This past Thursday I went to the climate change and Oregon salmon talk. There were two tribe members there talking about climate change and how it is affecting the salmon and their tribes. They told us there are four tribes that include, the Yakama, Warm Springs, Umatilla, and Nez Perce. Each of these tribes have fishing and hunting rights on the lands. Currently climate change has been affecting the salmon and steelhead by winter flooding and it is affecting their eggs and overwinter juveniles. During the summer their has been low flows which leads into migrating or spawning adults. Than throughout the year there has been increased water temperatures which will stress on migrating. During the meeting the audience came up with a climate change improvement for the salmon by growing more trees. We also talked about how the dams are affecting the salmon because it is hard for them to go through and the warm water and climate change on top of it is making it worse. Some people in the audience brought up creating passages for the fishes which would be hard to do. I think the ideas the audience brought up during the speech were great ideas which I hope will happen in the future to save the salmon. One of the tribe members brought up towards the end of the speech that salmon is in an ingredient in a lot of things we don’t know about and if they are in danger than we are in danger. After he said that it made me realize if our food is diminishing and the necessary products we need in our body are diminishing than what is going to happen to us.
Before coming to this talk I did not really know what it was about it or what to expect. But I really enjoyed coming and learning something new. It made me more aware of some of the other things climate change is doing to our environment that we do not necessarily talk about in class. I thought this talk had a really great turn out, more people than I thought would come but I think they really liked seeing the students there supporting this.