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.