Category: Current Affairs

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Shakers

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Thanks to a couple of people I met through some of my salmon reporting on KQED, I got to go out fishing today on a boat that put out from Moss Landing, on Monterey Bay about 100 miles south of Berkeley. I’ve considered it a little odd that I’ve developed a passionate interest in California salmon without once having fished for one. But on balance, only a little odd.

Today, I only kind of fished. I went out with Marc Gorelnik, a board member of the Coastside Fishing Club, whose boat is currently berthed at Moss Landing. His crew were a couple of guys named Chris from Marin County. All three knew their way around the boat and all the gear. They rigged the gear and set the lines while I mostly spectated (though I guess I worked in my own fashion: I had my recorder and camera with me, so I came back with sound and pictures).

Since I was a salmon rookie, the first time a fish hit one of the lines, the rod was handed to me and I reeled in whatever was on the end of the line. It turned out to be a salmon, though not a huge one. The minimum size anglers are allowed to keep this year is 24 inches; under that length, and you have to release them. The fish on I was pulling in was borderline. One of the Chrises landed the fish and then measured it against a guide on the stern. Twenty-two inches. Using a device that looked a little like a screwdriver with a blunt end–the idea is to minimize handling of fish that will be released, because the whole point is that they’ll survive to grow into mature adults–Marc “shook” the fish off the line, and back into the water it went. (The term for undersize fish, which I never heard before last week: “shakers”).

And that was the big fishing excitement of the day. Marc had his radio on, and we heard lots of boats saying they had zero luck and a handful reporting they were catching fish, some up to 22 pounds. To an inquiry from a friend’s boat, one voice on the radio said he was about to make his limit but added something to the effect that “the last fish is always the hardest to catch.” Marc responded, “I hate that guy.” (He was also out last Saturday, the season opener, and had just four shakers and several hours of weathering rough water to show for it.)

Two other fish would up on our lines, though–both shakers. The last one hit one of the rigs on our way in, immediately after one of the Chrises said, “One fish. One fish can easily be divided four ways. The fish in question is pictured (click on the images for larger versions). It was a little thing, maybe a foot long. It would have been hatched out the fall before last (2009), and then either made its way to the ocean (if it was naturally spawned) or was released on the upper reaches of San Francisco Bay (the recent practice for most hatchery-generated fish) about a year ago. Given its size, it’s got nearly a year and a half more to survive at the mininum before it will begin its run back to fresh water somewhere in the Sacramento River system.

So there it is–a shaker. I caught only a brief, brief glimpse of it. It was small, but it was a beauty.

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Monday Walkabout

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Above: The big oak in the schoolyard garden at Martin Luther King Jr. MIddle School, just around the corner and up the street from us. School was out today, and of course the occasion I connect the date with is April 4, 1968, the day King was murdered. I don’t remember anything about that day until hearing the announcement, at the tail end of the NBC national news, and I think Chet Huntley read the report, that King had been shot in Memphis. The rest of the evening and much of the next several days is vivid. My recollection is that the show essentially signed off with that report at 6:30 p.m. There was no cable TV to speak of, let alone CNN, so I think our immediate recourse would have been to the radio (not sure if WBBM had adopted an all-news format by then or not).

In any case, I remember that it was already dark, and it was raining. My mom had been out shopping for groceries, and she pulled up within a few minutes of when we heard the news. She had been involved in various civil rights activities and had actually driven by herself up to the South Side one night–in 1965, maybe?–to see King speak at a neighborhood church. I think we–my brothers and I–probably imparted the news in a panicked way and probably passed on the first report that King might have been shot in the head. I think that because of the shocked and despairing reaction I remember from my mother: “Oh, they always shoot them in the head!” I’m sure she was thinking back to President Kennedy. Maybe even to Lincoln. Bobby Kennedy wouldn’t be shot for another couple of months.

The connection, if any, to today. None. The schoolyard was beautiful, the day warm, and that night might never have happened except for what we remember and have brought with us into our future.

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Storm Week, Potrero Hill

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At the foot of the pedestrian overpass that cross U.S. 101 from 18th and Utah (west side of U.S. 101) to 18th and San Bruno (east side of the freeway). I was on my way into work. Can’t remember if this was the day I locked my keys in the car (Triple A came and got them for me), or the day I jump-started a coworker’s car (she had left her lights on), or the day I had delivered another coworker’s purse after she forgot it at work. The only thing I know for sure is that we had rain this day, like every other day of the week. Below: U.S. 101, looking south from the pedestrian overpass toward Bernal Heights (Utah Street turning west into 18th Street below and to the right).

