02/27/2024
Just a reminder to those way up on their holier than thou pedestals, ivory towers, and high horses, courtesy of a post on NextDoor.
Here are 6 things to think about before you so eagerly strut your environmental enlightenment in front of the rest of us:
1. Turning Capitol Lake into a mud flat WILL make downtown Olympia smell bad, which it was known for up into the early 1980's.
2. Capitol Lake becoming mud flats is not some "as it should be" solution. It will still require dredging, just further out into Budd Inlet, rather than the Capitol Lake dredging, which has purposely been skipped for the last few decades.
3. Capitol Lake mud flats are not some kind of panacea for salmon. Guess what? There were NEVER salmon spawning into Capitol Lake and on up the Deschutes. NEVER. The 30 foot falls were completely impassible and the river un-spawnable until a fish ladder was installed in the 1950s.
4. Guess what else? There are STILL NO SALMON SPAWNING from Capitol Lake into the Deschutes River. Do you know what happens?
Every Spring, young salmon are released from the hatchery pens at Tumwater Falls Park. They travel down the falls, into Capitol Lake, Budd Inlet, Puget Sound, and on out into the Pacific Ocean for a few years. Then they come back. They enter the Puget Sound, come down to Budd Inlet, into Capitol Lake, and on up the fish ladder at Tumwater Falls. Though their goal is to attempt to spawn in the Deschutes River, they are in fact ALL killed at the hatchery in Tumwater Falls Park. NONE actually spawn. The males have their s***m harvested, the females their eggs. The carcasses are sold to processors for dog food or similar uses. Then the eggs and s***m are trucked to a hatchery on the Olympic Peninsula where they are mixed and fertilized for several months of maturation. When ready, the baby salmon are trucked back to the pens at the Tumwater Falls Park hatchery. After being held in the pens there to “imprint” to the location for a period of time, they are released over the falls and into Capitol Lake. There you go: The Circle of Life (Man-made and Man-ended).
5. Turning Capitol Lake into mud flats will do nothing to "save" salmon runs in Capitol Lake / the Deschutes River, because there are none. It is an entirely artificial, man-made, man-supported process. The estuary MAY allow a few more baby salmon to survive longer in the lake before heading out into the Pacific, thus potentially helping a few more of them to return, but the idea that this is akin to tearing down dams or restoring vital habitat that will make a big impact on salmon populations is absolutely false. It is unscientific, disingenuous, and has become self-righteous bloviating in the community for far too long.
6. Instead of destroying people-oriented places, one of the biggest trends in urban planning is currently expanding public access to swimmable water bodies. It is happening all over the world and is one of the most cited solutions to cooling options in the face of global warming. I know it's en vogue to pontificate about how mankind doesn't belong in nature, but human-created development is every much a part of nature as a beehive that folks stare at in amazement. They both serve a purpose, are created by nature's creatures, and have impacts good and bad on their environment. We need to get off this self-flagellating circle jerk and be good stewards while also surviving and thriving.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/10/opinion/climate-change-swimming-clean-rivers-heat-waves.html
https://citylimits.org/2023/08/18/swimmable-cities-are-a-climate-solution/
“As a climate solution, being able to swim in your local waters just seems like a no-brainer,” said Jake Madelone, senior waterfront education coordinator at Waterfront Alliance.
