Mike Rechner
The Face of Salmon

Living Sustainably: Saving Salmon and Ourselves

It is difficult to dispute the truth: we are destroying our planet. Ted Bernard and Jora Young in The Ecology of Hope pointed out some disturbing facts:

• As many as 20% of the earth’s species is threatened with extinction in the next century

• Impoverished land is the fastest growing category of land use in the world
• The basic needs of people are not being met, yet the population is still expanding

In light of these, and other equally disturbing statistics, we have no choice but to admit that our current way of life is not working. Today’s world promotes what Bernard and Young refer to as "procedural politics", where individuals are encouraged to pursue outcomes that are of importance only to the one. So why should we be surprised that logging companies strip mountainsides bare and developers fill in wetlands in the hope of making money. When the land is depleted of all value, these companies move on to the next area. We need to try and shift the emphasis from large, short-term profit, to long-term, sustainable business. Bernard and Young define sustainability as a responsibility of the present generation to live in such a way that the needs of future generations can still be met. But what does this mean to the individual? Can an individual practice a sustainable way of life and make a difference? And what about the Pacific Northwest, can the salmon crisis be aided by the concept of sustainability?

Living sustainably means making better decisions. Decisions about everyday things like what we buy, where we live, where we work, and what we do for fun. All of these decisions determine what is produced (remember supply and demand?). If each individual makes conscious choices to be less consumptive, there will be less production to coincide with less demand. Many people believe that one person can’t make a difference but if you add up all of those people, you get a community and a community can make a difference. So, what makes a community sustainable? The Olympia Sustainable Community Roundtable (http://www.olywa.net/roundtable) says:

A sustainable community continues to thrive from generation to generation because it has...

• A healthy and diverse ecological system that continually performs life sustaining functions and provides other resources for humans and other species
• A social foundation that provides for the health of all community members, respects cultural diversity, is equitable in its actions, and considers the needs of future generations
• A healthy and diverse economy that adapts to change, provides long-term security to residents, and recognizes social and ecological limits

We are not currently living a sustainable lifestyle. The Roundtable and others around the world are using the "ecological footprint" as a measure of human impact on local and global ecosystems. It has been calculated that the "ecological footprint" of the average American is about 10.3 hectares (25.4 acres, or more than five city blocks). This is the amount of land required to produce the food, fuel, and fiber to sustain our present high-consumption lifestyle. The graph shows that the citizens of Thurston County had an ecological footprint in 1998 of 2.5 million acres. There are only 480,000 acres in the county. And it is only supposed to get worse.

The statements above made by the Roundtable show that the salmon crisis currently facing the Pacific Northwest could most definitely be aided by adopting sustainable practices. I believe that advocating sustainability is what will get the people of the Pacific Northwest behind the idea of saving salmon. It is what will directly connect saving salmon with our quality of life. Bernard and Young talk about how a community will need to have a commitment to ecosystem health in order to be sustainable. They would "seek ecological balance as a guiding and underlying principle for all of their decisions… ways that economic activity can promote a healthy environment and that healthy ecosystems can enrich their inhabitants, economically and otherwise." Up to this point, there has really been no reason, other than it is just wrong to let them disappear, to save the salmon. But by applying the principles of sustainability, we can protect our way of life while still saving the salmon and other creatures in danger of succumbing to our pressures.