Pondering the Point of No Return

by Josey Paul, OFCO Advisory Committee Member

Please click this link to read the UW Conservation article by Natasha Loder, to which Josey is responding.

Harvest pressures do terrible damage to fish, trees and other living things. The thing about an ecosystem is that everything is connected. The authors isolate the problems of harvest regulations on fish size and fecundity, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’m surprised they didn’t mention hatcheries, which are genetically enfeebling salmon. Or the loss of habitat. Or how the changes in fish size echo through the entire ecosystem, affecting us in many ways and coming back around to affect the fish all over again.

Not that size pressure isn’t important. The ocean used to have an entirely different species structure based on size. Larger fish actually had a greater biomass than smaller fish species, such as forage fish—just the opposite of what we see today. Two factors used to sustain this inverted structure: The large predators moved slowly and needed fewer calories to survive. The small fish reproduced extremely fast, making them a viable food resource for a larger biomass.

Now we have lost the large fish, but also the small fish. The Pysht nearshore used to be a vast eelgrass meadow. Herring used to mass spawn on the leaves, providing food for predators. With the logging of the Pysht watershed, staggering amounts of fine sediment washed off clearcuts, first smothering salmon redds and then smothering the nearshore eelgrass. The herring no longer have a place to spawn.

Everything is affected by our overharvesting of flora and fauna. Marbled Murrelets used to have those herring as a food source, giving them the energy to sustain nests as far as 50 miles from the ocean. Now the murrelets are finding few forage fish and have had to switch to lower life forms with much less energy. We take away their old growth habitat, wipe out their food resources and then say, hey, they can use some scrubby, high-elevation habitat on Forest Service land 50 miles from the sea.

I also caught this quote, referring to fish harvests: “Consider, for example, a farmer who, from year to year, grew seeds from only the smallest, weakest plants in the field. He would hardly be surprised to find his crops growing successively smaller and feebler as the years went on. Good farmers grow seeds from the largest or most productive plants and thus maximize their yields.”

Yes, we seed savers save our seeds  from our best plants, so our crops get better year after year. Our crops get better because we select plants best adapted to our microclimate. Loggers do just the opposite—they replant with genetically inferior trees. Over the centuries, our forest trees became acclimated to their own microclimate, just as salmon acclimated and genetically adapted to individual streams. My cool, wet valley is much different than Peter’s higher, drier, sunnier and warmer site just a few miles away at Salt Creek. The trees in my forest were the same species, but genetically different than the forest at Peter’s farm, just as the salmon in my stream are different than the salmon in Salt Creek, even though they are the same species. And there were normal evolutionary pressures so that the fittest trees produced the most well-adapted seedlings. Our original forests also benefited from the entire, intact ecosystem, such as fertile soil, bountiful runs of salmon that conveyed marine-derived nutrients into the forests, and a canopy ecosystem that generated nitrogen for older trees.

Now we cut down forests on a 30- to 60-year rotation. Then we replant with nursery trees that were grown from stock sourced from other places and adapted to different conditions. We no longer have forests, but tree farms where the soil is damaged, the genetic structure of the trees enfeebled an ecosystem that no longer functions as it did when our forests evolved.

We won’t save murrelets—or orcas—unless we allow a healthy nearshore ecosystem to return, which means we have to reform logging and animal harvests, and stop wiping out the salmon that used to convey massive amounts of marine nutrients into the forests. Only then can our trees resume a normal pace of growth.

What I find frustrating is that we are out of time. There is a principle in ecology called depensation, which means when a species falls to a critically low level, that species can no longer recover. We see that in salmon. Western Strait fall chum, for example, used to be the salmon with the most biomass in our streams in this area. They are now mostly gone, affected by harvest pressures and because they are especially vulnerable to fine sediment in streams. They build mass redds in low-gradient segments of low-elevation streams, the very places where sediment from clearcut logging and road building settles out. They have not recovered, just as the cod have not been able to recover once their numbers fell to critical levels.

Seven billion people cannot make a living by eating animals or by ruining the ecosystem. We’re trying to do both.