disservice when we treat the rest of nature as though it did not matter.
Copyright 1997 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711
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