I purchased Tags last Monday night, and had two nice Steelhead Tuesday afternoon, so there are still some fish out there. Obviously not very smart fish if I was able to catch them, but fish all the same.
I amn't old enough to remember things before clear cuts, mass pollution or some of the other major mistakes that society and industry did to our land. I am old enough to remember when a river caught fire somewhere over near the East Coast, and when we would drive to the beach over the pass and see enormous patches of timber completely gone, right up to the river and stream banks. I also remember how hard it was to breathe some days because of the multitude of wigwam burners in the Valley, and days when you literally could not see to the end of the block because open grass-field burning was allowed. And also McDonald's styrene hamburger boxes (now replaced with plastic water bottles), and a poor native sitting on his horse, crying.
We can blame a lot of those past and current problems on government, but industry did its share as well. You can't tell me that the Army went to Dow Chemical and said, "Hey, we need to defoliate a few hundred thousand acres of jungle over in Vietnam (even though the Army knew that most of the Viet Cong were using tunnels), and even though we know that you will be providing a noxious chemical, we will be exposing our soldiers to it as well", without at least one Dow Chemical exec thinking, "Hey, this doesn't fit into our Mission Statement".
Society also did its part, as we allowed things to get to that nasty point because it was inconvenient to stop what we had been doing for years. So I can tell you that while it may not seem possible, we actually have done a lot of work to clean up our act, sort of, since the early 1970's.
We often travel over to Eastern Oregon, and one of the stops has a display of life on the Columbia before the dams went in. It is amazing to think of those great falls being buried by the waters. The natives and the settlers caught a ton of Salmon, but there also weren't as many people back then...Of course it would be difficult for us to live without those dams now, as the cost of electricity and the level of pollution in the Pacific Northwest would soar if we didn't have hydroelectric power.
Finally, I do not understand why none of the President's State of The Union speeches since Jimmy Carter's day has ever had any forceful challenge to the American people to focus solely on developing hydrogen-based fuels and to cut off the need for oil within a decade. We were able to meet a similar challenge and succeeded in landing a man on the Moon within that 10-year period, and all we have really obtained from that effort is Teflon and Tang. It boggles the mind to think of the massive amount of petroleum that we use each day. Look at the traffic in LA, Portland, Seattle, New York and everywhere else around the world. Think of the logistics it must take to pump, refine, transport and deliver that enormous flow, and of the heat and pollutants coming from every drop of the stuff.
I was just waiting for my dinner to cook while I wrote this, and don't really have any idea what I started out talking about. I grew up in Eugene, so that might have something to do with it...