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Salmon for Their Own Sake

Like everyone else, I’m given to enthusiasms. Like everyone else, my enthusiams are too many to list. Thinking about them, most seem to involve a narrative of some kind: the progress of favorite remembered plays in baseball or basketball–any sport, really–to movies and books to roads I’ve traveled and places I’ve visited and on good days to whatever I happen to encounter in the world.

(Maybe something else is at work here; our tendency or need to turn everything into a story. I just came across a poem, “In Praise of a Teacher,” by Nikki Giovanni. She says:

“I always loved English because
whatever human beings are, we are storytellers. It is our stories
that give a light to the future. When I went to college I became a
history major because history is such a wonderful story of who we
think we are; English is much more a story of who we really are.”)

One of my enthusiasms, strange to tell for one who has hardly ever hooked a fish, is for salmon. Specifically, the salmon of the Pacific coast. And going with the notion of story, I think the biggest part of my attraction is to the salmon’s life narrative: birth in cold inland waters, migration to the sea, a sojourn that can last several years in the hostile wilds of the ocean, and then a long homeward journey to find that birthplace stream, whatever the obstacles, spawn just once, and die.

salmonstream.jpgIt’s a great story, and my often half-informed fervor to share salmon history and lore for anyone who will sit still for a minute has led my colleagues at our Local Major Public Radio Station (LMPRS) to adopt a “safe word” when they think things are getting out of control. It’s “coho.” At the same time, I’ve probably gotten as much interest (or forebearance) as anyone could reasonably expect when suggesting salmon stories to develop for broadcast. Earlier this month, I got to attend a West Coast fisheries conference and do a few stories on prospects for the coming salmon season.

But that interest from my fellow journalists always comes with a question that I’ll summarize this way: “Salmon? Why should we care about salmon?” It’s a reasonable enough question: Every news story in every news venue contains some sort of explicit or implicit rationale or assumption about audience interest. Falling housing prices? Well, a lot of the audience is in that boat. E. coli in the food supply? We all eat that food. Rising taxes or reduced pensions? You see how it works.

In narrating the plight of California’s once-great native salmon populations, those who seek to save some semblance of the historic fisheries are learning to play that “why should anyone care?” game. In the past couple of years, they’ve brought consultants into play who can quantify what salmon mean economically. Cancelling two straight commercial salmon seasons, they reported, cost boat operators and fishing communities upward of $2 billion and 23,000 jobs.

I suppose the numbers are powerful, and it’s useful to have them when trying to persuade someone else that the decline of salmon is a story that matters. But the power of the statistics only goes so far: Someone else whose ox is being gored in the debate–for instance, the Central Valley farm interests who might not get all the water they want because some is being set aside for salmon–can come up with bigger, scarier numbers. And the numbers are unfortunate in another way: The pure economic impact is important, of course; whole societies have lived their lives around the salmon. But the cost a lost salmon season doesn’t begin to touch on the wonder of the animal and its place in the world or on what’s really lost when wild salmon runs go dead.

As it happens, my schoolteacher wife is teaching her fifth-graders about watersheds this year. Part of the lesson is about fish, and she’s been particularly interested in learning about efforts to restore one of Northern California’s last surviving wild coho runs, up in Marin County. One book in her watershed library is the one pictured above, “Salmon Stream.” The entire contents: a simple narration of the salmon’s life history. What’s wonderful about it is it presents the fish–the “resource”–as something of value for its own sake, without economic justification or cost-benefit analyses.

For me, the answer to why anyone ought to care about the salmon isn’t instantly accessible. The rational piece of the answer is what they represent about the world as it has been, as it is, as it might be, and the toll we’ve exacted from our surroundings to have our lives just so. The non-rational piece is the beauty of the thing itself, from conception to death. And maybe, when the question comes up next, I need to have copies of that picture book handy.

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Japan Nukes: Academics, Consultants, Talking Points

Over at my Public Radio news job, the last 10 days or so have been dominated by what’s going on in Japan: an earthquake of incredible power, an unimaginably destructive tsunami, and then a much slower-moving and harder-to-comprehend series of incidents involving the collapse of a major nuclear power plant where safety systems were knocked out by the initial disasters.

What everyone wants to know about that last series of events, of course, is how big a danger the nuclear plant situation poses. Is it, in fact, a disaster? And the answer, despite the parachuted-in American news anchors’ default hyper-urgency, will be a long time coming. Part of the problem is the lack of clarity from the plant’s owners and the Japanese authorities; and part of the problem is a lack of clear reference points. What history is relevant here? Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The atomic powers’ legacy of open-air Cold War nuclear testing? Three-Mile Island? Chernobyl? Or all or none of the above? I don’t have the answers, but as the latest story on the situation from The New York Times makes clear, problems continue at the crippled nuclear plant and radiation concerns in the surrounding area are on the increase:

The government said it was barring all shipments of milk from Fukushima Prefecture and shipments of spinach from Ibaraki Prefecture, after finding new cases of above-normal levels of radioactive elements in milk and several vegetables. Relatively high levels were also found in spinach from Tochigi and Gunma Prefectures to the west, canola from Gunma Prefecture and chrysanthemum greens from Chiba Prefecture, south of Ibaraki.

Why should anyone on this side of the Pacific care about chrysanthemum greens from Chiba Prefecture? There’s no reason, on the thoughtless face of it. Japan’s nukes, Japan’s problem.

But even if that’s your take, the issue becomes more local when we talk about the safety of nuclear plants here and the recent surge in enthusiasm to build more of them. Let me just say I’m agnostic on the question of building more. One big argument for them is that they offer an alternative to carbon-based fuel sources and could be part of the solution to combatting global warming and climate change. And plenty of people feel nuclear power got a bad rap from the 1979 Three Mile Island accident and that as a matter of having abundant sources of secure energy, we need to develop more plants now.

As part of responding to the news this past week or so, we’ve been trying to track down experts who could tell our audience whether the Japanese crisis raises safety concerns about the two working nuclear plants in California–at Diablo Canyon on the south-central coast and San Onofre, between Los Angeles and San Diego. In looking for people who might be knowledgeable but have no axe to grind–avoiding industry sources and people from anti-nuke groups–we arrived at nuclear engineering experts from an important local public university.

In one case, we interviewed someone I’ll call Professor A at some length. The professor’s message was enthusiastically reassuring: No, there are no concerns about safety at California’s power plants. All issues have been addressed–even the recent discovery of a fourth seismic fault near Diablo Canyon. In fact, the endorsement of nuclear power was so hearty that the engineer recording the interview commented that Professor A sounded like “an apologist for the industry.” That was a legitimate concern, and I went back and took a look at the interviewee’s background. It turned out that the professor has consulted for General Electric, a major nuclear plant contractor, and with at least one other industry firm. Not to say that that necessarily colored the professor’s statements. But it’s something that we should have known going in and brought out in the interview, which we wound up killing.

Last thing at work Friday, a colleague had me listen to an interview with another professor from the same distinguished university. She had described this faculty member, Professor B, as sounding very pro-nuclear. And indeed the professor did. When asked a question about the safety of nuclear plants, the professor essentially dismissed it with a counter-question: “How about coal? Have you looked at the numbers on black lung?” (That line sounds good until you think about it a minute. Black lung, of course, afflicts people who extract the fuel from the earth, so a proper comparison would be to the safety of people who mine uranium. Let’s just say uranium mining is no picnic, unless lung cancer is your idea of a picnic. Also, the counter-question simply ignores the real issue, and fear, that radiation presents. It’s clear there will be some long-term effects simply because contamination hangs around so long; but the long-term effects are not at all clear). A quick check showed that Professor B, too, has done consulting work in the energy field–though it’s not at all clear whether that work involved nuclear energy.

The take-away lesson–a basic one, you might think, in a world where corporate money plays such a big role everywhere–is that even when we’re dealing with someone in academia, someone receiving a salary from the public treasury, you need to follow the money and ask about it as a matter of course.

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Blogger by Moonlight, or The Earthquake-Tsunami Saga

That title makes me think: "Booger by Moonlight." But that's a different story altogether.

So: Last Thursday night, we were following our usual custom of watching the local news (if for no other reason to catch one or another of the occasional on-air snafus that add up to must-see TV). About 15 minutes in, one of the anchors cut in with word of an 8.8 earthquake off the coast of northeastern Japan. One of the odd things I have set up via an email account is U.S. Geological Survey reports of Pacific earthquakes, so I'd been aware of a series of sharp quakes in the region that seemed to kick off with a 7.2 quake. Within a few minutes, the Thursday evening (Friday afternoon Japan time) quake magnitude was updated to 8.9 and eventually 9.0. Having gone through a handful e of 6-point shakes and a 7-pointer that was centered 60 miles away but was strong enough to wreak havoc in the central Bay Area, 9.0 is unimaginably powerful.) Soon, the channel was showing pictures, though not very clear ones, of an unidentified city location where, in the distance, you could just make out a flow of water (my guess it was a view of the tsunami just beginning to flow into Sendai, a city of 1 million on the northeast coast). After seeing that, I called my son Eamon and daughter-in-law Sakura–her hometown is about 50 miles north of Tokyo and 180 miles from the quake epicenter–to ask if they'd heard about the quake. They hadn't, yet, but immediately got on the phone to try to reach Sakura's family (they were all fine, though the shaking had been quite strong where they were and lots of stuff inside their home had come crashing down).

