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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (June 12, 2018)
Page 4A East Oregonian Tuesday, June 12, 2018 CHRISTOPHER RUSH Publisher KATHRYN B. BROWN Owner DANIEL WATTENBURGER Managing Editor TIM TRAINOR Opinion Page Editor Founded October 16, 1875 OUR VIEW Sea lions expose conflicts in laws I 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 steelhead, 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 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. OTHER VIEWS Secret life, value of trees W YOUR VIEWS Ryan Bounds’ nomination a good day for justice Ryan Wesley Bounds’ nomination to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 7. Lady Justice, with her blindfold and scales of justice, smiled. Why? Because Lady Justice knows that Ryan Bounds of Hermiston High School, Stanford University and Yale Law, law clerk to Justice Diarmuid O’Scannlain, counselor to President George W. Bush, and assistant U.S. attorney, will be a superlative justice. Along the way, our two U.S. senators sullied themselves trying to waylay the confirmation of this worthy attorney and decent man. They failed. As they should. After Mr. Bounds is appointed to the bench and hands down his decisions, Democrat and Republican alike will be surprised. Lady Justice will knowingly smile. George Anderson Hermiston CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES U.S. PRESIDENT Donald Trump The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Comments: 202-456-1111 Switchboard: 202-456-1414 www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ U.S. SENATORS Ron Wyden 221 Dirksen Senate Office Bldg. Washington, DC 20510 202-224-5244 La Grande office: 541-962-7691 Jeff Merkley 313 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510 202-224-3753 Pendleton office: 541-278-1129 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE Greg Walden 185 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 202-225-6730 La Grande office: 541-624-2400 Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board. Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the East Oregonian. GOVERNOR Kate Brown 160 State Capitol 900 Court Street Salem, OR 97301-4047 503-378-4582 REPRESENTATIVES Greg Barreto, District 58 900 Court St. NE, H-38 Salem, OR 97301 503-986-1458 Rep.GregBarreto@state.or.us Greg Smith, District 57 900 Court St. NE, H-482 Salem, OR 97301 503-986-1457 Rep.GregSmith@state.or.us SENATOR Bill Hansell, District 29 900 Court St. NE, S-423 Salem, OR 97301 503-986-1729 Sen.BillHansell@state.or.us hile we were obsessing the best-known phrases of Wallace Stegner. A wilderness in the Cascade over the self-obsessive one, Mountains is named for his late people who take a much father, Sen. Henry M. Jackson, longer view of things have been a giant of Congress from an era debating the question of whether when support for purple mountain trees talk to one another, experience majesties was bipartisan. pain, have sex and send out signals of So why is the Trump distress about the eminent collapse of Timothy administration trying to prop up this little planet of ours. Egan unprofitable coal plants, in a move Trees are sociable, it turns out, and Comment that could cost consumers hundreds even somewhat selfless, nurturing of millions of dollars, while an their drought-stricken or wounded unsubsidized industry based on nature’s arboreal siblings. They share nutrients. They glories has to fight the administration? Plus, suffer when a big arm is lopped during the coal-burning, one of the biggest producers of growing season, or a crown is next to an all- earth-warming carbon, is an indirect killer of night light. Some trees warn other trees of those life-supporting and economy-enhancing danger by releasing chemical drifts. forests. I found these relatively new discoveries The president is a fossil fool, but beyond not long after a giant fir came crashing down in my front yard during a freakish windstorm, that, he’s never taken a view that extends to the world that Ivanka’s grandchildren will nearly crushing my family and our century- inherit. His bias for dirty 19th-century energy old house. We were spared by 6 inches. But is based on pleasing a coal industry that has a question remained: What was the big guy gone from employing 883,000 people in trying to say? the 1920s to barely 50,000 now. If the free- Perhaps it has something to do with the market philosophy were still the bedrock 129 million trees that died from climate- principle of governing Republicans, coal change-aggravated drought and beetle would be left to the creative destruction of infestation in California, or the 5 million capitalism. acres of formerly sylvan green wiped out in Beyond the economic value, trees force Colorado by the same plague. Or maybe it’s us to measure time in epochs. In 1870, Victor a president who dictated the largest single Hugo planted a tree outside his home in exile rollback of public land protection in our on the island of Guernsey. His hope was that history, putting a national monument and when the little sapling was a mighty oak, its ancient flora at risk from predators with Europe would be unified. The European political connections. Union and Hugo’s plant are still standing, Trees are fighting back, helped by others doing the talking for them. Sadly, we are past though the tree may be in better shape than the EU. the point when an appeal to our better angels A spruce in Sweden, which sprouted does any good. “It is worse than boorish, it sometime after the last ice age, is 9,500 years is criminal to inflict an unnecessary injury old, having survived all the upheavals of on the tree that feeds or shadows us,” wrote history and weather. But will it live through Henry David Thoreau. “Old trees are our parents, and our parents’ parents, perchance.” the current era? In “The Hidden Life of Trees,” an A lovely sentiment, but largely futile. international best seller by Peter Wohlleben, Instead, in this moment of mercenary and “The Overstory,” a masterful new politics, those of us who are out-proud tree- novel by Richard Powers, forests are main huggers have taken to citing the bottom line. characters, crying to be heard. In the summer, And the winning argument here is simple: Powers writes, water traveling through a Trees are a vast source of wealth. A single single chestnut “disperses out of the million national forest, the 1.7-million-acre Mount tiny mouths of the undersides of leaves, a Baker-Snoqualmie east of Seattle, may be hundred gallons a day evaporating from the worth more in total value than the annual tree’s airy crown into the humid Iowa air.” revenue of Amazon, the world’s largest Some scientists think it’s wrong to online retailer, according to a recent study by anthropomorphize trees. They aren’t sentient the Wilderness Society. life-forms and can’t really “talk” like that The clean water, timber, cultural and grumpy apple tree Dorothy encounters on recreation opportunities of this one forest the way to Oz. But surely they communicate, deliver more economic value than all of through a system that foresters compare to the failing U.S. coal industry. The entire the neural networks of humans. It’s worth a outdoor recreation sector generates at least listen. $373 billion in gross domestic product, more ■ than the gas, oil and mining industry, the Timothy Egan worked for 18 years as a government reported this year. writer for The New York Times, first as the “I have mixed feelings about monetizing Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a the geography of hope,” said Peter Jackson, national enterprise reporter. a writer and conservationist, using one of The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication in the newspaper and on our website. The newspaper reserves the right to withhold letters that address concerns about individual services and products or letters that infringe on the rights of private citizens. Letters must be signed by the author and include the city of residence and a daytime phone number. The phone number will not be published. Unsigned letters will not be published. Send letters to managing editor Daniel Wattenburger, 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com.
