Could California’s Salmon Make a Comeback?
From Salon:
The collapse had been building for more than a century. Salmon are resilient creatures, capable of surviving even as humans dismantle and contaminate their habitat. But that ability has limits, and in 2007 a confluence of factors lined up perfectly to send the population into free fall.
The stresses began with the Gold Rush of 1849, which silted up the waterways. That was followed by the twentieth-century frenzy of dam construction for hydroelectric power and farm irrigation, which reengineered California’s river system. “Salmon are intimately tied to this river continuum,” says Jon Rosenfield. “Impound their waterways and they can’t migrate.” Some 75 percent of the salmon’s historic habitat has been lost, says the biologist Peter Moyle, associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis.