Neighbors Along the Riverbed Episode 9: New Normal

Neighbors Along the Riverbed Episode 9: New Normal

Mickey Morgan 0:08
The new normal is the subject of this episode. And a glaring example of this idea is how I've lived on the Pacific coast most of my life, but I've never seen a salmon or steelhead live and in person. I've been working with so many brilliant people to create a project about conservation and restoration of salmon, never having seen one alive. This is where I'm at, and where I work towards ecological justice from, which is the conversation that Urban Cree Karyn Recollet and Erin Marie Konsmo, who’s Metís, are having in Meeting the Land(s) Where They're At.

Perhaps going back to the land is not really the answer, as it presupposes a linearity that is associated with structures and systems that have not served us well. What I'm thinking here is meeting the lands where they're at, and thinking through our processes of conceptual kin making with them. We all have been impacted so that our bodies, as in bodies water, need radical love to have an affect in our future pasts and present features. Yes, Erin, what if we saw the magic of the land, water, plants in every space we were? What if we felt the presence of underground waterways teeming with fresh water salmon and eels, fishing weirs to gather magic we need all hold space for, kinncilliatory, we need all of us in our gorgeous complexities. Our ideas of the land and what is natural or sacred is often wrapped up in ableism. We need to consider lands’ overflow, as land that evades singularity, creating migration glyphs as it flows deep and celestially.

Joe Sullivan from East Bay Regional Parks District explained how Chinook salmon are not released from hatcheries anymore, but rather they're trucked out to estuaries and released from there, because so many of these threatened fish die on that journey without their help.

Joe Sullivan 2:22
And I think that's kind of, unfortunately the new norm at least for Central California, steelhead and Chinook not steelhead, but Chinook salmon.

Mickey Morgan 2:30
Yeah.

Joe Sullivan 2:31
I think we're just gonna get what wherever they whatever we get. Like I said, there haven't been salmon spawning here for over 50 years. So there is no natal stream for salmon in Alameda Creek. So we'll, we're kind of accepted, we'll just take whatever we can get. And if we can get salmon back here, then. That's great. And that's the best we can do.

Mickey Morgan 2:59
But at times, for people who do not have the privilege of working in governmental organizations, like the Parks Board, or even NOAA Fisheries, trying to enact tangible change for endangered and threatened salmon can be overwhelming.

Ann E. Maris 4:08
Yeah, and then to be excluded. And it's like, I don't know, I just it makes you feel like giving up
all the time.

Mickey Morgan 4:14
Yeah.

Bruce King 4:15
You know a, an overarching barrier to all these environmental things is our capitalistic property rights focused way that our economy works, right. So everything is focused on humans and money. How do you build housing? How do you provide for humans? How do you get humans transported in cars? And so everything is focused on that. And the environmental parts there's not enough unless you're damaging the creek.

Mickey Morgan 4:57
Yeah.

Bruce King
There is no hammer to require anything once the creek has been damaged is there's no hammer to restore it. The only way you get money to restore something, typically is someone else wants to damage the creek somewhere else and they have to pay mitigation dollars. So our whole system in the United States, and we see it here is this, it's you know, developers have money. They want to build something. And as long as you let them build what they want, maybe they'll give you they'll they'll follow the rules, the minimum rules for protecting the creek.

Mickey Morgan 5:39
Moving from infrastructural and social barriers to overall effects of climate change. Like what if anything do you know about the local salmon or steelhead that are like native to this area?

Ann E. Maris 5:55
They're gone. They're gone. And it's yeah, it's it's part of a bigger picture of what's gone because what they eat is also gone. Macro invertebrates. Yeah, all the little tiny things that they eat. So there's a whole food web. And so one of the measures that's used for creeks is how much of that bottom level of the food web is there?


Mickey Morgan 6:25
Yeah.

Ann E. Maris 6:25
So if you did have salmon, would they have food to eat? That's the next question.

Mickey Morgan 6:29
What Ann said is echoed by a story shared in a workshop with the South Coast steelhead coalition.

CT Workshop Speaker 7 6:36
And there was a there's a pretty good web article about steelhead in the in the LA River, and they had some nice pictures of the fish and stuff like that. And there were some large steelheads. Unfortunately, that was published on April 1, which is April Fool's Day. So it was a joke. But you know, so, to to Chad's point of shifting baselines, that's the new normal is there's there aren't trout in the LA River, and those trout weren't laughing at that joke. We can, we can help them come back in there, we can bring them home, you know, we can we can make the environment more habitable to them, and they'll recover. So it doesn't, it doesn't have to be the new normal.

Mickey Morgan 7:16
One thing that came up in the breakout room that I was in that I thought was really interesting was also about education, you know, to the point where it's steelhead are at such low populations, that people have no idea that they're even here, just generally. So what do we think we need to support our neighbors in this ecosystem?

CT Workshop Speaker 4 7:45
I was, when we were discussing this, I was feeling like we need, at least locally in Southern California, is a willingness to do things a little differently than we're doing them in some ways. We kept going back to the picture of the storm drain going, you know, that's like, it's become like standardized to do things like that, and, and to try and to actually think differently about how we build and how we live in nature, and a willingness to look at how other watersheds work.

CT Workshop Speaker 8 8:22
And I'll jump in, I think our group, sort of building on what Amanda said about the approach, like just how you feel in relationship to the ecosystem part of it or separate from it. And I think we all shared, that we pick up trash when we're outside. And it just, it's a relationship base that makes us feel good. It's sort of it makes us feel like we're part of a caring environment. And that sort of premise, as a neighbor, is very affirming. It's not like it's an altruistic…

Speaker 1 9:01
So for example, like as a surfer, it's like, before I go surfing, like, what are some things that I can do? Is it like meditating before I get in the water and like, saying, Thank you, like, to the people that like on the land, and also, thank you to the ocean for like, welcoming me in it, and like being so gentle with me or like, getting crushed by a wave, but being like, “Oh, you didn't kill me? Thank you so much.” Yeah, and I do those things, you know, it's intentional, and that's how I'm able to like, ride a wave so beautifully. That's just as in my way of being an activist in that space.

Mickey Morgan 9:45
Did you have any, like, last thing that you wanted to comment on or question about or anything like that?

Speaker 1 9:51
I feel like these are things, the things we talked about are things that I think about a lot and that I put into practice, but I don't articulate in conversation and so I'd love to have more spaces to be able to articulate these things. Because I love being able to put them into practice and like journal about it and, and reflect on it. But I'd love to have more conversation with more intentional conversations with others about it. So thank you for making the space for that.

SCSC Workshop Speaker 1 10:22
CalTrout works all over California. So we have a lot of projects up in Northern California as well. And so we do, we actually work for like salmon, steelhead and trout. So it's a big…yeah, this is really far reaching. And I think we talk about collaboration cooperation all the time, but it's, it's like, bringing that into a deeper, it's like what does that actually deeply mean besides just collaborating, cooperating with agencies and landowners and, and community orgs? It's like, what does that mean from a cultural standpoint for us and move towards a culture that's more collaborative, more cooperative? And what would that mean for our ecosystems, us as part of our ecosystems and steelhead as part of our ecosystems as well.

Mickey Morgan 11:02
Just because this is the new normal, the place we're working from now. Doesn't mean we have to accept it. We shouldn't normalize being complacent to systems and actions and conditions that are hurting or killing us and our neighbors. If you have any questions or want to add to this conversation, email salmon neighbors@gmail.com