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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JUNE 8, 2018
editor@dailyastorian.com
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Publisher
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Editor
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OUR VIEW
Sea lions expose conflicts in laws
Protected sea lions are
eating protected fish
t must have been quite a sight.
As U.S. Rep. Kurt Schrader tells
the story in his latest newsletter,
he and representatives of the Oregon
Department of Fish and Wildlife were
at Willamette Falls, where sea lions
were decimating the salmon and steel-
head, which are protected under the
federal Endangered Species Act.
“We witnessed a sea lion taking a
bite out of a salmon before members of
the Grand Ronde tribe who were fishing
at the falls could reel it back in,” the
congressman wrote. “The depredation
was stunning to see.”
The sea lions are amazing predators,
totally outmatching the fisheries and
wildlife managers, who had already tried
to evict them from the falls. They had
scooped up 10 of the offending critters
and transported them to new stomping
grounds along the Oregon Coast, where
they wouldn’t be eating protected fish.
Within a few days, though, the sea
lions were back at Willamette Falls. The
pinnipeds had swum up the coast to the
Columbia River and upstream to the
Willamette River all the way to the falls.
It was a trek of a couple hundred miles.
The problem is that sea lions are also
protected under federal law. The Marine
Mammal Protection Act forbids anyone,
including wildlife managers, from
“taking” a sea lion, whale, dolphin, sea
otter or polar bear without a permit.
The law, which Congress passed
and President Richard Nixon signed
in 1972, was aimed at preventing
incidental take and harassment of the
marine mammals.
In the Willamette Falls case,
the salmon are protected under the
Endangered Species Act of 1973.
Congress — and Nixon, before he was
run out of office — approved that law to
protect local populations of fish, plants
and animals. Note that it doesn’t protect
species so much as local populations.
At Willamette Falls, wildlife managers
have a legal standoff: Protected sea lions
are eating protected fish.
All of which would be mildly
interesting to farmers in the Willamette
Valley, except for one thing. Though
populations of hatchery-reared fish
I
AP Photo/Don Ryan
A California sea lion leaps out of a cage toward the beach and open Pacific Ocean as state Department of Fish and Wildlife scientist
Bryan Wright holds the gate open March 14 in Newport.
‘The sea lions are amazing predators, totally
outmatching the fisheries and wildlife managers,
who had already tried to evict them from the falls.’
AP Photo/Don Ryan
A California sea lion waits to be released
into the Pacific Ocean in Newport on
March 14.
are healthy, fisheries managers have
been working overtime to rebuild the
populations of native run fish in the river
system. They outdid themselves recently
with a plan to spend $200 million to
$300 million to build a concrete tower
in Detroit Lake to regulate the water
temperature for the fish.
While that tower is under construction,
irrigation water to 8 percent of the
valley’s farmland would be either cut off
or reduced for at least two years.
Here the managers want to take drastic,
and expensive, measures on behalf of
protected native run fish and protected sea
lions are killing them.
What to do.
ODFW last year applied to the
National Marine Fisheries Service to
kill the sea lions before they wipe out
the salmon and steelhead. That agency,
operating at the speed of government, is
expected to make a decision by the end of
this year.
In the meantime, Schrader, a
Democrat, and Republican Reps. Jaime
Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse of
Washington state and Rep. Don Young
of Alaska have introduced legislation to
update the Marine Mammal Protection
Act.
Called the Endangered Salmon and
Fisheries Predation Prevention Act, the
bill would extend to states and tribes the
authority to kill sea lions that prey on
endangered salmon and steelhead. Sea
lions have also been making a banquet of
protected fish in the Columbia River.
It’s a good first step toward getting a
handle on this problem. And it might also
be a step toward revisiting the Nixon-era
environmental laws that conflict with one
another and cost taxpayers hundreds of
millions of dollars a year to protect local
populations of fish, plants and wildlife.
If everything is protected, then nothing
is protected.
WRITER’S NOTEBOOK
Politicians need daily dose of ego feed
Knowing when to
leave the stage is
an essential choice
t is hard to avoid the phenomenon of
Rudolf Giuliani.
The man who was famously known
as America’s Mayor now appears night and
day as President Trump’s lawyer. Gaffes in
Giuliani’s statements have generated abundant
commentary and fodder for late-night talk
show hosts. Commenting
on the gaps in Giuliani’s
knowledge, one analyst
has said that he’s not really
the president’s lawyer; he
is a television version of a
lawyer.
It is a strange choice for
STEVE
a
man
in his seventh decade
FORRESTER
to opt for self-debasement.
In that, Giuliani is not alone.
Fronting for a morally fraught president has
brought out the worst in a number of men and
women.
Why do it? There is the paycheck, of
course. But there is the ego feed that only
television provides. In a revealing statement
to The New York Times on May 12, Giuliani
said: “The last year and a half, I haven’t been
on television. Frankly, I missed it.”
Knowing when to leave the stage is an
essential choice for the public man or woman.
Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah is giving evidence
of having stayed too long. Sen. Hatch spoke
about people who supported Obamacare, say-
ing they were some “of the stupidest, dumbass
people I’ve met.” On the following day, Hatch
I
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
Rudy Giuliani speaks in Washington, D.C.
walked that comment back and apologized.
The Obamacare comment was a level of
intemperance that was not typical of Hatch in
the decade I observed him on Capitol Hill.
Watching Hatch in real time while he loses
his instinct and self control reminded me that
Oregon Sen. Mark Hatfield was wise in retir-
ing from the Senate in his prime.
One phenomenon I observed as a congres-
sional correspondent was the massive doses
of ego feed that senators and congressmen
received from television cameras. As Rudy
Giuliani has inferred, the camera’s gaze can
become an addiction. In the 1990s it occurred
to me that some of the lawmakers whom I
observed were like aging addicts who needed
their daily fix of ego feed.
Television changed Congress
Retirement from daily journalism has
allowed me to pursue a topic I’ve been
researching, off and on, for 40 years. It is
the life of Richard L. Neuberger — one of
America’s most prolific freelance writers and
the first Democrat Oregon elected to the U.S.
Senate in 40 years.
This research immerses me into a dis-
tinctly different Oregon political culture. And
the U.S. Senate culture Neuberger inhabited
in the 1950s was much different than today’s.
When I watched the Senate in the 1990s, I
had a prior reference point — 30 years prior,
as a Senate page in 1963. The most profound
difference was that senators no longer knew
each other. They had lost social contact.
It occurred to me that two innovations
had changed Congress. They were central air
conditioning and the commercial jet. Central
air conditioning ended the long congressional
summer recess, in which western senators
traveled home by train. And the commercial
jet made today’s absurd amount of senatorial
travel possible. It also eliminated the weekend
socializing that once was a fixture of congres-
sional life.
Of course, a third innovation was the
advent of television. In Dick Neuberger’s
1954 upset victory, television was a relatively
small factor. He ran a campaign that we would
not recognize today — driving from town to
town in an old Buick with his wife Maurine.
I know that not from watching archival tele-
vision footage, but from a newspaper reporter
who tracked the Neubergers’ progress around
the state.
These days, technology allows the camera
to be omnipresent. As we know, that can be a
great opportunity or a trap. And for the poli-
tician-celebrity losing his edge, the camera’s
eye will catch the worst absurdities.
Addiction to television’s ego feed is not
as physically or financially destructive as
substance abuse or a gambling addiction. But
it comes with a symptomology. It enables
foolish behavior on a huge stage. For aging
politicians losing their wits, that can become
dark and embarrassing territory.
Steve Forrester, the former editor and pub-
lisher of The Daily Astorian, is the president
and CEO of EO Media Group.