Ostrowski's Outlook VI
Summer 2000
When I first started writing these articles, I expected to create some controversy or at least some discussion. All I've gotten so far is people agreeing with me. That's ok but it's not to be believed. Apparently, people who don't agree with me don't feel strongly enough about the subject to take pen in hand and write a response. Part of the problem has to be me.
I've worked in government for so long, looking for solutions, that I may be saying things with a tad too much tact and diplomacy. I'll try to be more contrary if you'll try to write. What I'm going to do this time is just blurt out a few opinions about how the world's screwed up and what should be done about it. You then merely read the article, form a differing opinion, write it down, send it in and fun ensues.
First subject: Salmon. We may not be endangered but we're a pretty funny species, we human beings. We think that we can take the world we've built and make it look and work like a natural world and still have all the convenience of what we've come to love in our built world. Every time we try to modify the world to make it better we change something we didn't plan on.
We built the St. Lawrence Seaway for shipping and created a playground for alewives, an Atlantic herring that had no significant predators in the Great Lakes. Populations flourished, food supplies dwindled and alewives died and washed ashore, stinking up beaches for miles. Human beings saw the problem and brought in salmon to eat the alewives and create a wonderful sport fishery at the same time. The salmon were so successful that they curtailed the alewife population and did a job on the fertilizer industry that had grown up because of the alewife surplus. I haven't followed the latest news on this story but my guess is that human beings are trying to fix it again and will cause something else to go wrong because of their actions.
That's one of the difficulties with an ecosystem. There's so much going on and it's so interconnected that humans who love simple solutions usually cause more trouble than they imagine.
We love to talk about letting the science dictate what we should do to save endangered species but it isn't a science problem; it's a management problem. If we look at this thing like a big biological machine that's turning out a product with quality defects, we can use some quality management principles to attempt to solve the problem. The quality defects are diminished salmon runs and the sources of the defects are well known to come from a variety of sources. What we haven't done is look at the relative contribution of those sources of the problem and the cost to cure and therefore the cost benefit ratio for each. We could then concentrate our efforts where they would do the most good. What we're doing instead is identifying all the sources and setting up programs to work on all of them so everyone can share the pain. What will happen is either that we'll fail and blame politics for interfering with science or we'll succeed because of things going on in the ocean that we don't know much about and didn't do anything about. In that case we'll cite the statistics we've collected to show how much good the programs we instituted have done and pat ourselves on the back for another job well done. After a few years something will happen that we didn't count on but that was caused by our actions and will start us on another round of world saving.
Do I think salmon aren't worth saving? I love salmon. I love smoked salmon even more. So far smoking is the only sure-fire way we've come up with to preserve salmon, however. If we want to come up with better ways, we'll have to manage better and be more realistic about our ability to un-ring the bell that is human intervention.
If you disagree, write in. If you agree and can't hold it in, just email me at ostrowj@pacifier.com and we can just keep it to ourselves. If you disagree strongly, don't email me; you might be the kind of human who sends viruses when you're unhappy.