Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
After the settlers drove out the Native Americans, the salmon continued to run for
a while, but more non-Native Americans continued to pour into the area. As the area
became more crowded, the salmon still ran, but by now their home, their habitat, the
Rachel River, had begun to show the effects of modern civilization. The prevailing
philosophy was, “If we don't want it any more, we can just throw it away.” The river
provided a seemingly endless dump—out of the way, out of sight, out of mind. And
they threw their trash, all the mountains of trash they could manufacture, into the
river. The salmon still ran.
More time passed. More people moved in, and the more people that came into the
area, the bigger their demands. In its natural course, sometimes the river flooded,
creating problems for the settler populations. Also, everyone wanted power to main-
tain their modern lifestyles, and hydropower was constantly pouring down the
Rachel River to the ocean. So the people built flood control systems and a dam to
convert hydropower to hydroelectric power. (Funny … the Native Americans didn't
have a problem with flood control. When the river rose, they broke camp and moved
to higher ground. Hydroelectric power? If you don't build your life around things,
you don't need electricity to make them work. With the sun, the moon, and the stars
and healthy, vital land at hand, who would want hydroelectric power?)
The salmon still ran.
Building dams and flood control systems takes time, but humans, although impa-
tient, have a way of conquering and using time (and anything else that gets in the
way) to accomplish their goals, including construction projects. As the years passed,
the construction moved closer to completion, and finally ended. The salmon still
ran—but in reduced numbers and size. Soon local inhabitants couldn't catch the
quantity and quality of salmon they had in the past. They began to ask, “Where are
the salmon?”
But no one seemed to know. Obviously, the time had come to call in the scien-
tists, the experts. The inhabitants' governing officials formed a committee, funded
a study, and hired some scientists to tell them what was wrong. “The scientists will
know the answer. They'll know what to do,” they said, and that was partly true.
Notice that they didn't try to ask the Native Americans. They also would have known
what to do. The salmon had already told them.
The scientists came and studied the situation, conducted tests, tested their tests,
and decided that the salmon population needed to grow. They determined that an
increased population could be achieved by building a fish hatchery, which would
take the eggs from spawning salmon, raise the eggs to fingerling-sized fish, release
them into specially built basins, and later release them to restock the river. A lot of
science goes into the operation of a fish hatchery. It can't operate successfully on its
own (although Mother Nature never has a serious problem with it when left alone) but
must be run by trained scientists and technicians following a proven protocol based
on biological studies of salmon life cycles.
When the time was right, the salmon were released into the river—meanwhile,
other scientists and engineers realized that some mechanism had to be installed in
the dam to allow the salmon to swim downstream to the ocean, and the reverse, as
well. In the lives of salmon (anadromous species that spend their adult lives at sea
but return to freshwater to spawn), what goes downstream must go upstream. The