After hearing from Eamon, I started to think about how the event would impact our local public-radio news operation in San Francisco. Well, sure, there'd be reaction in the Japanese-American community here. And yes, there was a possibility of a tsunami on this side of the Pacific, though in 25-plus years of covering news here tsunami threats have generally been non-events on this part of our coast (not this time, though). In time, a couple colleagues showed up on email to share ideas for coverage in the morning. Then I headed to the one immediate outlet for news we have, a blog we call News Fix. I made my first post around midnight, then kept updating until 4 a.m. Friday morning. There was enough traffic to early posts on tsunami warnings for California that it broke the site (we had some incompatible, inefficient widgets installed, apparently). I and others posted later Friday, on Saturday, on Sunday, then again Monday.

Posting on that news blog is different from posting here. It's much more to the point, and I feel much less need to be discursive. The result: Less thought, fewer words, more links, frequent posts. Here's the list from the last few days:

Links to Coverage of Japan's 8.9 Quake, Tsunami

California, West Coast on Tsunami Watch

1964: A Distant Quake, a Disastrous California Tsunami

Tsunami Warning for California, Oregon

U.S. Geological Survey Breaks Down Monster Quake

Japan Quake-Tsunami Aftermath: Fears About Nuclear Plants

When the Tsunami Arrived in San Francisco Bay

California Tsunami Watch: Canceled

Japan's Great Quake: The California Perspective

More Maps and Images of Japan's Great Quake

Japan's New Crisis: Fighting to Avert a Nuclear Disaster

Japan's Nukes: What and Where They Are

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All-Salmon Weekend

A summary of my weekend-plus at the meeting of the Pacific Fishery Management Council (what I'll describe as akin to an advanced seminar on chinook salmon from a world-class faculty) in Vancouver, Washington:

Day 1: I left home for the Oakland airport at 7:20 a.m. or so. My plane departed at 9 a.m. and landed in Portland at 10:40 or so. I was behind the wheel of a rented car by 11 a.m. and at the Hilton in downtown Vancouver by 11:30. In a hallway, I recognized a voice I'd only heard on the phone before–Barbara Emley, a San Francisco salmon troller who's been fishing salmon since the 1980s. I introduced myself and she invited me to lunch with her and two fishermen, Dave Bitts of Eureka and Joel Kawahara, from Washington's Olympic Peninsula. They filled me in on the morning's proceedings and what was to come in the afternoon, including a discussion of limitations that may be posed on this year's chinook salmon catch to accommodate threatened populations of killer whales, which like to snack on them. I spent the afternoon in a variety of meetings and talking to a variety of people, including Chuck Tracy, the PFMC officer who works on salmon issues. At about 5:45, I headed over to my friend Pete's house in Portland to hang out with him and his boy Niko. 

Day 2: Sunday morning I was at the hotel by 10:30 or so for another day of meetings both on the status of the Sacramento River salmon fishery and on initial suggestions for the 2011 fishing season. I interviewed about half a dozen people, pulled a couple soundbites, wrote up a short story to air on KQED's local news on Monday morning, did a read-through with my editor in the Bay Area. I got out of the hotel about 7:45, went to Pete and Niko's, had a late dinner, then voiced and uploaded my story. Pete and I stayed up talking until about midnight, then he went to bed. Since I had promised a second story, I stayed up and wrote that, pulled another soundbite, and sent it off to one of the editors in San Francisco. 

