Trout Plan Improves Life Quality for All

* The plan to give endangered steelhead trout a chance to spawn again in Ventura County rivers and streams is a victory for everybody (“Trout Drought,” July 31).

The trout’s return may eventually become a tourist and sports attraction. Also, the trout’s success here will improve overall water quality and restore our riparian habitat--together these are economic, environmental and aesthetic gains. Better water quality and management will help everybody, including industry and agriculture.

The real payoff is the changed point of view we will acquire. We have to see the links between the upstream and downstream flow of the rivers themselves, the relationship of orchards and farms to cities, industry and recreation, and the ocean’s own water quality.

We have to learn to see and think this way--interconnectedly--and act and play this way. We can’t live “off” the land; we live on it and in it. Our appreciation of the web of connections among our activities and between them and nature is the first step toward a new and necessary cooperation that will bring economic health, social justice and environmental protection--all three are essential and interdependent.

If we can make a sustainable path for these spirited trout, they will return. That’s a metaphor for our own health.

BOB CHIANESE

Ventura