Environment

Hey Ho, Coho! A prodigal fish returns

By |

The California coho salmon, a magnificent fish that was all but wiped out during the 1990s, have begun to trickle back to the rain-swollen Russian River and its tributaries.

It feels like a miracle.

“When it starts to rain, it somehow clicks in them that it’s time — that they can get through to their spawning waters,” says Harry Morse, communications official of the California Department of Fish and Game.

The Russian River coho salmon population faced near-extinction in 2000, he said, for reasons that are still debated. In their heyday, the size of the coho fishery off the Sonoma Coast was 200,000 to 500,000 fish in the 1940s. By 2000 the number of salmon shrank to one percent of that, and the fish was listed as a threatened species.

“Why they disappeared is the $64,000 question,” Morse said in a telephone interview.

He acknowledged that in some coastal fisheries, habitat damage caused by logging operations may have affected the fish, which depend on cool, clear, sustained flows and stable, structural elements of streams in old-growth forests.

But there are a host of other factors that may have contributed to the near-total wipeout along the Northern California coast, Morse says.

Featured

California Prisons Report: A Look Inside with Hastings Scholar Hadar Aviram

By |

Despite a year of legal sanctions and budget cuts, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation takes an upbeat tone in its new annual report. Inspirationally titled “Corrections Moving Forward” [25 mb PDF], the report opens with a letter from the CDCR secretary Matthew Cate, who writes that “in the midst of significant challenges, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has quietly had a remarkable string of successes in the last year. While it is easy to focus on the negative, there have been many positive developments at our agency.”

Featured

The Buzz is Catching

By |

Second-hand smoke? Not an issue for electronic cigarettes, which emit nicotine-infused vapor. That’s good news for nonsmokers, and those who want to skirt anti-smoking laws. But should the FDA regulate them as “drug delivery devices” for nicotine addicts? Photo: Izuaniz

Featured

The Bottle Problem

By |

Plastic water bottles, a global pollution problem, have been banned from San Francisco to Bundadoon, Australia. Yet waste still proliferates, with 1,500 bottles thrown out each second. And in the U.S., the water itself is less regulated than what comes out your kitchen tap. Photo: Nairobi street/Meaduva

Featured

Playing for Life?

By |

Because so many U.S. veterans are video game mavens (right), researchers are using warlike games to help treat post-traumatic stress syndrome. Even as governments worldwide try to regulate video game violence, new research is finding a curious flip side to the virtual carnage. Photo: Soldier in Iraq/U.S. Army

Featured

Pigeon 1, Broadband 0

By |

A leading Internet service provider has been one-upped by a pigeon toting a four-gig memory stick. Despite the economic boons of broadband, developing and wealthy nations alike are lagging. Good news? Innovation is happening where the resources are scarcest.Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Featured

Cell Block Hospital

By |

Chronically ill parolees in California often return to communities that lack adequate health services — and budget woes are expected to force the early release of thousands of inmates from the state’s overcrowded prisons. Our “Prisons & Public Health” news blog tracks the issue.Photo: Mule Creek State Prison/cdcr.ca.gov

Featured

Better Health Care, Better Prisons?

By |

By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us
Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog
In a recent New York Times op-ed, columnist Nicholas Kristof cites the case of Curtis Wilkerson as an example of lopsided budget priorities (“Priority Test: Health Care or Prisons?”), wherein health care is considered too expensive, yet long and costly prison terms are the norm. Wilkerson, you see, is a California inmate who became entangled in the state’s three-strikes laws; he’s now serving a life sentence for stealing a $2.50 pair of socks (strike one and two both involved abetting a robbery in 1981 when he was 19). California doles out $49,000 a year on each inmate housed in a state prison, and $216,000 a year on each young person incarcerated through the juvenile justice system, Kristof notes, while in contrast, the Bay Area’s Urban Strategies Council has found that only $8,000 is spent on each Oakland public school student. Prison spending has been growing for decades in California and across the country [PDF], along with incarceration rates, under the “tough on crime” banner. Yet as many public-policy makers are beginning to realize, being tough on crime doesn’t mean that they’re being safer or smarter about it.

Featured

Anti-Violence Programs Cut Back

By |

As the recession forces state budget cuts nationwide, victims of domestic and sexual violence are getting left behind. California leads the way, with $20.4 million in cutbacks affecting 94 domestic violence centers. Three have already been closed. Photo: Lewisha1990

Featured

Jail Break

By |

Prisoner labor is complicated enough, but it doesn’t get any easier for former offenders dogged by prior convictions. Now, a number of cities have banned the question, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” from job applications, while re-entry programs create new opportunities (at right). Photo: Chattanooga Endeavors