News

6/21/10 Coho salmon in Southern Humboldt County's Mattole River are at a breaking point.

The Mattole Salmon Group counted just three adult coho in the river this winter, and only one redd, the rocky nest in which salmon lay their eggs. It's the lowest number of coho counted since the group began surveys in 2004, and far below the historical estimates of thousands of the fish.

”They're just really on the brink of extinction,” said Mattole Salmon Group Executive Director Keytra Meyer.

Meyer said that the surveys don't span the entire watershed, but she believes it's unlikely teams missed even 50 adult fish. Compounding that, Meyer said surveyors' expanded efforts to locate juvenile coho found them only in Thompson and Ancestor creeks.

The Mattole is at the southern end of the coho salmon's range. The population of fish is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, as are its salmonid cousins chinook salmon and steelhead. The health of the Mattole's coho is considered important to the survival of the evolutionarily significant unit -- a subset of the larger species.

In many California watersheds this year, coho are struggling. In the Shasta River, only nine adult coho were counted this winter, all of them males.

Read Full Article

7/7/10  U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson on Wednesday declared the entire concrete-lined Los Angeles River channel "traditional navigable waters," a designation crucial to applying Clean Water Act protections throughout its 834-square-mile urban watershed.

The designation overturned an earlier ruling by the Army Corps of Engineers that only four miles of the river were navigable, which would have made it easier to develop its upper reaches by eliminating the need for certain federal permits.

David Beckman, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, suggested that the shift could affect the way many other river systems are managed.

"The EPA's decision has been closely watched as an indicator of whether similar rivers throughout the West — dry as a bone one day, a torrent the next — would lose historical protections under the Clean Water Act," he said. "So this is great news. It means less pollution in the river and provides a vital support for community efforts to rejuvenate and restore it."

Among those listening at the news conference was Heather Wylie, a former project manager in the Ventura field office of the Army Corps of Engineers, who lost her job after kayaking down a stretch of the L.A. River in late 2008.

The expedition was in protest of the agency's ruling that year that only a small portion of the river was boat-worthy. She was suspended from her duties and eventually left the agency.

"All I did was go kayaking to make a point about Clean Water Act protections," she said. "I am grateful for the EPA stepping in and fixing this."

Read Full Article

6/24/10 A controversial plan that would have meant the end of a 24-year long moratorium on commercial whaling was today put on ice for a year by the International Whaling Commission at its annual meeting.

The 88 IWC member governments meeting in Agadir failed to agree on the proposed compromise between whale conservation nations and whaling nations that would have legalized whaling in return for bringing the hunt under IWC control.

Currently, three whaling nations - Japan, Norway and Iceland - set their own quotas without regard for the moratorium observed by all other countries.

Japan conducts "research" whaling in Antarctica's Southern Ocean and North Pacific under a provision of the IWC treaty, while Norway and Iceland have taken objections to the IWC moratorium. The three countries have killed more than 33,000 whales since the the moratorium took effect in 1986.

The proposal by IWC chairman Cristian Maquieira of Chile and vice chairman Anthony Liverpool of Antigua and Barbuda was the result of three years of negotiations, but even they have said repeatedly that it does not reflect their personal views and was tabled merely as a basis for discussion.

Read Full Article