SalmonAid organizes to fight threat of extinction
Sean Maher
Oakland Tribune
06/22/2009
OAKLAND — The plight of declining salmon populations and the commercial fishers they support up and down the West Coast drew hundreds of people to Jack London Square on Saturday and Sunday for the second annual SalmonAid Festival, organizers said.
The festival featured food, music and a message of conservation. Some salmon populations around the Central Valley are down 90 percent over the past eight years, SalmonAid Foundation President Jonathan Rosenfield said.
The issues facing wild salmon throughout California and as far north as Alaska involve many local interests represented by more than 2,000 small nonprofit organizations. The foundation first put together the event last year to unite their voices and help consumers, politicians and the media understand the enormity of the issue, Rosenfield said.
"One of the major issues we're asking the state and federal governments to tackle is water management in the state of California," Rosenfield said. "We have huge amounts of water being diverted from the greater Bay Area into the Central Valley for big agricultural corporations to grow crops out there that don't make sense.
"For example, you're seeing a lot of water used to grow grapes, which need a constant water supply to grow," he said. "We don't need to be growing grapes in the desert during a drought."
Salmon don't need a lot of tender care to survive, Rosenfield said — they are "a hearty, tenacious, adaptable species." They just need access to their spawning grounds and relatively clean water in the rivers they travel to get there. But as rivers dry up or are blocked by dams, or are even pushed into reversed flows by powerful pumps, that access gets cut off, and generations fail to reproduce.
"It's hard to predict extinctions to some degree, or sometimes to know if it's not already too late to stop them from happening," Rosenfield said. "But as a Ph.D. conservation biologist, I think that unless we seriously turn things around in the next four or five years, we'll begin to see extinctions occur on a grand scale, across an entire family of species. We're witnessing an ecosystem in collapse."
Meanwhile, the rise in farmed salmon has begun to threaten natural food supplies and an industry and tradition of outdoor, open-seas fishing, said restaurant owner Kenny Belov of the nonprofit Fish or Cut Bait. The nonprofit began with four partner restaurants last year and has expanded to 26, including Baja Taqueria in Piedmont. All the eateries have committed to buying only wild salmon, he said.
