Make Waves Not War

The dramatic title does not overstate the damage we are doing to our oceans, our planet, and to ourselves.

When you look out to the horizon, from the shore or a ship, you can only see the surface. What lays beneath the depths we can only guess.

We have founded all of our resource extraction from the very surface of science. No depth or long term projections are made about the repercussions of exactly HOW we go about extracting any given resource. The purpose and movement of the resource in nature are not questioned, or how that might affect the intricate web that nature truly is.

From fish, to trees, and whales, to bears. The interconnected webs of nature’s plans can begin to be understood. She plays the long game.

Billions of years of evolution have prepared the current chemistry of earth upon which all life on earth depend.

She ignores our harm, to a point. That point is the terrifying precipice upon which we are standing. Here is a link to a story from 2019 about a tragic grizzly attack fatality that was the result of food scarcity. No salmon equals starving Grizzlies. Also starving Orcas, and in fact starving people. With a resource so vastly nessecary to the very top of the food chain, Why are there no salmon?

However disconnected these four animals and elements seem, they are inextricably reliant on one another. This is in fact, a very tragic and clear example of the results of tampering with nature’s balances. The worst part is that the victims of this tradgey were living a simple life, and were not responsible themselves for the lack of fish. I am not a scientist, though I was raised by one.

I am not qualified to breakdown why there are no salmon, though I witness the deforestation of ancient stands with my eyes, while salmon stocks continue to go extinct in unison with this destruction. I am not qualified but here is someone who is.

For Decades whistle blowers have been attempting to draw connective dots between forest health, salmon stocks, whales and land mammals. This Biologist/Activist Alexandra Morton has made it her life’s work to educate and lobby for change. She is one of my heroes.

I live in the region where the southern resident Orcas of B.C. reside. I have observed them myself in the wild only twice. I have also had eye contact with a grey whale, from a boat in the shallow, clear water sand flats where they feed before their migrations. I have been face to face with a black bear, as a child, while camping on a remote west coast beach. Thank the Goddess there was plenty of fish still in the early 80’s. That is not the case today.

The black bear and the southern resident Orcas, are primarily reliant on salmon stocks. This is one attribute of the southern residents that makes them a unique population.

Salmon have a massively important place in the web, that goes beyond Orcas and bears, they are the primary food source of the Indigenous People of B.C., they also foster fecundity and fertilization of forest stands, and provide food to the very soil that feeds every living thing in the forest.

It is not only de-forestation that threatens these precious and once massively abundant populations.

Ocean based fish farms,

excessive and dangerous transport,

over-fishing and you have the trifecta of what could rightly amount to our complete obliteration from existence.

1. Put fish farms in deserts,
2. generate energy from where you are, through tidal, solar, wind, geothermal, and infinite other innovations.
3. STOP CUTTING DOWN ANCIENT TREES ANYWHERE.

Problem solved, or at least a few.