The Salmon are going extinct and we won't be far behind

Coho salmon, here in full vivid spawning colors. One of many species of wild Pacific salmon in danger of extinction. (Jessica Newley)

I remember when I was younger -- around the time of the Spanish Civil War -- I used to listen to my parents and their friends talk with no little animation, about how the world was “going to hell in handbasket.” I never understood what that meant. What was a handbasket, and how did one go anywhere in a "basket," let alone to hell? On top of that, I didn’t think things were so bad when I was growing up in Los Angeles, California (the fact that World War II was going on during my early childhood seemed to have escaped me).

I still don’t know where that particular phrase comes from, but I tend to agree with the sentiment now. Maybe people my age just get cranky -- feel as though nothing’s as good as it used to be. But maybe not. Maybe there’s something to that observation. I’ll tell you this – fishing’s not as good as it used to be. Here in my adopted state of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest generally, native salmon are on the brink of extinction. So, that’s not a cranky old feeling. That’s a fact.

I’ll tell you something else. When I was growing up in Los Angeles back in the mid-Twentieth Century, you could smell the orange blossoms in the spring, and you could look up in the night sky and see the millions of stars, then wake up in the morning and see the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains off to the East. Unless you think smelling exhaust fumes and squinting out with burning, red eyes at an orange-brown sky is a good thing, then I expect you’d agree things were better in LA back then.

But these are just my personal recollections. And they probably color my thinking about a lot of other things – like the way we live, the way we bring up our children, the way we run our country. Things like that.

It never would’ve occurred to me when I was graduating from the University of Southern California in 1961 that kids going to school today, Elementary School at that, would be searched for weapons because 12-year olds and younger are shooting each other to death. Come to think of it, it also never occurred to me that wealthy people -- investment brokers, celebrities, and the like -- would bribe test administrators and college coaches in order to get their kids into USC.

I used to worry about my kids when they were growing up in the Seventies and Eighties, but I will tell you, I never worried that they’d go to school one day and get gunned down by an 18-year old who bought two military-style AR-15s the day after his birthday expressly to go into an elementary school and murder children. As I recall, that was something like the 270th mass shooting in America in just the first half of 2022. But somehow, another 19 children slaughtered was just enough to pass a law on gun reform. Not a law that anyone who cares thinks is enough, but after waiting 30 years for something, well we hope it's the "slippery slope" that the NRA has been warning us about.

There’s been a lot of press over the years about efforts to get the entertainment industry to tone down the violence in films, television, and video games. I agree with that, and I’d add the Internet to the list. But the industry argues that there’s “no evidence” that the subject matter in these media influences people’s behavior. In fact, they argue that the films and television that they produce simply reflect society itself. You know, I don’t buy it. The biggest “e business” on the Internet is pornography and it isn’t there because it’s producers are simply “reflecting society.” It’s there because the scumbags of the world are out to make a buck any way they can. Pornography debases society and no one needs a statistical study to know that.

I’ve never watched a whole lot of television, but I’ve watched it for some fifty years and I’ll tell you what – in today’s television, from comedy to drama, almost nothing seems to be out of bounds. In the past, sponsors seemed to take some responsibility for the content of shows on which their name and product were advertised. Now, their primary concern is ratings. In other words, they’re interested in what percentage of their target audience is watching, not what they’re watching.

Corporate “social responsibility” seems to be on the decline generally. The late Senator John McCain once tried to get a bill passed that would’ve held executives personally responsible if their companies withheld evidence of product defects that resulted in injury or death. Members of the Senate beholding to industry special interests killed the bill. What’s worse, they were able to do this anonymously.

Frankly, I feel strongly that one of the greatest threats we face as a democratic society is the unchecked influence of corporate and other special interests on our government. When George W. Bush, in his preliminary debate with John McCain before the 2000 Presidential Election, said that he wouldn’t support Campaign Finance Reform, I decided right then and there that I wouldn’t vote for him – ever –and I didn’t. I’m sorry that he was ever elected president. Little did I know that not supporting Campaign Finance Reform would be the least of his faults.

