Manifest Destiny on 'The River
The day will dawn grey on Friday over the Lower Columbia River for the gillnetters. How does that affect Southern Oregon? Conservation battles in one place affect the outcomes of similar battles far and wide. I've been careful not to diss the gillnetters in Oregon's inland waters because Alaskan gillnetters watch, my brother included. But in an intercept fishery like near the mouth of the Columbia, just too many fragile stocks from tributaries all over the Pacific Northwest are being hammered.
Alaska closed some of their famous intercept fisheries long ago. Some are still going, and in a sense, all salmon fisheries are intercept fisheries. They don't discriminate much, but limiting where the fishery is prosecuted, managers can get the by-catch of non-target species and races down to an acceptable level. It just isn't possible on the Lower Columbia by gillnetting the main channel. Besides flying in the face of the Endangered Species Act, with all the individual threatened and endangered salmon runs being caught.
On Friday, the Fish and Feathers Commissions of Oregon and Washington will line up with their Governors, the concerned public, and the salvation of many salmon species, or they will side with a small dirty fishing club called the gillnetters. The ideologies on all sides are firmly entrenched. The gillnetters will be sore as a bunch of Tea Partiers if they get limited to terminal harvest areas. Lets take a look at the ideologies at play. I can speak to this because I was a gillnetter once. Now I don't like dirty fishing methods much because the damage to the ecology of the planet is obvious to me. I had to step back from direct involvement in the fishing industry for family reasons and I got a fresh perspective. It took time, it's not easy. I still want to dabble in the fishing industry, even though I know for sure it's what I need like a hole in the head.
Ideologies, otherwise known as paradigms, are tough nuts to crack. A famous East European psychoanalyst/sociologist recently tackled this subject in something I was reading. His thesis is that we embrace our ideologies with a passion, because they are what makes us content. They create a framework for interpreting the ebb and flow of life and it's myriad shifting events of common and uncommon nature. It's a confusing place, this earth. So an ideology is a handy thing to have in your survival arsenal.
The problem is that they are not easy to change by individuals themselves, in response to external, and even etermal, threats. And our problem as a society in America is that we aspire to one man, one vote to respond to new situations. The situations change lots faster than our ideologies change, is the bottom line. That's where Governors come in, like Oregon's Governor when he simply said, "Lets quit commercial fishing with these gillnets out in the middle of the river where the whole swimming ecosystem of the river is moving around." Remember, gillnets can't distinguish between the keepers and the non-keepers, and they strangle both with equal efficiency.
Back to my point about the paradigms commercial fishermen live in. Been there, done that. I started gillnetting in Alaska in the mid '60s. Mono-filiment gillnets had just been invented. Gillnetting in Alaska exploded. I became aquainted with fishermen who had moved up from gillnetting the mouth of the Columbia River. The Columbia's salmon runs sounded like they were on a serious decline then.
Fishing of all kinds is a funny thing. When the success rate drops off, you become like a frog in a slowly heating pot of water. You just don't notice the danger coming, and even when it comes, due to fairly rigid paradigms, you just die happily. What's the expression, "Old fishermen never die, they just smell that way." A group of sport fishermen gather on the Upper Rogue River every year to fish for king salmon and swap yarns. One of them hadn't caught a fish in ten years. But they keep doing it. Folks who support other folks' destructive ideologies are really supporting their right to have them left intact.. But do they have a right to have their paradigm left intact in these cases? That is the real question.
Elections never change ideologies, they just sideline the less popular ones so society as a whole can move forward. Or at least not slip back. The stocks of fish in the Pacific Northwest, and even Alaska, have been slipping back for a long time. To save each species, concerned citizens are up against entrenched paradigms, not individual walking, talking organisms. To put it plainly, I love all commercial fishermen, I just don't love some of the ways they do business.
When there was seemingly no end to the amount of fish in the ocean, and Manifest Destiny was driving the new settlers of this land to exploit as quickly as possible, gillnets were an effective way to do this. Now some of the variables have changed, but gillnetting hasn't. Some call them 'curtains of death.' I certainly didn't back in 1965 when we hauled aboard anything in the path of our net, including the baby seal that bit a hole in my fairly new boot.
Another problem with NOT sidelining outdated ideologies is that it is harder to limit them in other areas. It took a long time to sideline the Vikings. God only knows the amount of havoc they wrought on civilization and the environment before they were pushed back to the fjords where they came from, or melded into other societies. One noted Viking leader was called Harald the Walker, because he was too tall to ride a horse. Eight and nine foot tall Indians were common on this continent at one time. Red headed ones were smoked out of a cave in the Southwest and rubbed out. Manifest Destiny on the water is one paradigm that has outlived it's time.
