Neighbors Along the Riverbed Episode 5: Awareness

Neighbors Along the Riverbed Episode 5: Awareness

Mickey Morgan 0:00
So how can people become invested in something that they don't even know is there? How would we even know if the salmon populations that should knock the steelhead and coho are gone? Even as someone who comes from much further north along the Pacific coast, I've never seen a live salmon in person. The group friends of San Lorenzo Creek had a different point, about perception relating to restoring healthy salmon habitat.

So I'm focusing on salmon but you guys work with fish? And in general, do you know or like, what do you know about salmon specifically? I'm curious. And if, if yes or no, then that will be different follow up questions.

Speaker 5
Little, I would say.

Mickey Morgan
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 1:04
Kind of the same for me.

Mickey Morgan 1:07
So what do you think like, have you guys both like grown up in the area? Or?

Speaker 4
Sort of, yeah I went to high school around here.

Mickey Morgan
Okay. Was there any understanding at all or representation of the fact that there is like native salmon species that should be here?

Speaker 4 1:29
Yeah, I'm, like, I maybe heard about salmon. Like when I went to a very, like, liberal elementary school. And I feel like we maybe learned about salmon in the context of like, that was what indigenous people would eat, or like around here that was one food source. Never after that.

Mickey Morgan 1:45
Yeah. Well, I mean, that is, that is an important point, as well as like, part of genocide against indigenous people includes like eradicating cultural sources and food sources. So that is, that makes sense.

As I was talking with different people from the north, all the way to the most southern parts of California, people have different ideas for how we can respond to people's lack of awareness about their local creeks, rivers, streams, and the creatures that live in them.

Bruce King 2:19
Like my niece works for Trout Unlimited. She does salmon restoration, up in the wine country, north of here in the streams, and, you know, she the other day, she posted something on Facebook, “Oh, look, the stream that we restored”. It looked like this pristine stream. And I said, my comment on Facebook was, “it doesn’t look like you did anything. It looks that good.” Yeah. And I said, that's the problem people have with restoration. It didn't look like you did anything.

Mickey Morgan 2:52
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As I was talking with people from all the way north to the most southern parts of California, folks had different ideas for how we can respond to people's lack of awareness about their local creeks, rivers and streams, and the creatures that live in them.

Speaker 2 3:13
When that poet said water, water, everywhere but not a drop to drink.

Mickey Morgan
Yeah.

Speaker 2
You know, we have some good poets from way back, Edgar Allan Poe and all those. Good, wise advice. And they do it in poetic form. You know, I still feel it’s good. Because people, like poetry when you teach your children, they always learn new thing by poetry.

Mickey Morgan
Mhm yeah.

Speaker 2
Because the words rhyme it catches their ear.

Bruce King 3:59
And the question was,

Mickey Morgan
It was just about,

Bruce King
What people think about all of this?

Mickey Morgan 4:04
Yeah just if there's an awareness, yeah.


Bruce King 4:07
Yeah, even an awareness of the creeks that we have to build, because we're, and that's one of the things we work on is just people even know the name of their creeks.

Ann E. Maris 4:21
Yeah, that's what we like, and we do events. Yeah. We're like what Creek is closest to your house? And then we give them a little sticker with the name.

Bruce King 4:27
And one of the big projects is the local park district has been submitting grant applications for what's called the San Lorenzo Creekway, will be a multiple use trail from the bay all the way to eight miles inland here. And in some cases, that has to go on city streets and things but a lot of places that will follow the engineered channel using the existing maintenance roads, but that doesn't have a direct impact on the ecological health of the creek. But getting people out walking and riding bikes along a creek way that in some place puts them in, like, it'll be right up here at the top, where they can walk down where they can follow the engineer channel and the endirtments and in flood stage they can go, “wow, there's a lot of water flowing through this thing”. So right now, people can't even get to their streams, because a lot of it is private land, this is unusual that we can even walk down to the stream here. So developing that connection with the stream, it's important that people can actually see it, get to it. And and know its name. Yeah. Yeah, seems like the only way change happens and people get informed is either have non governmental organizations like ourselves, advocate for things and help get the word out and challenge the agencies, or you got to have the agencies on board, ready to do something. The problem I see with the agencies is there's really, there's not too many people, poking them, encouraging them or forcing them to to act on things. So it's very easy for them to say, “hey, you know what? We're doing what's required of us. We're not required to make improvements in the screens or get the fish back.” So a lot of times it takes citizen groups.

Mickey Morgan 6:40
Moving from the conversation at San Lorenzo, where the engineered flood channel meets the polluted but free flowing creek in Fremont to the Alameda Creek Dam. For decades, until this year, when a fish ladder was installed. The Alameda Creek Dam, like the San Lorenzo and many other waterways has become filled in the spring and fall with dozens of salmon at the barriers. Joe Sullivan from East Bay Regional Parks District talks about the compromises made for helping salmon when working with the kind of agencies that Bruce mentions. The parks district is told by local citizen groups when these fish arrive, and they trucked some of them out to more habitable waters to finish their migration inland.

So are you able to, and I know there's like regulations and whatever around this, so were you only able to transfer like the steelhead? Or are you able to transfer all of them over?



Joe Sullivan 7:44
It was just just steelhead. That salmon don't have the that the fall Chinook salmon from the Central Valley is where they're from, they don't have the same protections that steelhead do.

Mickey Morgan 7:56
Right.

During a workshop with CalTrout, one participant spoke to how effective solutions to the disappearance of salmon and raising awareness about this environmental situation must be diverse, responsive, and work on different scales.

CT Workshop Speaker 3 8:15
So something I think, bringing together some things that other people have said, it's seems like it's a continuum of personal connection to community involvement and engagement. And then it goes into ecological broader ecological web, and then political. And there's probably a lot of other things there too. But I just see a continuum. And then it kind of reflects how the species itself is within its own ecological niche and its habitat, and it's got that web, but then it is really it's next to and in and intersects the humans and how we interact with our environment. And so it's this circling of webs, and, and habitats. That is really interesting to me. And just in thinking especially down south here, I know, probably most people are from points north, but in South that one of our strategy is to try to integrate endangered species management into community plans into climate change plans and statewide plans. So that, and then support that by public outreach so that you try to try to back into that continuum that goes from a real personal to a public sort of sphere.

Unknown Speaker 9:34
Kind of following on that group really emphasized awareness building too, and how we needed to make sure everybody recognized how extraordinary these creatures were in order to then go forward with different policy and restoration activities.
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Mickey Morgan 9:50
Talking about awareness allows us to understand how diverse the understandings are about local salmon and steelhead with each distinct population segment in each community and watershed along California's coast. If you have any questions or want to add to this conversation email salmon neighbors@gmail.com