Of course, I’ve got a lot of reasons for not voting Republican: I am in favor of the so-called "safety net" programs, like Social Security, Medicare, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). That makes me a socialist in the minds of Republicans.

I'm also in favor of everyone having "personal bodily freedom" That's my term for every human being having the freedom to choose what to do about their health and well-being. I know this is anathema to Evangelical Christians and the Republicans who pander to their religious beliefs, and panhandle for their campaign contributions, but overturning Roe v. Wade is wrong, and the rationale for doing so is stupid. "It says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs." This decision isn't the worst I've seen in my many years of watching one bad decision after another, but it's close, very very close.

Protestors attend the Bans Off Our Bodies rally at the base of the Washington Monument

Well, getting back to the safety net, I think we need to spend more money on education, not on the military (despite my 20 years in the Air Force). And I favor teaching science in our public schools, not hocus-pocus. George W. Bush wants creationism on the curriculum along side evolution. I say, “Nuts!”

Well, I’m rambling, but I’m old and that’s what old folks do sometimes. Now let me tell you what I’m reading. I’m reading an article in my automobile dealer’s magazine, of all things, “Drive,” from Subaru. It’s telling me that today – Saturday, October 7, 2000 – 116 square miles of rain forest will be destroyed; 250,000 newborns will join the World’s exploding population; “at least” 1.5 million tons of hazardous waste will be released into our air, water, and land; Americans alone will throw away enough garbage today to fill the Superdome in New Orleans twice; some 40 to 100 species will become extinct.

I’m a cranky old guy that, like my parents before me, thinks things are getting worse rather than better, and this article is telling me that at the end of today, “the Earth will be a little hotter, the rain a little more acidic and the water a little more polluted…crowded cities will be more crowded and the air…will be a bit dirtier…the web of life will be a bit more threadbare. Tomorrow it starts all over again” Hey, this is my automobile dealer talking to me! Guess what I’m reading in Audubon magazine, for crying out loud!

And speaking of “drive,” I don’t like paying six bucks for a gallon of gas any more than the next guy, but drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Reserve isn’t an option for me. Haven’t we done enough harm to the environment? And half the "cars" I see driving around the Tri-Cities are trucks, or big SUVs. Either buy more fuel efficient vehicles, or buy electric vehicles. Or stop bitching about gas prices!

So here’s my plan: Vote the Republicans out of office – they had their chance and screwed things up royally. Let the Democrats screw things up for a change.

I’m also thinking about meditation. If I understand it, you sit there and try not to think about anything. Hey, that could help. When I told my wife, she said, ”Meditation, hell. You need medication!” She could be right.

Not with a Bang, but a Whimper?

If we could somehow disassociate ourselves from ourselves and all we are, and stand well back away from this planet earth, and hit the rewind button on our remote, taking the planet back through time (whatever that is) to its inception, and then fast forward to the present, we'd be struck by what a dynamic planet the earth is, changing constantly in fits and starts, or more accurately, eruptions, explosions, and earthquakes, in fire and in ice.

In earlier posts I've written about the earth's five mass extinction events, and the hypothesis of many scientists today that we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction event. In examining this hypothesis, scientists have to ask themselves, what caused the first five extinctions? And then, are we seeing similar conditions now? As you might have guessed, there are no easy answers.

It's important to understand what a "mass extinction" means, and how an "event" is defined. Because we ordinary humans have no understanding of time in a geologic sense (unlike rocks), we need to know that an event in paleo terms can occur over millions of years -- there's no agreement on how many millions of years.

A mass extinction is a loss of biodiversity -- plants and animals -- that exceeds what is considered "normal," that is, things becoming extinct as an expected result of evolution, otherwise known as "background" extinction. Thus, an extinction event is a dramatic loss of plant and animal life that occurs rapidly in geologic terms.

