Steelhead and Logic
Re “Frankly, We Have Better Fish to Fry,” March 26, Ventura County Life column inspired by the discovery of a dead female steelhead, with eggs, in the fish screen bay at Freeman Diversion Dam on the Santa Clara River.
The column is a strange mixture, part cynicism and part empathy. Steve Chawkins states that his first thought on hearing of the dead steelhead was, “I wonder if it was a fry-by” and later that he “wondered who had the tartar sauce.” However, he also writes, “I know that restoring the steelhead is a worthy goal.”
It seems appropriate to remind Mr. Chawkins that if we still had thousands of steelhead in the river, as we once did, he could certainly go catch some and get out the tartar sauce.
The upshot of Mr. Chawkins’ musings, although he avoids saying so directly, is that we as a society probably paid too much for the fish ladder and screen, which cost approximately $2 million in 1991. Since then, seven adult fish have been seen in the ladder, which Mr. Chawkins calculated at $286,000 per fish.
A little thought shows Mr. Chawkins’ mathematics to be bogus. First, those seven fish are only the ones that have been detected. There have undoubtedly been more adults passing through the ladder since the adult fish trap and counter were removed from the ladder several years ago. Second, hundreds of juvenile fish (smolts) have been observed going downstream. But suppose the fish ladder were to be supplied with sufficient flow (present flow is limited to a short period--48 hours--after rainstorms) to eventually build the Santa Clara steelhead run to 1,000 adult steelhead per year, only 10% or so of its former numbers. And suppose this continued over 50 years. That is 50,000 fish through the ladder, and the cost per fish would then look much different. There is absolutely no question that, without the ladder, the Santa Clara steelhead are doomed.
The best characterization of the type of thinking exemplified in Mr. Chawkins’ column is lazy logic. It is this type of thinking that has got us into the fix we are in today relative to endangered species. We have, unfortunately, felt free to dam, divert and otherwise impair our river systems without stopping to add up the costs to our environment. Indeed, one of the most glaring omissions in most cost analyses of industrial society’s many projects, in or out of rivers, is the environmental cost.
If we all buy Mr. Chawkins’ line of thinking, humans will never get around to concluding that we have the resources needed to take care of nature and the environment. It simply “costs too much.”
We cannot afford, according to this logic, to be good stewards of our lands and our waters. We seem condemned to continue our slide into some future environmental hell where we will have wiped out all sorts of species, endangered countless more and reduced our own quality of life immeasurably. We could well become, in the end, the most endangered species of all.
RON BOTTORFF
Newbury Park