Alaska closed some of their famous intercept fisheries long ago. Some are still going, and in a sense, all salmon fisheries are intercept fisheries. They don't discriminate much, but limiting where the fishery is prosecuted, managers can get the by-catch of non-target species and races down to an acceptable level. It just isn't possible on the Lower Columbia by gillnetting the main channel. Besides flying in the face of the Endangered Species Act, with all the individual threatened and endangered salmon runs being caught.
On Friday, the Fish and Feathers Commissions of Oregon and Washington will line up with their Governors, the concerned public, and the salvation of many salmon species, or they will side with a small dirty fishing club called the gillnetters. The ideologies on all sides are firmly entrenched. The gillnetters will be sore as a bunch of Tea Partiers if they get limited to terminal harvest areas. Lets take a look at the ideologies at play. I can speak to this because I was a gillnetter once. Now I don't like dirty fishing methods much because the damage to the ecology of the planet is obvious to me. I had to step back from direct involvement in the fishing industry for family reasons and I got a fresh perspective. It took time, it's not easy. I still want to dabble in the fishing industry, even though I know for sure it's what I need like a hole in the head.
Ideologies, otherwise known as paradigms, are tough nuts to crack. A famous East European psychoanalyst/sociologist recently tackled this subject in something I was reading. His thesis is that we embrace our ideologies with a passion, because they are what makes us content. They create a framework for interpreting the ebb and flow of life and it's myriad shifting events of common and uncommon nature. It's a confusing place, this earth. So an ideology is a handy thing to have in your survival arsenal.
The problem is that they are not easy to change by individuals themselves, in response to external, and even etermal, threats. And our problem as a society in America is that we aspire to one man, one vote to respond to new situations. The situations change lots faster than our ideologies change, is the bottom line. That's where Governors come in, like Oregon's Governor when he simply said, "Lets quit commercial fishing with these gillnets out in the middle of the river where the whole swimming ecosystem of the river is moving around." Remember, gillnets can't distinguish between the keepers and the non-keepers, and they strangle both with equal efficiency.
Back to my point about the paradigms commercial fishermen live in. Been there, done that. I started gillnetting in Alaska in the mid '60s. Mono-filiment gillnets had just been invented. Gillnetting in Alaska exploded. I became aquainted with fishermen who had moved up from gillnetting the mouth of the Columbia River. The Columbia's salmon runs sounded like they were on a serious decline then.
Fishing of all kinds is a funny thing. When the success rate drops off, you become like a frog in a slowly heating pot of water. You just don't notice the danger coming, and even when it comes, due to fairly rigid paradigms, you just die happily. What's the expression, "Old fishermen never die, they just smell that way." A group of sport fishermen gather on the Upper Rogue River every year to fish for king salmon and swap yarns. One of them hadn't caught a fish in ten years. But they keep doing it. Folks who support other folks' destructive ideologies are really supporting their right to have them left intact.. But do they have a right to have their paradigm left intact in these cases? That is the real question.
Elections never change ideologies, they just sideline the less popular ones so society as a whole can move forward. Or at least not slip back. The stocks of fish in the Pacific Northwest, and even Alaska, have been slipping back for a long time. To save each species, concerned citizens are up against entrenched paradigms, not individual walking, talking organisms. To put it plainly, I love all commercial fishermen, I just don't love some of the ways they do business.
When there was seemingly no end to the amount of fish in the ocean, and Manifest Destiny was driving the new settlers of this land to exploit as quickly as possible, gillnets were an effective way to do this. Now some of the variables have changed, but gillnetting hasn't. Some call them 'curtains of death.' I certainly didn't back in 1965 when we hauled aboard anything in the path of our net, including the baby seal that bit a hole in my fairly new boot.
Another problem with NOT sidelining outdated ideologies is that it is harder to limit them in other areas. It took a long time to sideline the Vikings. God only knows the amount of havoc they wrought on civilization and the environment before they were pushed back to the fjords where they came from, or melded into other societies. One noted Viking leader was called Harald the Walker, because he was too tall to ride a horse. Eight and nine foot tall Indians were common on this continent at one time. Red headed ones were smoked out of a cave in the Southwest and rubbed out. Manifest Destiny on the water is one paradigm that has outlived it's time.
posted by Alaskacafe at 5:17 AM
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