When the soldiers came home from World War II, they brought back a new perspective for a new America. Rather than continuing a rural existence, most citizens were ready for a modern lifestyle supported by technology — dams, suburbs, shopping malls, interstate highways — and all the natural resources that could be gobbled up.
In the 1940s, the estimated California Coho population was 350,000. By 2009, those numbers had plummeted to less than 3,000.
But as Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
With the 2012 NOAA Fisheries Coho Recovery Plan in hand, members of the Valley Women’s Club’s Environmental Committee initiated the Coho Restoration Subcommittee. The war against the war on coho had begun.
For the last year, the group has been working to inform and motivate local agencies and local governments to incorporate the Plan’s guidelines into their policies and procedures.
John Ambrose, a NOAA biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service and co-author of the NOAA Fisheries Coho Recovery Plan, told the group, “I’ve worked for years on this report and unless people like you try to make it happen, it’s not going to be enforced.”
The biologist said he is frustrated that people do not believe coho can be recovered, even though no one has tried in 25 years to push a coho restoration project forward in the San Lorenzo River. “It’s easy to predict the future when folks do nothing to change it,” he said.
The Mendocino County watershed, where he worked previously, had been devastated by early logging practices.
“I was positive it would not see decent coho rearing in the mainstreams for at least 50 years,” Ambrose said. “Seven years later, salmon are there in decent numbers” — because the timber company that now manages that watershed used the NMFS plan.
“The salmon are a symbol of the viability of the river and the watershed,” said Nancy Macy, VWC chair of the Environmental Committee. “I remember a huge headline in what was then the Valley Press [now the Press-Banner] and it said, ‘The River Is Dead.’”
Pollution and erosion were killing it.
In 1978, the County wrote a Watershed Management Plan. Updated in 2009, the plan has become a living document on how to restore a river and a springboard for non-profit initiatives.
Recently, the Valley Women’s Club was invited to represent the upriver region on the San Lorenzo River Alliance’s Oversight Committee.
“It is a brilliant concept — to bring together an alliance of government agencies, nonprofits, businesses, art, and to reawaken an awareness of the river to the people of the city, because they don’t see it. It’s behind levees,” says Macy.
The quality of our drinking water is dependent on the quality of our river and creeks and whether water is restored to the watershed and allowed to sink into the aquifers.
“I made an agreement with myself in my youth that I would work three to five hours a week on some environmental issue, and I have done that for the rest of my life,” said Cathleen O’Connell, VWC chair of the subcommittee for coho restoration. “It makes me optimistic instead of pessimistic. The people who are pessimistic are the people who are not doing anything.”
American Indians of the Pacific Coast mythologized the salmon, believing they were people with superhuman abilities who lived under the sea in mansions.
When the Salmon People learned that the tribes were hungry, the fish swam up the rivers and offered them the sustenance of their bodies for food, along with the bears and other animals along the banks.
The Salmon People asked that once their meat was eaten their bones be thrown back into the river so their spirits would return to the ocean and be reborn.
The myth teaches us that if we use our natural resources, we must respect and support their gifts.
What can you do?
Become involved in helping the environment by living respectfully on the land, watching your personal pollution, water consumption, and reaching out to the Environmental Committee for information on septic systems and other environmental issues at www.vwcweb.org.
Attend and speak before the County Board of Supervisors and the water boards. Learn more about the watershed at the VWC’s Environmental Committee which meets the first Saturday of the month at 10:30 a.m. at Henry Cowell in the Gift Shop. Contact Macy at nb**@cr****.com.
To learn more about the Coho Restoration Plan, visit http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/recovery/plans.htm, and click on Coho Salmon (Central California Coast).
– Carol Carson is a writer and Certified California State Master Naturalist.
