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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 25, 2016)
OPINION 4A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, AUGUST 25, 2016 Founded in 1873 DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager CARL EARL, Systems Manager JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager OUR VIEW Physical education should be a part of everyone’s day T here is a branding problem for physical education. Perhaps it should be renamed “Learning to have fun for life,” or “Play for healthy bodies and minds.” Whatever we call it, some form of PE should be a signiicant part of everyone’s day — children and grownups alike. For decades, professional educators recognized this and built physical activity into the school day. They recognized that bodies and minds aren’t separate. Growing young people particularly need the physical and mental stimulus of fresh air and rushing muscles. Lifetime health and physical coordination must be ingrained early on. Our nation has meandered far from this ideal. Oregon is as bad or even worse than most. As our EO Media Group/Pamplin Media Group Capital Bureau reported Friday, a check of public records found most school districts have made a travesty of a 2007 law requiring at least 150 minutes of PE per week for kindergarten through ifth grade and 225 minutes for sixth through eighth grade. Schools are supposed to meet this standard by fall 2017. But only 97 of 1,080 Oregon grade schools did so in 2014-15, a decline of ive from the year before. This is ridiculous. Although blamed on tight inances and the pedagogical focus on academic test scores, the decline of PE really betrays laziness on the part of schools and society. It is simply eas- ier to control children seated in regimented classroom settings than it is to create opportunities for them to play, exercise and learn life- time sports. Physical activity need not always be highly structured. Before PE became a formal part of the school day — with its jumping jacks, sit- ups and other boot camp-like exercises — classroom teachers super- vised activity time. This can still work. As a Salem-Keizer school oficial noted, PE teachers can cooperate with classroom teachers on ideas for brain breaks and structured play between lessons. It’s possible to anticipate that paying for expanded PE opportu- nities could be used as a selling point for the money promised by an Measure 97 tax. However, meeting our obligations to help children learn and practice healthy physical activities does not require a new pot of money. It only requires deciding that basic physical itness is essential and taking pragmatic steps to build this priority into school life. The Daily Astorian/File Photo A gillnet boat fishes on Youngs Bay on a warm and colorful evening in 2014. Commercial ishers are endangered By HOBE KYTR Salmon for All I t seems a bit odd that some of our neighbors should have to reintro- duce themselves. But many new residents in our community don’t seem to know who they are. They are your ishermen. The vast majority of citizens are not recreational or com- mercial ishermen. We live on one of the world’s great rivers — once known as the world’s greatest salmon stream. Astoria also was once known as the salmon-canning capital of the world. But develop- ment of the Colum- bia River basin, and the era of hydroelec- tric dam building, eliminated all but around 40 percent of the Columbia’s existing salmon habitat. Our once great abundance of salmon is no lon- ger what it was. But it’s not gone. Not by a long shot. Last year, the largest run of Chi- nook salmon since 1938 returned to the Columbia. This is still the great- est producer of Chinook salmon, also known as king salmon, in the world. And if you like to eat salmon (I know I do), someone has to catch it for you. For most of us, that means we depend on commercial ishermen. Gillnets On the Columbia River, the gear of choice for harvesting salmon, used both by Treaty Tribal ishers and the non-Indian ishing leet alike, is the gillnet. It is among the most effective ishing gears in existence. And man- aged using time, area and gear regu- lations, the gillnet can be among the most selective ishing gear types there are. But gillnetting is not without con- troversy. Sportishing advocates have attempted to ban gillnetting in Ore- gon three times, unsuccessfully on all occasions: Measure 4 in 1964 was defeated by over 70 percent of the votes; Measure 8 in 1992 was defeated by 59 percent of the votes; and Measure 81 was defeated in 2012 by over 63 percent of the votes. Similarly, in Washington, I-640 in 1995 was defeated by over 57 per- cent of the votes; and I-696 in 1999 was defeated by over 60 percent of the votes. The off-channel isheries in existence are limited to the Select Area Fishery Enhancement terminal isheries, all of which are near Astoria. Select Area catches are down, not up. Alterna- tive selective gears (purse and beach seines, which weren’t even legal in 2012) have not proven to be viable. And participation in recreational ish- ing is in decline, as it has been for decades. If there are more ishing trips being taken, it is the same people going ishing more often. That may not seem possible during the trafic tie-ups during Buoy 10, but it’s true. Kitzhaber ban Friends and neighbors However, during the campaign against Measure 81 in 2012, former Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber decided to take matters into his own hands, and called for ishery reform, which would transition the lower Colum- bia River gillnet leet into “enhanced off-channel ishing areas,” and reserve the Columbia River main stem for recreational priority. Commercial ish- ing in the mainstem only would be allowed after all recreational objec- tives had been met, and then only with alternative “selective” gear types. This plan would work only if the off-channel ishing areas could be enhanced enough to make up for the loss of mainstem isheries for the commercial leet, and alternative selective gears could be successfully developed. The objective was to turn the Columbia River main stem into a sportishing paradise, and increase participation in recreational ishing by 15 percent within three years. Those three years are now up. None of the objectives of Gov. Kitzhaber’s plan have been met. Roughly two-thirds of the eco- nomic value of the gillnet ishery is still derived from mainstem isheries. So here we are as 2016 winds down. According to the Kitzhaber plan, the gillnetters are to be pushed off the river by the beginning of next year. They are our friends and neigh- bors. They are threatened with being put out of business. Their children go to local schools. They volunteer in local ire and emergency depart- ments, sit on local boards, provide ish that is served in local restaurants, and support local businesses. They have been living in a heightened state of anxiety that their livelihoods will be gone or greatly reduced as soon as next year. The