There have been a variety of singular events hypothesized as the cause of one or another mass extinction event. Perhaps the best known extinction event and its hypothesized cause is the so-called K-T extinction, named for the timing of the event, the boundary between the end of the Mesozoic -- the Cretaceous era -- and the beginning of the Tertiary period, 65 million years ago. This boundary event marked the end of the dinosaurs, and since most of us at one time or another have been fascinated by these gigantic, strange and fearsome looking creatures, it's no wonder this particular extinction event has generated so much popular interest.

But not just dinosaurs died off in the K-T extinction. Almost all the large vertebrates on Earth, on land, at sea, and in the air became extinct by the end of the Cretaceous Period, and most plankton and many tropical invertebrates, especially reef-dwellers, became extinct. Many land plants were severely affected. Thus, the earth in all its manifestations was a very different place after K-T. Why? What happened?

Many scientists -- paleontologists, biologists, geologists, etc. -- came to believe that a large asteroid impacted the earth at that time, causing widespread devastation and triggering catastrophic global climate change. In fact, a crater has been discovered; an egg-shaped geological structure called Chicxulub, deeply buried under the sediments of the  of Mexico (North America looked like this  65 million years ago). Some scientists insist the asteroid creating the crater impacted earth exactly 65 million years ago.

Other scientists argue the Chicxulub impact predated the K-T boundary by some 300,000 years, and propose that volcanism actually caused the mass extinction. The volcanism theory centers on the so-called Deccan Traps, flood basalts similar to the Columbia River basalts of the northwestern United States. This is one of the largest volcanic provinces in the world. It consists of more than 2,000 meters of flat-lying basalt lava flows and covers an area of nearly 500,000 square km (roughly the size of the states of Washington and Oregon combined) in west-central India. Estimates of the original area covered by the lava flows are as high as 1.5 million square km. The volume of basalt is estimated to be 512,000 cubic km (the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens produced just 1 km3 of volcanic material).

More recently, some scientists have come to the conclusion that it was a combination of meteor strikes and massive volcanic activity that brought about the K-T mass extinction event. What seems more likely to me at least, is that over several million years, the world, rife with erupting volcanoes, became less and less hospitable for its terrestrial and marine guests. Vast amounts of dust, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide poured into the atmosphere, resulting in heavy acid rain (akin to battery acid), acidic oceans, and global temperatures that initially turned frigid (possibly lasting for years) due to dust and debris, and then intolerably hot, due to the longer-term green house effects of carbon dioxide. Violent tornadoes and hurricanes ravaged the earth, the seas fell and then rose, inundating coastal areas, normal food supplies dwindled and what was left was gobbled up by the more adaptable life forms that managed to survive the initial onslaught, such as the plankton species Guembelitria cretacea, a disaster opportunist that flourished in devastated environments when few other species survived.

Chicxulub may have looked like this. This is
actually 951 Gaspra, a much larger asteroid.

And then Chicxulub made its abrupt and violent (100 million megatons equivalent) arrival on the Yucatán peninsula creating a tipping point for the vulnerable planet and spelling an end to life as it existed 65 million years ago.

Extinction

The coral reefs are dying. These largest of all earth’s living structures, intricate and brightly colored, home to a vast panoply of colorful fish, mollusks, marine life of all kinds -- the superstructure of biologically diverse ecosystems -- are bleaching white, breaking up, and withering away.

It won’t be the first time that the reefs have died away. In each of the five previous mass extinctions, coral reefs have been severely impacted, taking many millions of years to recover. In this respect, reefs are like the canary in the coal mine. They are a sentinel, whose current calamitous condition foretells the sixth mass extinction, an event many paleontologists believe the earth has already entered.

The cause or causes of earth’s previous mass extinctions have been a matter of intense scrutiny. Hypotheses have ranged from massive volcanism to asteroid strikes. 

The Permian-Triassic extinction of 250 million years ago (Mya), wiped out over 90% of the planet’s marine species. On land, over 70% of reptile, amphibian, insect, and plant species went extinct. It was the most catastrophic of all earth’s extinctions, and may have been triggered by the eruption of the super volcano known as the Siberian Traps, the most massive eruption and lava flow in earth’s history.