Day 3: Monday, which at one point in this adventure was penciled in as a day off, I was up at 7:30, drank Pete's excellent coffeed, stayed at the house while Pete took Niko to school, then voiced the second piece I had written the night before, wrote a third piece (these are all very short, like a minute, max), voiced that, then uploaded everything to KQED. I made an attempt to talk the editor of our statewide show to put off a Tuesday morning story I had promised her, because I was hoping to have a pressure-free day before flying back to Oakland in the evening. But my gambit didn't work, and a promise is a promise, so I said I'd have a script to her late in the afternoon. In the meantime, Pete had returned home and we had talked about going to Powell's, the landmark bookstore in Portland, which I had never visited. So we walked to the Lloyd Center "Max" station–about three and a half miles from Pete's, as it turned out–and rode free to the heart of downtown, then walked the rest of the way to Powell's. We hung out there and both bought something–I got a cookbook, which I never do, and a novel by Peter Carey that's supposed to be something of a gloss on Tocqueville's visit to America. Then I bought Pete lunch at Little Big Burger, which was awesome (we each consumed 1.5 cheeseburgers and split an order of fries). Then Pete said, "Well, you feel like walking back?" I did. So we set off across the Pearl District, Old Town/Chinatown, the Burnside Bridge, and up Burnside Avenue to Laurelhurst; we detoured through Laurelhurst Park, with Pete filling me in on details of the neighborhoods we passed through. At 3 o'clock, when we got back to Pete's, in the general vicinity of Mount Tabor, we had walked another four and a half miles or so. The total for the outing came to about nine miles. Back at Pete's I packed up, loaded up the car, took my leave, filled up with gas, and made the short, easy drive to the Portland airport for my 6 p.m. flight. There, I schlepped my stuff to one of the cool little work carrels they have in the terminal buildings and, at about 4:20, began writing my story for Tuesday morning. At about 5:30, I had something that was, if not profoundly insightful, most likely would not provoke shrieks of outrage from editor or listeners. I did a quick read-through with said editor, then packed up my stuff and walked to the gate for my flight, which was due to be boarding. It was a little late, but not by much, and the flight was uneventful. We got to Oakland about 7:30 or so. Kate picked me up. We went home, had dinner, walked the dog, and then I recorded my voice tracks and isolated my soundbites and uploaded all the sound. Lest that all sound real quick, I was done with all that at 12:30 this morning. 

Day 4: This morning, while I was asleep, an engineer mixed the sound, and the piece aired at 5:50 a.m. I caught it during a 6:50 repeat and at some point realized I had made a factual error in the piece. So I wrote a correction for that, too.

Later, I vacuumed the house. 

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Berkeley: Late Winter Weather and Bud News

buds022611.jpgThis morning and tomorrow morning: probably the two coldest mornings of the winter here. It was 34 at our house early today, and looks like we’re headed there again tomorrow. (Here’s the National Weather Service’s summary of record lows set this morning. Berkeley’s all-time low for Feb. 26, recorded at a station on campus, is 34, according to the Western Regional Climate Center’s statistics.

By early afternoon, we were up in the high 40s. Beautiful cumulus-filled sky. I noticed the buds on the maple tree next store just as we got in the car to drive to the South Bay.

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Journal of Self-Promotion: TV Edition

KQED-Channel 9 has a long-running news discussion show called “This Week in Northern California.” The producers asked me on the show last night to talk about some recent developments in California water policy (I can hear the surge of adrenaline out there in blogland). You’ll notice that the still for the video captures me in mid-jabber. Unfortunate. But here it is anyway:

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Tough Love for Panhandlers, 14th Century Style

We have alluded before in this space to the conundrum of living in a community where — well, where you get hit up for spare change or are otherwise wheedled and baited as part of some impromptu street-based money-raising scheme. We have quoted Walt Whitman’s injunction “give alms to all who ask.” And we have watched as our town and nearby cities have adopted laws–for instance, San Francisco’s “Sit-Lie Ordinance” — that are supposed to address public concerns about getting panhandled.

In researching another topic just now, I found that England’s King Edward III dealt with panhandlers, too. Here’s a section of the Ordinance of Laborers, handed down in 1349 as to deal with the impact of the Black Death that had recently swept the kingdom:

“… Because that many valiant beggars, as long as they may live of begging, do refuse to labor, giving themselves to idleness and vice, and sometimes to theft and other abominations; none upon the said pain of imprisonment, shall, under the color of pity or alms, give anything to such, who are able to labor, or presume to favor them in their idleness, so that thereby they may be compelled to labor for their necessary living.”

To be clear, the law didn’t outlaw begging. It outlawed giving anything to beggars. (I like the phrase “under the color of pity or alms.” Mustn’t give sway to those kinds of feelings or predilections.)

And what could this possibly have to do with the Black Death? you ask. Well, England was facing a severe labor shortage after the plague, and the king was answering demands to find workers. The same proclamation essentially required all able-bodied people under 60 to work; in fact, if someone who was otherwise unemployed was asked to work and refused, they could be thrown in jail; and anyone who was employed was forbidden to leave their position “without reasonable cause or license.” The statute also prohibited laborers, who found themselves in a sellers’ market, from demanding higher wages for their work. That prohibition is said to have become the Common Law precedent for blocking formation of labor unions in the United States up through 1840.