states of Oregon and Wash- ington made commitments to keep their businesses whole during this pro- cess. But the states haven’t been very good at keeping those commitments. If they do not, our entire community will be affected. An important com- ponent of our local economy will be eliminated unless things change. I thought you should know. Hobe Kytr is the administrator for Salmon For All. Its mission is “To provide protection and conservation of Columbia River salmon resources.” Don’t be surprised by water next time By PAUL KRUGMAN New York Times News Service A AP Photo/Beatriz Costa-Lima U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell speaks to reporters during a news conference at Grand Canyon National Park in Ariz. As the Na- tional Park Service prepares to celebrate its 100th anniversary on Aug. 25, 2016, the agency is working to attract more minorities to the country’s national parks and monuments as the demographics of America are expected to change dramatically in the coming years. Match national park dreams with reality T oday marks the 100th birthday of the National Park Service. It is a milestone worthy of celebration and relection. America led the way in establishing national parks. It is easy to take this amazing step for granted. Many other nations have a paltry commitment to parks, or designate them and then virtually abandon them to be despoiled for private proit. Blessed with foresight, considerable resources and a belief in preserving something of this amazing continent for future gener- ations, the U.S. runs a coast-to-coast network of parks that is lit- erally world class. Before congratulating ourselves too much, it’s important to remember there’s a national park maintenance backlog near- ing $12 billion, four times more than the NPS’s annual operat- ing budget. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility notes deteriorating NPS employee morale, a shrinking workforce and a failure to engage in strategic planning. It isn’t enough to establish parks. We must decide how much of a park system we’re able and willing to support, and take steps to match aspirations with reality. disaster area is no place for political theater. The gover- nor of lood-ravaged Louisi- ana asked President Barack Obama to postpone a personal visit while relief efforts were still underway. (Meanwhile, by all accounts, the substantive federal response has been ininitely superior to the Bush administra- tion’s response to Katrina.) He made the same request to Donald Trump, declaring, reasonably, that while aid would be welcome, a visit for the sake of a photo op would not. Sure enough, the GOP candidate lew in, shook some hands, signed some autographs, and was ilmed taking boxes of Play-Doh out of a truck. If he wrote a check, neither his campaign nor anyone else has mentioned it. Heckuva job, Donnie! But boorish, self-centered behav- ior is the least of it. By far the big- ger issue is that even as Trump made a ham-handed (and cheap- skate) effort to exploit Louisiana’s latest disaster for political gain, he continued to stake out a policy posi- tion that will make such disasters increasingly frequent. Let’s back up for a minute and talk about the real meaning of the Louisiana loods. Warmer planet In case you haven’t been keep- ing track, lately we’ve been set- ting global temperature records every month. Remember when cli- mate deniers used to point to a tem- porary cooling after an unusually warm year in 1998 as “proof” that global warming had stopped? It was always a foolish, dishonest argu- ment, but in any case we’ve now blown right through all past records. And one consequence of a warmer planet is more evaporation, more moisture in the air, and hence more disastrous loods. As always, you can’t say that climate change caused any particular disaster. What you can say is that warming makes extreme weather events more likely, so that, for example, what used to be 500-year loods are now happening on an almost routine basis. So a proliferation of disasters like the one in Louisiana is exactly what climate scientists have been warning us about. What can be done? The bad news is that drastic action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases is long overdue. The good news is that the technological and economic basis for such action has never looked better. In particular, renew- able energy — wind and solar — has become much cheaper in recent years, and progress in energy stor- age looks increasingly likely to resolve the problem of intermittency (the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow). Or to put it a different way, we face a clear and present danger, but we have the means and the knowl- edge to deal with that danger. The problem is politics — which brings us back to Trump and his party. Down the rabbit hole It probably won’t surprise you to hear that when it comes to climate change, as with so many issues, Trump has gone deep down the rabbit hole, asserting not just that global warming is a hoax, but that it’s a hoax concocted by the Chinese to make America less competitive. The thing is, he’s not alone in going down that rabbit hole. On other issues Republicans may try to claim that their presidential nomi- nee doesn’t speak for the party that nominated him. We’re already hear- ing claims that Trump isn’t a true conservative, indeed that he’s really a liberal, or anyway that liberals are somehow responsible for his rise. (My favorite theory here, one that has quite a few advocates, is that I personally caused Trumpism by being nasty to Mitt Romney.) But when it comes to denial of climate change and the deploy- ment of bizarre conspiracy theo- ries to explain away the evidence, Trump is squarely in the Republi- can mainstream. He may be talking nonsense, but anyone his party was likely to nominate would have been talking pretty much the same nonsense. It’s interesting to ask why cli- mate denial has become not just acceptable but essentially required within the GOP. Yes, the fossil-fuel sector is a big donor to the party. But the vehemence of the hostil- ity to climate science seems dispro- portionate even so; bear in mind that, for example, at this point there are fewer than 60,000 coal min- ers, that is, less than 0.05 percent of the workforce. What’s happen- ing, I suspect, is that climate denial has become a sort of badge of right- wing identity, above and beyond the still-operative motive of rewarding donors. In any case, this election is likely to be decisive for the climate, one way or another. Obama has made some serious moves to address global warming, and there’s every reason to believe that Hillary Clin- ton would continue this push — using executive action if she faced a hostile Congress. Given the tech- nological breakthroughs of the last few years, this push might just be enough to avert disaster. Donald Trump, on the other hand, would do everything in his power to trash the planet, with the enthusiastic support of his party. So which will it be? Stay tuned.