The Siberian Traps eruption, which lasted for a million years, added huge amounts of heat, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide to Earth's surface and atmosphere, and the resulting greenhouse effect generated a long warming trend. The climate change triggered by the warming dramatically shifted weather patterns across the globe.

Carbon dioxide has left its fingerprints on all the massive die-offs experienced during earth’s often violent history. J.E.N. Vernon (2008) has pointed out in his article in the journal Coral Reefs, that recent palaeophysiological studies have clearly implicated CO2 in the destruction of most life on earth during the Permian-Triassic extinction.

There is also evidence of a sudden and massive release of methane, perhaps triggered by increased warming. This would have been an example of positive feedback, that is, CO2 causing warming, melting frozen tundra, and thereby releasing methane, which is considered a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

As it happens, Russia’s Siberian tundra is currently melting. Russia has the largest extent of permafrost in the world. Scientists estimate that permafrost covers more than 10 million square kilometers of Russia. The warming planet is melting permafrost in Siberia, and the melting permafrost is releasing methane in much greater quantities than previously thought. Methane is considered 20 times more damaging as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, which means that Siberia is now actively contributing to  warming. Russian scientists believe the melting of Siberian permafrost is irreversible, as the release of green house gases will perpetuate the warming climate.

Experts say Siberian tundra leaking methane in record amounts

And this brings us to the Sixth Mass Extinction -- the one happening now. We’ll address that in a coming blog post.

Passenger Pigeon

Probably the most terrible example of mass slaughter in the history of wildlife was not the bison but the passenger pigeon - a story that almost defies belief. From Dead Trees EF

At one time, not that long ago, the Passenger Pigeon was probably the most abundant bird on the planet. Accounts of its numbers sound like something out of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds," and strain our credulity today. Alexander Wilson, the father of scientific ornithology in America, estimated that one flock consisted of two billion birds. Wilson's rival, John James Audubon, watched a flock pass overhead for three days and estimated that at times more than 300 million pigeons flew by him each hour. Elongated nesting colonies several miles wide could reach a length of forty miles.

Market hunters prospered, devising a wide variety of techniques for slaughtering the pigeons and collecting their succulent squabs. Adults were baited with alcohol-soaked grain (which made them drunk and easy to catch), and suffocated by fires of grass or sulfur that were lit below their nests. To attract their brethren, captive pigeons, their eyes sewn shut, were set up as decoys on small perches called stools (which is the origin of the term stool pigeon for one who betrays colleagues). Squabs were knocked from nests with long poles, trees were chopped down or were set on fire to make the squabs jump from nests. Disruption of the colonies was so severe that wholesale nest abandonment was common and breeding success much reduced.

So successful were the market hunters that pigeons became cheap enough for use as live targets in shooting galleries. Laws intended to protect the pigeons did not help. In 1886 an editor's note in Forest and Stream said: When the birds appear all the male inhabitants of the neighborhood leave their customary occupations as farmers, bark-peelers, oil-scouts, wildcatters, and tavern loafers, and join in the work of capturing and marketing the game. The Pennsylvania law very plainly forbids the destruction of the pigeons on their nesting grounds, but no one pays any attention to the law, and the nesting birds have been killed by thousands and tens of thousands.

As railroads penetrated the upper Middle West after the Civil War, many millions of pigeons were shipped to cities along the Atlantic seaboard, since, by then, clearing of oak and beech forests and hunting had already exterminated the birds on the East Coast.

Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon came with stunning rapidity. Michigan was its last stronghold; about three million birds were shipped east from there by a single hunter in 1878. Eleven years later, 1889, the species was extinct in that state. Although small groups of pigeons were held in various places in captivity, efforts to maintain those flocks failed. The last known individual of the species, a female named Martha, died in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo and is now on display in the U.S. National Museum of Natural History.

Elephants

My painting of elephants at a dusty African watering hole is based on a National Geographic photograph.

Researchers at the University of Washington tell us that elephants face the risk of extinction as soon 2020 as a result of habitat loss and poaching.