EPA instructed to reverse protections for Bristol Bay salmon...

RLLigman

Well-known member
In complete disregard of previous cost:benefit analysis studies that indicated that the sport and commercial value of the Bristol Bay salmon fishery far exceeded the total gold deposit estimated value over the mine's life, opposition due to water quality degredation by indigenous peoples communities downstream of the proposed site, as well as investor pushback during Rio Tinto's ownership:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/09/us/epa-alaska-pebble-mine-salmon-invs/index.html
 

That was very interesting, Rick. Thanks for putting it up so I could read it. That, sir, is just the tip of the iceberg and maybe some day there might be a few more souls on this globe that will give more credence to what scientists have to say. So much has happened in the past couple of years.
Al
 
The Administration's follow-up action was to move to reduce protections afforded to threatened species populations and make management determinations on a case-by-case basis; clear-cut, burn, and pave...
 
Best theory on ecosystem is.. It's like a Jenga game, you can pull out a block here and there but at some point the whole system will collapse.
 
Ken, you're right. An "old saw" within the community ecology field is that: the more diverse the ecosystem remains the more stable it is and the better it resists "external perturbations." As one-by-one local ecosystem support systems are removed or badly damaged, a tipping point is eventually reached. Example: Both alewife and sea lamprey had physical access to the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario. They had limited impacts on the ecosystem because their numbers remained low until settlement and deforestation raised stream temperatures to ranges that enabled successful spawning and consequent spread throughout the watershed as well as access to the upper Great Lakes via the Welland Canal.

Darwinian evolutionary theory advanced the concept of natural selection functioning as a near constant through time. This gave rise to the creationist's counter argument that there is nearly no "gradualism" in evidence within the fossil record, therefore Darwinian Evolutionary Theory is a hoax. Steven J. Gould advanced the concept of Punctuated Equilibrium, where marked environmental change acts as the principal selection pressure on ecosystems and organisms, with speciation advancing rapidly when the local environment undergoes radical changes due primarily to geologic upheaval or a larger landscape-wide extinction event like the asteroid collision in the Yucatan Peninsula, evidenced by the Kt horizon within the strata. Now, that radical "reshaper" of the global landscape is Man.
 
Last edited:
Now that I live in SWFL I now see recent video of Panthers and Bob cats that are staggering with their back legs giving out every few steps.Then there are the maps that show SWFL in 2050 mostly covered by the ocean. Some scientists think it may occur sooner with the ice melt this summer. Then we had Blue Green algae and Red Tide last year with tons of dead sea life on the beaches.
Too bad it has become a political debate.
Mother nature will always survived even if it means eliminating humans.
Just my observations
Ken
 
RLLigman said:
The Administration's follow-up action was to move to reduce protections afforded to threatened species populations and make management determinations on a case-by-case basis; clear-cut, burn, and pave...

Don't forget rescinding the Clean Water Rule and the Clean Power Plan.
 
WAPO fact check on the United States' status and rank for air and water quality:

Trump withdrew the United States from participation in the Paris accord to combat climate change, and he falsely asserted that the United States had the world?s ?cleanest air? and ?cleanest climate? and even the ?cleanest water.? The United States actually ranks 27th in the world, according to the authoritative Environmental Performance Index, a project of Yale and Columbia universities. It ranks 10th for air quality ? but 88th on exposure to particulate matter, an indication of the health effects from pollution ? and 29th for water and sanitation. The United States is tied for first place ? with nine other countries ? for the quality of drinking water. As for whether things have improved under Trump, that?s hard to track in the available data ? in fact, the number of unhealthy days in the United States went up from 2016 to 2017, according to government data ? but he has taken a number of actions that could reverse or slow the gains made in air and water quality since 1990.


1990 is passage date of the Clean Water Act.
 
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh, the noble "Redman" of both lore and yore.

In spite of having all the tribal health care accounts in the Upper Midwest when I worked for Merck, as well as numerous dealing with them as participants in the tribal gillnet/trapnet/ subsistence fishery on the Great Lakes for years...I have yet to meet ONE who lived-up to the stereo-type you advance! How odd! Fraud, poor management, embezzlement of tribal funds, LLCs set-up off tribal books by various tribal chairman for personal gain,...failure to enforce tribal statutes for fish and game violations. Pretty much the entire gammet of offenses.

I wouldn't include the Ekdahl brothers who we caught fishing lake trout at Stannard Rock back in the '80s; thirteen miles outside of their Treated ceded fishing waters. I would not include the two Soo Tribal commercial fishers (Jentzen brothers) who for five years purchased illegally caught yellow perch and walleye from a group of subsistence fishers who were running thousands of feet of gang rigged nets under the ice of Big and Little Bay de Noc waters, selling them as by-catch from their nets.. Immediately prior serving their two year jail sentence, they set and abandoned approx. 5 miles of gillnet, eventually recovered by the MDNR Great Lakes Enforcement personnel when tribal enforcement officers from the Soo Band failed to act to retrieve the nets once located off Pte.Aux Barquex.

And it definitely wouldn't be any of these gentlemen:

https://abc10up.com/2014/11/19/feds-probe-great-lakes-commercial-fishing/
 
Jeff, I didn't mention them, until now, since they were just enacted, markedly limiting the scope of the Clean Water Act.

I remember running into one of the two new infectious disease specialists who had just joined the group at the Regional Medical Center from Milwaukee. During the conversation, she mentioned that she was aghast to find out that the hospital drew its water supply via the city's system from Lake Superior. This was after the Cryptosporidiosis (caused by Cryptosporidium sp.) outbreak in Milwaukee. I directed her to talk to her senior practice partner, since he had moved immediately when that occurred to determine whether the Marquette system's hyper-filtration unit, about the size of a football field, was removing this potential pathogen, which it was.

The Clean Water Act was used as the guiding document in Michigan that moved the legislature to require nearly all municipalities on the Great Lakes to draw their water supplies from groundwater sources, if feasible.
 
Back
Top