Reading helps me learn more about myself and my place in the world. Dancing gives me motivation to overcome whatever is coming next, and reminds me of everyone i love, nothing else compares. Being outside is where i feel an innocence i felt when i was a kid playing make believe, i feel safe and real outdoors.. Birds don't care if i wear make up.
When i talk about taking our dams, I'm not "just" talking about liberating rivers, and I'm not "just" talking about saving salmon. I'm talking about forests and meadows and aquifers and everyone else whose home this was long before the arrival of civiization. I'm talking about those whose home this is. You cannot seperate rivers from forests from meadows, and it's foolish to think you can. If you kill rivers, you kill forests and meadows and everyone else. The same holds true for all parts of these relationships, in all directions. I've long known that salmon feed forests, but i did not know how dependent forests are on theses fish until i read a luminous essay called The Gift of the Salmon By Kathleen Dean Moore and her son Jonathan. The essay begins with part of a letter Jonathan wrote to his mother from Alaska, where salmon have not yet been destroyed by civilization: "The creek is so full of sockeye, it's a challenge just to walk upstream. I stumble and skid on dead salmon washed up on the gravel bars. It's like stepping on human legs. When i accidentally trip over a carcass, it moans, releasing trapped gas. In shallow water, fish slam into my boots. Spawned-out salmon, moldy and drying, drift down the current and nudge against my ankles. Glaucous-winged gulls swarm and scream upstream, a sign the grizzles are fishing. The creek stinks of death." The next summer, Kathleen went to visit the spot, now clean of salmon, and asked, "Where did the piles of dead salmon he witnesses go? What difference does their living and dying make to the health of the entire ecosystem?" As you know, salmon provide a tremendous influx of nutrients into the forests. They put on about 95 percent of their weight in the ocean, and carry this weight into the forest and die. Prior to the arrival of civilization-and dams- the amount of nutrients that flowed into forests this way was nearly unimaginable. Salmon, steelhead, shad, herring, striped bass, lamprey, eels, and many other fish ran the rivers to bring their bodies home. Researchers estimate that about five hundred million pounds of salmon(not including steelhead, lampreys, and so on) swam up the rivers of the Pacific Northwest (with some streams averaging more then three salmon per square yard over the whole stream). That's hundreds of thousands of pounds of nitrogen and phosphorous each year. When the salmon come in it's time for a feast. Bears eat salmon. Eagles eat salmon. Gulls eat what the bears and eagles leave behind. Maggots eat what the gulls leave behind. Spiders eat the maggots-turned-flies. Caddisflies eat dead salmon. Baby salmon eat living caddisflies. In the Pacific Northwest, sixty-six different vertebrates eat salmon. That includes salmon themselves: up to 78 percent of the stomach contents of young coho and steelhead consist of salmon carcasses and eggs. Between 33 to 90 percent of nirtogen in grizzl bears come from salmon, or at least it did when there were salmon for them to eat. This was true as far inland as Idaho. As go the salmon, so go the bears. Phosphorous from pink salmon makes it's way into mountain goats. Trees next to streams filled with salmon grow three times faster than those next to otherwise identical streams. Three times. David Montgomery, in King of Fish, writes, "For Sitka spruce along streams in southeast Alaska this shortens the time needeed to grow a tree big enough to create a pool, should it fall into the steam, from over three hundred years to less than a century. Salmon fertilize not only their streams but the huge trees that create salmon habitat when they fall into the water." As go the salmon, so go the lakes. Kathleen Dean Moore notes that " the cycles of salmon are mirrored by the growth of plankton, the foundation of the food chain that nourishes live in a lake. The more salmon, the more zoo plankton, and the more algae flourish in the lake...[Studies] show the precipitous drop in plankton levels and lake productivity that mark the scale of large-scale fishing in the late 1800's. Over the last 100 years, fishing has diverted up to two-thirds of the annual up-stream movement of salmon-derived nutrients from the local ecosystem to human beings." Add in dams, industrial forestry, and the other ways the civilized torment and destroy salmon, and rivers in the northwest starve: they only recieve about 6 percent of the nutrients they did a century ago. The forests need salmon. We need salmon. And salmon need us. As Bill Frank Jr., Chair of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission stated, "If the salmon could speak, he would ask us to help him survive. This is something we must tackle together." I think they are speaking if only we would listen. Here is what Jonathan Moore wrote to his mother: " I have seen sockeye salmon swimmin upstream to spawn even with their eyes pecked out. Even as they are dying, as their flesh is falling away from their spines, I have seen salmon fighting to protect their nests. I have seen them push up creeks so small that they rammed themselves across the gravel. I have seen them swim upstream with huge chunks bitten out of their bodies by bears. Salmon are incredibly driven to spawn. They will not give up." They are speaking. We must listen.- d. jensen
Classic rock, indie/electronica/house, raggae.
Anything that makes me laugh or scream from excitement. Super Troopers, Harold and Kumar, There will be blood, The doors,
I wish everyone including myself would break our televisions. we'd be happier and insecurites will eventually seem miniscule. It's too bad it's too boring to do anything but watch tv sometimes. I think people's reactions come straight from what they see on the screen from the moment they start watching disney cartoons as kids, "they're unrelatable" a friend of mine says, and make you distress about your own life. BUT.. that's just another point of view.
Anyone from everywhere that is struggling for survival, We're all the same.